Biography of Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in the 5th May 1818 in the Rhenish city of Trier. He was the second son of Heinrich Marx and Henrietta Pressburg who had been married in a Jewish ceremony five years before. 

Although there was a Rabbinic background in his family, Marx was not brought up as a Jew.

Heinrich Marx was a man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who took part in agitation for a constitution in Prussia.

At the age of seventeen he entered the University of Bonn to study law, but transferred to the University of Berlin one year later.

Marx remained Berlin for several years and he became under the influence of the philosophy of Hegel and particularly that variant of Hegelianism that focused on the criticism of law and religion.

He completed his doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus, received his degree from the University of Jena in 8141, and returned to the Rhineland in 1842.  He then became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne.

This paper was suppressed by the German government and in 1843 Marx left Germany to settle in Paris. In Paris he encountered Friedrich Engels, who then became his long friend and patron.

Having become a confirmed socialist, Marx published, in 1848 and with the aid of Friedrich Engels, the famous Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron, on June 19, 1843 in the Pauluskirche at Bad Kreuznach.

In 1867 he published the first volume of his monumental work DAS KAPITAL, which was eventually to change the shape of the world. Marx read constantly and possessed encyclopedic knowledge of economics, philosophy, history and literature.

After 1857 he frequented the Round Read Room of the British Museum, primary to research DAS KAPITAL.

Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last 15 months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London.
Biography of Karl Marx