Engels before Marx

Terrell Carver

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030423711
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

This book examines the life and works of Friedrich Engels during the decade before he entered a political partnership with Karl Marx. It takes a thematic approach in three substantial chapters: Imagination, Observation, and Vocation. Throughout, the reader sees the world from Engels's perspective, not knowing how his story will turn out. This approach reveals the multifaceted and ambitious character of young Friedrich's achievements from age sixteen till just turning twenty-five. At the time that he accepted Marx's invitation to co-author a short political satire, Engels was far better known and much more accomplished. He had published many more articles on far more subjects, in both German and English, than Marx had managed. Moreover, he had written a critique of political economy from a perspective unique in the German context, and published his own pioneering and substantial study of working class conditions in an industrializing economy. Offering an innovative approach to a largely neglected period of Engels's life before meeting Marx, Carver upends standard narratives in existing biographical studies of Engels to reveal him as an important figure not just in relation to his more famous collaborator, but a key voice in the liberal-democratic, constitutional and nation-building revolutionism of the 1830s and 1840s.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. CarverEngels before MarxMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42371-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: When Was Engels?

Terrell Carver¹  

(1)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

 

 

Terrell Carver

Abstract

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) is well known as Karl Marx’s long-time political partner. Biographers have invariably filtered his life-story to show how he reached that ending. However, the Engels-archive for the decade preceding the inauguration of the partnership in 1845 is extraordinarily rich. This Introduction explains how Engels Before Marx is conceived and organized to present young Friedrich’s world from his own perspective, and to convey to the reader the excitement of his life and times. Thematic chapters, incorporating clear chronologies, show what the youthful Engels achieved in his own right against formidable odds.

Keywords

BiographyTeleologyKarl Marx

End Abstract

Friedrich Engels was certainly Karl Marx’s long-time friend, closest political associate, and intellectual partner, albeit—as Engels himself styled this relationship—playing “second fiddle” to the greater man. But all those biographical truths were consolidated as such only after Marx’s death in 1883, and indeed very largely by Engels himself. Of course the ongoing relationship, when both were alive, was well known to friends and associates, though interestingly seldom commented on by opponents and detractors, or even the ever-snooping Prussian secret police.

After Engels’s death, the survivor and authority on the relationship was no longer re-living it in print, as he certainly was in his living role as Marx’s literary executor. Engels not only re-published selected works by Marx and edited some of Marx’s voluminous manuscripts but also produced his own essays, tracts, pamphlets, occasional pieces, and mountains of correspondence. But all that living activity expired on 5 August 1895, and memoirists and biographers—mostly following Engels’s own narrative leadership—retold the tale of the Great Man and the “junior partner.” That process constructed both fame and notoriety over more than a hundred years, so that by 2020, the bicentenary of Engels’s birth (28 November 1820), we have a very clear picture.

But what exactly is this a picture of? Or rather, how exactly is this picture framed? And in whose interests is it framed that way? And what is left outside the frame? The answers to those questions begin to appear when we consider biography as a genre and biographers as story-tellers, albeit avowedly truthful ones, since the genre prescribes historical validation and intellectual honesty. Biography falls firmly to the non-fiction side of the librarians’ and booksellers’ binary scheme, ensuring that historical fictionalizing and hagiographical propaganda fail the test. Since 1895 Engels’s biography has been firmly linked to Marx’s because what makes the younger man important is the older one’s fame—and of course notoriety. There are many biographies of Engels that fall within that frame, and of course many questions worth asking about his life, activities, and ideas arise from that consensus.

This book, however, is asking a different question: what was Engels like before he teamed up with Marx? After all Engels didn’t grow up knowing that that was how fame would bundle him into biographies. And in any case all the biographies that purport to be his are actually explaining him in relation to Marx and stray from that claim-to-fame at their peril. Readers would not see the point, or rather biographers did not see that there might be some other point to make. The teleology of biography—that is, recounting a story for which we already know the one and only ending—controls the genre, and the genre controls the writers—though not this one, and not in this book.

Let’s start the story where young Engels started it, not knowing how it would end, and what fame or notoriety might accrue along the way. Let’s try to see the world through his eyes, brave and new as it was in the 1830s, and see what happens.

What Can We Find Out from What We Have Left?

Fortunately for the present genre-busting exercise, we have quite a lot of material conserved and at our disposal. Post-War/Cold War politics generated massive resources for ferreting out materials that Engels’s fame had decreed were valuable, hence worthy of publication. These were published within editions that became ever more massive and in some self-defining sense “complete.” However, the controlling hand of teleology relegates the pre-Marx materials to subordinating terminologies and skippable placements, such as juvenilia, minor works or experiments, merely “literary” effusions, and the like. All of those materials, now resting rather uncomfortably in official archives and scholarly editions, have a clear function: they work well for us when they foreshadow what is to come. And if they don’t, then, well, we can skim through them lightly, and not take them seriously.

So when does conventional biography become literary violence? The young Friedrich didn’t write for the archive, and it seems reasonable to presume that he took his writing—and sketching and cartooning—quite seriously. He doesn’t seem to have been reaching for the stars, exactly, but in terms of earthly interests, we know that he was ambitious, thoughtful, daring, and trouble-making. He was gifted, acknowledged as such, well traveled, fluent in three living languages, and reasonable in at least one dead one, and most probably two. As period pieces go, it’s an interesting collection from a really interesting era. And clearly Engels was an interesting young man.

Possibly the larval Engels didn’t partner with Marx in the autumn of 1844 and suddenly turn into a butterfly. Possibly it was somewhat the other way round. Dwelling for a while on that hypothesis we might generate some answers to a set of questions that almost no one ever asks: Why was the twenty-six-year-old Marx so interested in the twenty-three-year-old Engels? Why did Marx stick to the friendship and—rather unusually for him—manage it so well? From the early 1850s to the end of Marx’s life (and beyond, in the case of the later generations), there is a fairly obvious answer—financial support via handouts—and, after 1869, a private pension and family support. But Marx was well capable of biting the hand that was feeding him. Something else must figure in the explanation.

The three substantial chapters in this book will put up a case for re-imagining Engels’s life going unknowingly forward, rather than haunted by his own—and his biographers’ “standard”—version of how he wanted to be remembered. Readers will find that the 1830s and 1840s—seen through young Friedrich’s eyes—weren’t all that different from how things look today in significant and troubling respects. That historical discovery for us might represent the exhilaration of novelty, though soundly tempered by a realization that, after nearly 200 years, things really should have become quite a lot better.

There is also a case here for tossing a hefty dose of skepticism in the direction of biographical certainties, namely that we already know for all time what’s important about someone and what isn’t. And moreover when that importance is assigned to a life, then it has to be assessed near the end. The end isn’t of course necessarily old age: youthful death imparts a mandala of its own, and a glowing regard for what’s left, given what might have been. However, the young Engels lived to be seventy-four, so “died young” isn’t available in his case. And Engels didn’t look back to his earlier life and works before he overshadowed himself—just as he turned twenty-four—with his collaborator.

Being and Time

Had the elderly Engels gone back to these manuscripts and published works—and sketches and watercolors—with any degree of seriousness, he would have destabilized the “second fiddle” narrative and contradicted the self-effacing persona he cultivated in that way. Perhaps it was—or wasn’t?—an accident, but according to his last wishes, he even erased himself bodily. That instruction precluded a gravesite, or indeed much in the way of speeches at the crematorium. Engels directed that his ashes should be scattered into the sea off Eastbourne, on the south coast of England, facing the English Channel. That extraordinary self-immolation into a memorialized relationship of self-imposed subordination sealed the fate of the “early” materials that we will investigate here, remembering that at the time of writing they were contemporaneous—not “early.” Those papers and publications are now carefully conserved but firmly cordoned off in the collected works as even less than incidental, since Marx isn’t there at all yet, giving Engels a life.

Once that Marx-centric exclusion zone removes these works from serious scrutiny, we lose a living human individual, and in this book we will give resurrection a try. So when was Engels? For our purposes, the answer is 1836–1845. However, rather than guide the reader through yet another Bildungsroman of youthful and sentimental education, succeeding chapters in this revivification will adopt a thematic approach to a decade’s worth of materials, such as we have preserved. Rather than chronological “development,” which presupposes a teleological goal, it seems fair to consider a well-developed personality, given the short, if youthful, time-span, and even starting the story at age sixteen. At that point in his final year at school, and knowing that he wasn’t enrolled to prepare for university entrance, young Friedrich is already looking over and beyond the grammar school gates.

The chapter themes are themselves non-chronological, showcasing a multi-faceted and ambitious young intellect. Chronology will feature within each discussion, as and when it is essential to keep the reader sign-posted. The object is to keep this writer—and his readers—inside Engels’s head, looking out to make an impact, rather than keeping ourselves outside, looking down at him. From that latter perspective he looks like a collection of dead artifacts that we’d have to try hard to revive. Of course the former approach is an imaginative exercise, but no more so than organizing artifacts into a strict chronology, and a life into an already-knowing teleology. That is why Chap. 2 opens with “Imagination.”

© The Author(s) 2020

T. CarverEngels before MarxMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42371-1_2

Begin Abstract

2. Imagination

Terrell Carver¹

(1)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Terrell Carver

Abstract

Taking imagination as a theme, this chapter shows how apparently conventional topics and interests occurring in the compositions and letters of the teenage Engels were connected by him to the clandestine political struggles in his German context. That context was one of religious repression and authoritarian monarchism. Writing anonymously, young Friedrich learned how to engage with progressive, liberalizing politics, which necessarily proceeded in coded fashion. Messages concerning social change were encoded in poetry, music, art, and fiction, which he pursued when working for his family’s business in Bremen. Protected by pseudonyms, he achieved publication in this adult world from age sixteen onwards, and with increasing success and notoriety. Denied university entrance by his commercially minded father, Engels educated himself and urged former schoolfriends to join his “virtual” university.

Keywords

PietismLiberalismYoung GermanyRomanticismOrientalism

End Abstract

The youthful Engels was highly imaginative, projecting himself into other worlds via historical narrative and fictional writing, both prose and poetry. This may not seem very startling to today’s readers, accustomed to liberal education, imaginative arts, and a culture of creativity. What we have of Engels’s youthful works and letters can look very clichéd, even hackneyed and ingenuous. But they look that way because nearly 200 years of recursive academic and cultural labors have explored and packaged romanticism, nationalism, and liberalism. Those ideas and episodes have been rendered objects of study, safely distant from today’s supposedly different concerns and superior ways of understanding them.

Our familiar ways of understanding ourselves, however, are a direct result of the “culture wars” that, from an impressively early age, the very young Engels got himself involved in. What often gets lost in today’s historicism—without which we would not have our post facto categories and conceptions—is the edgy immediacy of the ideas and enthusiasms of the 1830s and 1840s. And today in an age of legalized free speech, and only lightly regulated digital communications, the distinctly risky thrill of communicating unorthodox, even heterodox, views to others in print is hard to capture. A liberalism of romantic nationalism was not, in its day, how it looks to us now.

No doubt the young Engels wasn’t unique, and we know that he expected his correspondents, and indeed certain reading publics, to get the message and spread the word. But he could hardly expect the reward of fame or the fun of notoriety—as a budding poet, writer, journalist, and self-evidently a “free-thinker”—because he had to cover his tracks with anonymity and pseudonyms. How many teenagers in the German states and state-lets of the time were similarly engaged? Young Friedrich may not have been unique, but as such a youthful figure he was in a tiny minority of a very tiny minority. He first achieved publication at the age of sixteen, so far as we know, and there is some hint later from a family friend that his writerly ambitions hit the local paper even earlier.

Teleologies, Biographies, Exclusions

The historical record, as we have it, and the exigencies and economics of archival preservation, are both teleologically selective. Much more attention goes to those who make it to a hall of fame (or infamy), and thereby become subjects for study, than to those understood by historians and educators to be of little, if any, significance. In that way artifacts of all kinds, provided they relate to the great and the good (or bad), acquire a scholarly and even market value. Those who don’t make the cut, don’t get celebrated (or denigrated), and so their legacy items don’t get collected. And indeed, if they are very, very bad, such items get defaced and destroyed.

What is interesting about the Engels archive of youthful materials, first collected up and selectively published in the early years of the twentieth century, is that after he became somewhat famous (or marginally notorious) in his late 60’s, there was still so much to be found and archived from adolescent days, even if there are a few missing items, “known unknowns.” Even after another hundred years or so, boyhood artifacts still turn up and acquire an aura in their physicality, if not generally in their substance, which is what we are dealing with here.

Engels’s boyhood years were spent in the Wupper Valley, which lies some 35 km east of Düsseldorf in what is now Germany. Between those years from 1820 to 1845, and before any suggestion of national fame (or infamy), which came along in the 1870s, we have some thirty or forty years. During those decades, unremarkable items would very likely have been prime candidates for disposal. That interval seems quite a long time for successive generations to keep papers and letters by or about someone who, from the local perspective, had apparently been as ordinary as anyone else, but had departed pretty much completely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: When Was Engels?
• 2. Imagination
• 3. Observation
• 4. Vocation
• 5. Reflections: In My End Is My Beginning …
• Back Matter