Heinrich Marx

Life

Heinrich Marx was born Herschel Mordechai, to Marx Levy Mordechai (1743–1804) and Eva Lwow (1753–1823). Heinrich Marx's father was the rabbi of Trier, a role which his older brother would later assume.

Heinrich Marx qualified as a lawyer in 1814, but upon Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Rhineland came into the conservative control of the Kingdom of Prussia, from its more detached French administration. Prussia was a Christian state which claimed to be based on the divine right of kings, and had Christian churches answerable to its political leadership. An 1812 edict, unenforced by the French, asserted that Jews could not occupy legal positions or state offices, and Prussian enforcement of the law led to trouble for Heinrich Marx.

Marx's colleagues, including the President of the Provincial Supreme court, defended him and sought an exception for him. The Prussian Minister of Justice rejected their appeals. In 1817 or 1818, changed his name to Heinrich Marx and converted to the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church to be allowed to practice law in Prussia. His wife and children were baptized in 1825 and 1824, respectively.

After Conversion

Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. A classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a ten-room property near the Porta Nigra. His wife, a Dutch Jewish woman, Henriette Pressburg, was from a prosperous business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics: she was great-aunt to Anton and Gerard Philips, and great-great-aunt to Frits Philips. Her sister Sophie Pressburg (1797–1854), was Marx's aunt and was married to Lion Philips (1794–1866) Marx's uncle through this marriage, and was the grandmother of both Gerard and Anton Philips. Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London.

Isaiah Berlin writes of Heinrich Marx that he believed

that man is by nature both good and rational, and that all that is needed to ensure triumph of these qualities is the removal of artificial obstacles from his path. They were disappearing already, and disappearing fast, and the time was rapidly approaching when the last citadels of reaction, the Catholic Church and the feudal nobility, would melt away before the irresistible march of reason... Born a Jew, a citizen of inferior legal and social status, he had attained to equality with his more enlightened neighbours, had earned their respect as a human being, and had become assimilated into what appeared to him as their more rational and dignified mode of life.

Heinrich Marx became a passionate Prussian patriot and monarchist who educated his family as liberal Lutherans.

Relationship with Karl Marx

Heinrich had his son educated at home until the age of twelve. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Karl enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen; he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study. At Bonn, Karl joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society (Landsmannschaft der Treveraner) and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically-oriented University of Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history.

Works

Literature