This commendably brief biography of the grandfather of Communism is
less an account of his political ideas than his life: the son of a
Jewish lawyer (later himself a childishly thoughtless anti-semite)
he was a typical drunken, duelling student who disliked and
rejected his bourgeois parents. After leaving university he found
it impossible to work as a university lecturer because of his
radical views, and instead worked for an activist newspaper, the
'Rheinische Zeitung', until it was suppressed in 1848 - when he
founded the 'Neue Rheinische Zeitung' which he edited from Cologne,
then Paris, then London. He remained there for the rest of his
life, living in extreme poverty with his devoted - nay, put-upon
but angelic - wife Jenny and six children in two rooms in Dean
Street, often unable to go out because his clothes were usually in
pawn; when he did go out it was to the British Museum library,
where he wrote his great work 'Das Kapital'. It is difficult to
like Marx: dogmatic, unpleasant, extremist, he lived off his
friends - mostly Friedrich Engels, who virtually kept him for most
of his life (and got precious little thanks for it). In a rather
surprising new introduction to this edition of Blumenburg's 1962
biography Gareth Stedman Jones seems to set out to show that it is
not worth reading. That is not true. For the lay reader it is the
best available introduction to one of the outstanding men of the
nineteenth century, a springboard from which to leap into more
detailed study of his theories and work. (Kirkus UK)
This classic biography of Karl Marx, complete with Gareth Stedman
Jones' poignant introduction, is unlike any other account of its
subject. Focusing as much on Marx's private life as on his public
persona and work, this classic biography looks in detail at his
relationship with his mother and father, wife and friends, and
includes generous quotations from a wide range of correspondence in
addition to virtually every photograph in existence of Marx and his
closest associates. Blumenberg examines Marx's early writing as a
schoolboy and his romantic poetry whilst a student, as well as his
exchanges with close friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. In
these pages are moving accounts of the privations of Marx's
poverty-stricken life in London and the tragedies which struck his
family, as well as discussions of his intellectual development and
political activity. Including virtually every photograph in
existence of Marx and his closest associates, and focusing as much
on his private life as on his public persona and work, Werner
Blumenberg's biography provides an intimate portrait of the making
of a complex intellectual the New Yorker dubbed "the next most
influential thinker."
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