But despite its success it was not a city at ease with itself. Political reforms were non-existent, social reforms were grudgingly introduced, and all this at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were moving to the city to fill the new factories and the tenement blocks. They would become part of a force so powerful that by the end of the century Berlin would act both as the conservative capital of Germany, and the centre of the German working-class movement – the ‘other’ part of the city known as ‘Red Berlin’.
God help the poor.
(Faust, Part I)
ON A DAMP AFTERNOON in October 1836 a black and yellow postal coach pulled into Berlin and a young student stepped out on to the pavement. He had just written a short verse to his beloved in Bonn: ‘The two skies. On the journey to Berlin in a carriage. The mountains pass, the forests recede. Gone from sight they leave no trace behind.’1 It was not a promising start. After finding rooms in Lessing’s old house in the Mittelstrasse (with ‘cultured people’) the gaunt man, his face adorned by a rather unsuccessful moustache and wispy beard, set off to register at the university. Had he remained in the Rhineland the world might have been spared a great deal of turmoil and bloodshed, but his experiences in Berlin would redirect his career and change him from a drunken, duelling provincial student into the creator of scientific socialism and the driving force behind the international Communist movement. Berliners can be forgiven for ignoring the arrival of Karl Heinrich Marx, forced to Berlin by a father tired of his loutish behaviour in Bonn, but they would hear of him soon enough.2 And Marx was only one of the litany of Communist saints who would be drawn to this burgeoning industrial city; Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and even Lenin, who visited twelve times and who later slid through Germany on his way to lead the Russian Revolution, would be drawn to the new centre of the European working-class movement. Between Marx’s arrival and the end of the First World War the sprawling industrial city became known as ‘Red Berlin’, a powerful symbol lionized by the left and feared, even loathed, by just about everybody else.
When Marx first arrived in Berlin he found a city charged with pre-revolutionary tension. He threw himself into the radical circles at the university, joined the Doktorklub, a group of earnest young men who met over coffee and the eighty newspapers of the reading room of the Café Stehely, and was inspired by the latest works by the Young Germans like Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow and Theodor Mondt.3 But above all it was in Berlin that the young Marx came into contact with the works of Berlin’s most prominent philosopher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.4
‘Only one man understands me,’ Hegel muttered towards the end of his life, ‘and even he does not.’5 The complaint was widespread; Hegel’s cryptic style, coupled with the fact that many of his works were published from lecture notes, added to the difficulty in deciphering his already obscure and abstract writing. Schopenhauer would call Hegel’s work ‘pure nonsense’ created by ‘stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses’, which had resulted in the ‘most bare faced general mystification that has ever taken place … and will remain as a monument to German stupidity’.6 It did not help that Hegel had attempted nothing less than the placement of all human knowledge into a coherent philosophy of history. Despite the savage criticism his work was, in Engels’s words, a ‘triumphal procession which lasted for decades’ and was later used to legitimate two of the most influential – and mutually exclusive – developments in history: the rise of chauvinistic Prussian nationalism, and the creation of scientific socialism. Hegel would be given the dubious honour of being invoked both by William II and by Marx.
Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and struggled for many years as a poor and unknown lecturer, confiding in his friend Schlegel that he had often gone hungry. His house at Jena was stormed by Napoleon’s soldiers and he barely managed to survive while in Nuremberg and Heidelberg, but by the time he reached Berlin in 1818 he had become the well-known author of Logic and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and his birthday was jointly celebrated with that of the other icon of the fledgling German nation – Goethe.
Hegel was above all a product of his age. Golo Mann has said of him: ‘What Napoleon was to the political history of the period Hegel was to its intellectual history.’7 One sees in his work the desperate search for answers to the political turmoil which had ripped apart the Europe of his youth. For Hegel, the most important aspect of existence was the notion that everything – every idea and every situation – must always change, be torn down, and give rise to its opposite. If there is peace there will be war and, although this will result in violence and pain and bloodshed, eventually the warring parties will come to some reconciliation which will form a ‘higher stage’, a greater whole. The new status quo would not last either – it too would spawn its opposite, and the same process would be repeated again and again. This was the dialectic which swung through history like a giant pendulum, affecting everything from art to philosophy, from fashion to politics. For Hegel the great dualisms of history – the divisions between public and private or between the individual and society – would one day be reconciled through this relentless process. Only then would man achieve complete knowledge and fulfil the world spirit – Geist.8
Hegel died in 1831, and his followers immediately split into two antagonistic groups known as the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians. The first were ultra-conservative and would eventually use his defence of the all-powerful state – the Machtstaat – to legitimate Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871 and to justify chauvinistic nationalism and militarism well into the twentieth century. Because of this Hegel has been called everything from the father of nationalism to the harbinger of totalitarianism, but although he defended the Machtstaat, it is ahistorical to suggest that he either foresaw or would have approved of the policies later carried out in his name. He would have been appalled to see his face staring out gloomily from the pages of Nazi propaganda.9
Hegel’s other disciples, the Young Hegelians, saw his work as proof of precisely the opposite view. For them Hegel’s dialectic proved that what is ‘rational’ today is ‘irrational’ tomorrow, and that everything from religion to culture to politics must be destroyed to make way for something new, something better. Using Hegel as their guide they began to denounce their own society.10
Hegel had been a religious man all his life but his followers set about proving him wrong. Using his own methodology they tried to show that religion was a human construct whose time had passed. In 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, David Friedrich Strauss wrote his Life of Jesus, in which he used the dialectic to ‘prove’ that the New Testament was a myth. In his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker Bruno Bauer denied that Jesus was the son of God, and in The Essence of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach tried to show that it was not God who had created man, but rather man who had created God, and that the deity was nothing more than a projection of human needs and desires. It was Feuerbach who coined the now famous expression ‘You are what you eat’ – by which he meant that man is not fashioned in the image of God but is nothing more than biological matter.11 Arnold Ruge became the leading Young Hegelian of the 1848 era and, using Hegel’s ‘terror of reason’, attacked everything from