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On 5 May 1818, Karl Marx was born at Brückergasse 664 in Trier, the third child of the lawyer Heinrich Marx (1777-1838) and his wife Henriette, née Presborck (1788-1863). The family had recently rented the house (now Brückenstraße 10) and lived there for only a year and a half.
In the autumn of 1835, at the age of seventeen, Marx graduated from the Royal Prussian Gymnasium (from 1896 Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium) in Trier. He had attended the school, which was dedicated to humanist ideals, from the age of twelve.
Karl Marx went to Bonn to study law. He began to devote himself to philosophical and historical studies. During this time Karl Marx wrote poems and short literary pieces in his enthusiasm for Romanticism.
In 1836 Marx moved to the University of Berlin. He attended lectures on law, but increasingly absorbs himself in philosophical studies. At the centre of his interest was the philosophy of Georg Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectical method had a great influence on Marx. Marx participated in the critical discussion with Hegel’s thought in the debate groups of the Berlin Young Hegelians.
Karl Marx had known Jenny von Westphalen (1814-1881) since childhood. They became engaged before he left for Berlin
Marx graduated in 1841 with a dissertation on the Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.
His plans for an academic career came to nothing. Instead, Marx turned to journalism, writing articles for the Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe in Cologne from April 1842. It was here that Marx had to deal with economic and social issues for the first time.
Always under the critical eye of the Prussian government, the Rheinische Zeitung was eventually banned in 1843.
Marx left Cologne and married Jenny von Westphalen in Kreuznach after a seven-year engagement. In late autumn they moved to Paris. There Marx came into contact with artisans and other emigrated intellectuals. From here, the centre of socialist thought, Marx planned to continue his journalistic work. His encounter with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was significant for the rest of his life. A lifelong friendship began between the two men, who worked together on political, literary, journalistic and scholarly projects.
Expelled from Paris in 1845, Marx and his family settled in Brussels.
In 1848 he set out his view that history is the “history of class struggles” in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written with Engels. It was a programmatic statement for the “Communist League”, a secret organisation of artisans, workers and intellectuals. From Cologne, Marx commented on events in “revolutionary” Germany and Europe in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. When the revolution failed, Karl Marx had to leave Prussia. He and his family emigrated to London. Until the 1860s, their lives were marked by money worries and illness. Only three of their seven children, born between 1844 and 1857, reached adulthood: Jenny (1844-1883), Laura (1845-1911) and Eleanor (1855-1898).
Despite his worries, Marx studied intensively, mostly in the reading room of the British Library, reading the books of major economic theorists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, works on history and politics, and a wide range of new publications in the fields of science and technology that were flourishing in the nineteenth century.
Museum Karl-Marx-Haus
Karl-Marx-Haus