Significant Others - The Marxes

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

A man who looms as large as Karl Marx needed multiple Significant Others (although when it came to wives, he only had one). Starring Ted Danson as Karl Marx, Maddie Ogden as Jenny von Westphalen, and Patton Oswalt as Friedrich Engels.Also featuring Katie Sharer and Matt O’Brien. Source List:Love and Captial: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by Mary Gabriel, ©2011, Hachette Book GroupEngels by Terrell Carver, ©2011, Oxford University PressRevolutions Podcast, Season 10Reason.org, Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’The Washington Post, “Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution,” by Mary GabrielNational Library of Medicine, Friedrich Engels: Businessman and RevolutionaryBritannica, Young HegeliansCCSNA.org, Duke of ArgyllMarxist.org, Yearning: A Romance, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852History.com, Paris Commune of 1871

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in our final episode of Season 2, we are talking about a figure who looms so large, he is both overly invoked and commonly misunderstood. His ideas were so potent, they have been named as the cause of everything from the French socialist revolts and the Russian Revolution, to political correctness and the January 6th insurrection. Arguably, the world as we know it would truly be different without him. He was a massive force in our shared history, and yet he was also a human being. He drank and smoked and laughed with his friends. He played games with his kids. He loved his wife. He also kind of ruined their lives. It makes sense in a way that a figure so titanic would not have simply one significant other, but many. And they all

tell a similar story, one of endearment and sacrifice. This time on Significant Others, meet the Marxes. Meet the Marxes. There's only one source that provides a clear view of Karl Marx's family universe. The book Love and Capital by Mary Gabriel is a fantastic read and a truly stunning work of historical reporting. At best, this will all just be a teaser for that main event, so if you're curious to learn more, do go check it out. I'm embarrassed to admit that I came to this story with the expectation and maybe even the hope of discovering the tale of a hypocrite, an anti-capitalist theorist who married an aristocrat and lived in bourgeois luxury while preaching the abolition of the upper class.

Of course, the story is far more complex than that, and I was really wrong on both counts. For Karl Marx's family, life was barely survivable, let alone luxurious. And while Marx himself was a truly singular genius, there is more than one figure without whom he might not have become who he was. The first, chronologically speaking at least, is the man who would ultimately be his father-in-law. Prussian Baron Ludwig von Westphalen was the highest-paid government official in the city of Trier, and his grandmother came from one of the oldest and most powerful noble families in Scotland. So, he fancy. But while he was definitely part of the establishment, he was also a student of French socialism, the movement spawned by the Enlightenment, which promoted the liberté and égalité the French

constitution still espouses today. It was in vogue with some members of Europe's upper crust at the time to embrace such liberal lines of thinking, though less popular with the kings and their governments. Westphalen's teenage son became friends at school with an intellectually curious kid called Karl, who was descended from a long line of important rabbis, but whose father had been forced to convert to Lutheranism by the intensely anti-Semitic Prussian government. Karl spoke with a lisp and was not academically distinguished, but he thrived when talking to his friend's dad about literature and ideas. Basically, 14-year-old Karl and 62-year-old Ludwig were vibing.

The Baron and the teen went for long walks while discussing things like man's natural goodness, the concept of personal freedom, and society's responsibilities to its members. Karl had such affection for the Baron, he later dedicated his Ph.D. thesis to his, quote, fatherly friend Ludwig as a proof of his love. You were always visible proof to me that idealism is no figment of the imagination, but a truth. At times, they would be accompanied on their walks by the Baron's daughter and Karl's older sister's best friend, Jenny. Like Karl, Jenny was captivated by her father's analysis of the French Revolution and his empathic humanist perspective on social justice,

particularly when that perspective moved to consider the plight of women. Jenny and Carl had been family friends for years, but she was four years older than he. So in 1832, when he was 14, she was already out in society, and her job was to go to parties and luncheons and teas and find herself a husband, which was not going to be much of a challenge because she was notoriously beautiful and bright and charming, and serious established dudes were jockeying for position to take her for a twirl around the dance floor. One of those dudes, an army guy, got her head spinning so fast she agreed to marry him the night they met. Her mother was thrilled because he came from a good family,

but everyone else thought Jenny had made a big mistake. And indeed, after she had some time to actually talk to the guy, she realized that while he was good-looking and fun to dance with, he didn't exactly share her enlightened perspective on the world and, in fact, as a soldier, valued authority more than individual moral conscience. This was a deal-breaker for Jenny, so she dumped him. It was apparently verboten in Prussian society for a woman to break an engagement, and Jenny's reputation did suffer. She returned to the marriage market, but her focus

had shifted. She spent less energy flirting at dance parties and more time discussing politics and philosophy and history with her father, her brother, and Carl. It's not known exactly when she fell in love with her father's young friend, but by the time he was headed to his second year of university in 1836, Carl had become secretly engaged to Jenny. Oh, my darling, how you looked at me the first time like that, and then quickly looked away, and then looked at me again, and I did the same, until at last we looked at each other for quite a long time, and very deeply, and could no longer look away. stay under the radar mostly because Jenny's father, however fond he may have been of both young Carl and the idea of an egalitarian society, wasn't anxious to conscript his daughter to a lower social standing. Thus began Jenny's waiting period, wherein the plan was for Carl to establish a career, prove himself as a worthy match, and win the right to marry the love of his life.

This period would last a bit longer than either of them hoped. Marx was what one might call a fairly typical college underclassman. He drank too much, spent too much money, got distracted, wasted time, wrote bad poetry. Why size your breast? Why close your gaze? Why are your veins all burning as if night weighs, as if fate flays down into storm your yearning? And he failed to do much of anything to make an impression except get himself arrested for public drunkenness. It was so bad that his father made him switch schools to try to get him to focus up. But swapping Bonn for Berlin only provided more opportunities for distraction. In addition,

by the time Marx headed off for year two, he and Jenny had fallen head over heels in love. He wrote to his father, When I left you, a new world had come into existence for me, that of love, which in fact at the beginning was a passionately yearning and hopeless love. In Berlin, Marx attacked academics with so much unfocused enthusiasm, he wore himself out completely and had to take a month in the country to recover. But his intellectual ideas were actually beginning to take shape. Jenny, meanwhile, was moldering in Trier, feeling anxious and jealous and left behind, and worrying about how she was going to break the news to her

parents of her engagement to her, what she called, Schwarzvielchen, or darling little wild boar. what she called Schwarzvielchen, or Darling Little Wild Boar. She and the boar didn't exchange letters since they were trying to stay under the radar, and the only communication she got from him for months was three volumes of poetry he had written for her, which came as a Christmas gift. She wept when she got them. Sitting around waiting on a boy is tough. Knowing your parents are going to hate the idea of you marrying him is even tougher. The fact that that boy is, while you're waiting on him, getting himself in deeper and deeper with a crowd that is very publicly making themselves an enemy of the state? This was just the tip of the iceberg for

Genevon Westphalen. When Marx finally got his PhD, he had to send away for it in the mail to some random school because his cohort in Berlin had been discredited and or blacklisted by the Prussian government for being anti-religious, anti-royalist radicals. This meant that Marx's job prospects at home were, in a word, nil, which meant they still couldn't get married even after five years of waiting. The engagement that had begun in 1836, when Jenny was a fresh-faced 22-year-old, threatened to drag into her 30s. Here's how Marx himself characterized this period to a potential business partner in 1843. I can assure you without the slightest romanticism that I am head over heels in love, and indeed in the most serious way. I have been engaged for more than seven years,

and for my sake, my fianccé has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom the Lord in heaven and the Lord in Berlin are equally objects of religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves. Jenny was long-suffering before the marriage even started. But at least she and her beau weren't courting in secret anymore.

And once they were out in the open, they made for hot gossip in Trier, where no one could believe the fashionable, elegant Jenny von Westphalen had chosen, in the words of one neighbor, nearly the most unattractive man on whom the sun ever shone. Criticism and confusion didn't dampen Jenny's love for her man. In fact, it may have galvanized it. And if she couldn't control when they got married, she found there was at least one thing she did have at her disposal, her virginity. It was indeed a radical act for an aristocratic woman in 19th century Prussia to sleep with a man she was not yet

married to. But in year five of their engagement, it appears that Jenny did, in fact, consummate her relationship with Karl. Oh, Karl, I know very well what I have done and how the world would outlaw me. I know all, all of that. And still I am happy and overjoyed and would not give up even the memory of those dear hours for any riches in the world. That is my treasure and shall remain it forever. Each happy hour I lived through again. Once again, I lay close to your heart, drunk with love and overjoyed. As Jenny's hometown tutted and her family fretted,

she went all in on her long-bearded, cigar-smoking lover. In 1843, Karl Marx was certain that social reform was imminent and that he would help to deliver it. Marx was certain that social reform was imminent and that he would help to deliver it. As the editor of an influential new paper in Cologne, he was earning both respect and money, and so was finally able to confer onto Jenny the patriarchy's MVP status of honest woman. They planned to be married in June, but then the paper got shut down. Marx scrambled for money to finance a new paper, going to his mother, with whom he was in an endless fight over his deceased father's estate,

and his uncle, Lyon Phillips, incidentally the forefather of the Phillips electronics dynasty, who periodically gave him cash to get by. The marriage went off as planned with the help of Jenny's mother and only a few family members in attendance, none from the Marx side, presumably because of their ongoing squabbles over money. On their honeymoon, Karl and Jenny squandered what few funds they had, canoodling in Switzerland while he delved into the 45 books they had brought with them. books they had brought with them. Biographer Mary Gabriel writes, The Karl Marx who would achieve historical preeminence appeared with his long-awaited marriage to Jenny. Her love enabled him. His honeymoon studies and reflections produced two of his most famous declarations, Religion is the opium of the people, and the heart of the emancipation of mankind is the proletariat. If Karl Marx the philosopher was created on their honeymoon, so was Jenny Marx the mother.

Soon after their marriage, Jenny was pregnant, and the Budding family were on their way to Paris, where Marx had plans again to found a revolutionary newspaper. It was an exciting, voluntary exile to a beautiful place, but it wouldn't last long. Before their daughter Jenny Chen was a year old, the King of Prussia kindly requested that the King of France expel all the atheist Prussian expats, a request with which the King of France happily and swiftly complied, and the Marxists were forced to move again. France happily and swiftly complied, and the Marxes were forced to move again. This is how Jenny Marx, formerly Baroness von Westphalen, found herself in early 1845, caring for a sick infant, fighting illness herself, and desperately trying to scrape together enough money to settle her young family's debts so she could follow her husband to Brussels.

This morning I have been running all over Paris. The mint office was closed and I had to go back once more. Then I went to the stagecoach office and to the auctioneer of a public furniture sale. But in vain. All this running around has been useless. This was just the beginning of a life that would be defined by disruption, exile, illness, and dire financial need. Over the next few decades, Jenny would be forced to sell her family silver, herors, watch her children suffer and suffer herself, all for want of the very thing Marx was building his revolutionary philosophy around, money. Marx was committed to awakening the proletariat in order to overthrow the ruling class and craft a new social order,

and Jenny was committed to Marx. Because of, or perhaps in addition to that, she believed in his ideas. At one point during their engagement, she wrote to him that she dreamt he would lose his hand in a duel and need to rely on her to communicate his ideas with the rest of the world. I have tortured myself with the fear that for my sake you could become embroiled in a quarrel and then in a duel. Day and night I saw you wounded, bleeding, and ill, and Carl, to tell you the whole truth, I was not altogether unhappy in this thought,

for I vividly imagined that you had lost your right hand, and Carl, I was in a state of rapture, of bliss because of that. I could write down all your dear heavenly ideas and be really useful to you. All this I imagined so naturally and vividly that in my thoughts, I continually heard your dear voice, your dear words poured down on me, and I listened to every one of them and carefully preserved them for other people. Having studied together under her father's tutelage, they shared a worldview. Writing to Karl from their hometown of Trier in 1844 about a recent attempt on the Prussian king's life, Jenny observed that the would-be assassin was driven to violence by force of destitution. For three days, the man had been begging in vain in Berlin in constant danger of death from starvation. Hence, it was a social attempt at assassination.

If something does break out, it will start from this direction. The seeds of a social revolution are present. Marx appreciated that letter so much, he published it. This was among his highest forms of praise. He was so fastidious an editor, he was called a dictator by his colleagues. He held his wife in the highest esteem, considering her to be brilliant and entirely on his level. her to be brilliant and entirely on his level. But the revolution Marx was certain was just around the corner would take much longer to arrive than he ever anticipated. And while they waited for it to come, Jenny would sacrifice almost everything in its name.

When he arrived in Brussels, Karl had already met the next vital member of his support system, a handsome, wealthy young German man with a radical bent named Friedrich Engels. The son of a textile factory owner, Engels had a unique vantage on the harsh realities and economic levers of industrial-era Europe, and his conscience was molded by what he saw. By day, he trained in the exploitation of the worker. At night, he wrote articles under a pseudonym that attacked the ruling class and outed their most immoral practices.

In Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age, 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories, merely so the manufacturer need not pay the adults whose place they take twice the wage he pays the child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience, and causing the death of one child, more or less, does not doom a pietist's soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. Note that the wealthy manufacturers Engels criticizes here are not only his employers, but his own family. He was both to the manor born and resolved to blow the manor up. In Manchester, England, where he had been sent

by his father to oversee the family's cotton mill, he fell in with a 19-year-old Irish factory worker named Mary Burns, who would later pose as his wife. Mary introduced him to the horrifically squalid and unsanitary living conditions she and the rest of the workers had no choice but to put up with, which inspired in Engels a sentiment very similar to the one that lay at the heart of Marx's developing philosophy, that such unlivable circumstances for the workers brought home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which machinery shall no longer work against them, but for them. Marx knew of Engels' work and had in fact already published some of his articles

by the time they came to know each other in 1844. But their in-person connection, at the tail end of the Marxists' first stay in Paris, was transformative. The two men decided to join forces, making plans to co-author a takedown of another leftist group entitled The Holy Family, or A Critique of Critical Criticism. Engels wrote the first 15 pages, and Marx sat down to dash off the rest. A few months and a few hundred pages later, he was interrupted by the police, who were giving him 24 hours to get out of the country.

The meeting of Marx and Engels initiated a mind meld that would continue until long past Marx's death. Their relationship has been called the most famous intellectual collaboration of all time, but their connection was actually far greater than that. It was Engels who would sustain the Marx family emotionally and materially through their many periods of financial destitution, their multiple traumatic losses, and their decades of life in exile. It was Engels who had eulogized nearly every member of the Marx family. And it was Engels who would deprioritize his own interests time and again, keeping Marx on track while he was alive and spending the last 15 years of his own life editing the unfinished works Marx left behind when he died. Top of all that, they were simply great friends.

They had a good time together, smoking, drinking, and laughing until tears came at all hours of the night. The Engels-Marx relationship functioned as an ideal microcosmic communist society. They considered whatever each of them had to be theirs communally, even though what they each brought to the to be theirs communally, even though what they each brought to the partnership was lopsided, to say the least. As the eldest son of a wealthy family, Engels was heir to a fortune and had no dependents. Marx was a destitute family man with many mouths to feed and a high-octane intellectual purpose to fulfill. But Engels had recognized in Marx a voice powerful enough to transform the world,

and not unlike Jenny, he was taken by that voice. I simply cannot understand how anyone can be envious of genius. It's something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start. But to be envious of anything like that, one must have to be frightfully small-minded. With apologies to Dr. Kissinger, perhaps it's genius that is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Which is not to suggest that there was a sexual connection between Marx and Engels, but Engels was seduced by Marx's brilliance as thoroughly as Jenny was, if the measure of it is devotion. And he was just as important a partner to Marx as his wife. Try to count the number of times Engels bailed Marx out financially and you'll lose track. Try to separate Engels from Marx's intellectual legacy and the whole thing comes apart. But one of the most generous things Engels

ever did for Marx and his family has to do with the third member of the constellation of vital supporters, one who entered Marx's life just after Engels did, but who was already as close to Jenny as her own family. In 1844, when Jenny Marx went to visit her mother, the Baroness Caroline von Westphalen, she, Jenny, was unwell, unrooted, underfunded, and struggling to care for a sickly infant amidst the chaos of a life in exile as the wife of a man whose business was antagonizing the king. When a second pregnancy

announced itself in 1845, the Baroness felt her daughter's situation had become truly dire. To do what she could for the struggling young family, the Baroness sent them a gift in the form of a young domestic worker named Helene de Meuth. Lenchen, as she was called, had been in service to the Vestfallen family since she was about 11. Six years younger than Jenny, Lenchin had grown up almost alongside her and had not only a kind of tribal affection for her mistress, but a rooting interest in the success of the love affair between Jenny and Carl, as she had been one of the keepers of their early secret. For the rest of her life, Lenchin would live with the Marxes,

doing their chores, raising their children and mourning them when they died, fighting their creditors, and caring for Jenny and Carl, who were both chronically unwell. Her support of them was no less essential than Engels' financial and intellectual contributions. Engels himself said of her, If Marx was able to work in peace over a period of many years, it was largely thanks to her. was able to work in peace over a period of many years. It was largely thanks to her. Neither Jenny's nor Karl's life would have functioned without Lenchin,

and they all seemed to know it. Even as, or especially when, the bounds of all their loyalty were put to the ultimate test. In 1848, it looked as if the revolution Marx had been predicting might finally have arrived. The citizens of Paris organized a revolt after months of unrest in Switzerland and Italy. Jenny and Karl felt Europe was on the verge of reforming itself, and they were anxious to live in this new world, a world in which workers would no longer be subject to exploitation,

a world in which society would care for its most vulnerable members, a world in which Marx might be celebrated instead of vilified. But instead, the revolt in Paris was quashed, rulers all over Europe tightened the reins on their citizenry, and things became even more dangerous for the man calling loudly for change. Over the next couple of years, the Marxists were forced to relocate again and again as Marx was expelled from Belgium, bounced in and out of Paris, was driven from Cologne, and finally forced to seek shelter in England. Marx quickly found a haven in the British Museum reading room, which would be his study for the next three decades. But London, for Jenny, was wretched. For anyone without means, the city was a fetid,

unsanitary stew of displaced humanity and oppressive labor practices. A series of landlords ejected the Marxes because they couldn't pay their debts, and they were spared no sympathy. Two bailiffs entered the house and placed under restraint what little I possessed. Beds, linen, clothes, everything. Even my poor infant's cradle and the best of the toys belonging to the girls, who burst into tears. They threatened to take everything away within two hours, leaving me lying on the bare boards with my shivering children and

my sore breast. By 1850, Jenny had four children, one of whom was seriously ill, and was pregnant with a fifth. Engels was sharing his salary with them, but they still needed more money. So Jenny decided to make her own attempt at pitching in financially, and in August, she made a long and uncomfortable trip to Holland to appeal to Lyon Phillips, Marx's uncle, for money. But Uncle Lyon was angry with Carl because the revolts of 1848, which Carl championed, had cost him money. So he refused to help them. Jenny wrote to her husband,

I just did not succeed in bringing him round, wherever and however I tried. It was in vain. Yesterday evening, I collapsed into bed with a heart like lead, breathing heavily and all in tears. Alas, my beloved dear Carl, I'm afraid I have done the big effort in vain and will not even bring the production costs of the trip back home. What I have suffered here since yesterday in terms of inner grief, anger I cannot express in this few lines. I cannot write of the children. My eyes start to quiver and I have to remain brave here. Thus, kiss them. Kiss the little angels a thousand times for me. I know

how well you and Lenshin will take care of them. Without Lenshin, I would have no calm here at all. Farewell, Carl of my heart. As Jenny was writing this, miserable, humiliated, destitute, and afraid, Carl of her heart was doing what untold others have done in similar circumstances and sleeping with the nanny. Was this a weird one-time thing, or did it go on for years? The evidence seems to suggest it was a product of Jenny's absence and perhaps alcohol. Both Carl and Lynchon liked their drink. and perhaps alcohol. Both Carl and Lynchon liked their drink. After it happened, Lynchon acted neither like a spurned lover nor a victorious mistress, but we can't really know how she felt

about any of it. All we can say, if not for certain then with a high degree of possibility, is that while pregnant Jenny was in Amsterdam begging for money from her husband's uncle, pregnant Jenny was in Amsterdam begging for money from her husband's uncle, her husband and her right-hand woman were conceiving a child. It's suspected that Jenny found out about Lingen's pregnancy as she herself was giving birth six months later. It's unclear whether she was told or deduced who the father was. Marks wrote to Engels to announce the new baby and made a comment about being stuck in a house with two pregnant women, saying, Finally, to give the matter a tragicomic turn, there is in addition a mystere which I will now reveal to you in very few words. But he never finished the letter. Instead, he said he would come visit Engels in Manchester to explain.

he said he would come visit Engels in Manchester to explain. There's no record of their conversation, but it is believed that when Marks returned from that visit, Engels had agreed to claim Lenchin's child publicly as his own. A couple of months later, Lenchin's son's birth was registered with no father named. The boy was then handed over to another family in London to be raised in exchange for some payment rendered most likely by Engels. Lenton remained with Jenny and Carl and continued

keeping their house and raising their children and caring for them until they were dead. When she herself died, she was interred alongside them. Why did she stay? Biographers suggest it was affection for the Marx family, and or a lack of other options. But we are reduced to guessing, because Lenchin kept no diary and wrote no letters. All we can know is what she did, not why she did it. three survived to adulthood. Only one lived past 50. They were each indoctrinated, by dint of their father's work, into lives of sacrifice. Tussie, the youngest, said that she and her siblings devoted their lives to the proletariat. Jenny Chen, the eldest, was just 13 when her mother was put on bed rest for her final pregnancy, and she took over the role of secretary and assistant to her father. Her younger sister Laura, 11 at the time, was recruited as well. They both adored their father and remembered him working at his table in their tiny, cramped apartment

while they and their younger sister made him play horsey, while Marx was writing such sentences as, The Social Republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. His three young daughters lined up behind him in chairs, threatening to whip him if he didn't pretend to pull them in their make-believe stagecoach. They were so close to his work that they were the only people living, besides their mother and Engels, who could decipher

their father's handwriting. Both Jenny Chen and Laura married acolytes of their father, which meant neither of them escaped lives of revolutionary exile and hardship. Both their parents regretted this. Jenny wrote a friend in 1866. partition for the society in which they move. Would they be rich? They could get by without baptism, church, and religion. But like this, they both will have to go through arduous, difficult struggles. And I often think that when one can't offer assets and complete independence from others, one is not doing right to bring them up in such a violent opposition to the world. The girls believe that I am often in a bad mood or irksome, but it is nothing but the awareness that they cannot claim as much happiness as they would have the right to in their lives due to exterior and interior gifts. To her brother, she wrote, everything that we do for others, we take away from our children.

Even Marx, for whom the moral correctness of his ideas was inarguable, did not like the life he had conscripted his family to in their name. I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the contrary, if I had to begin my life over again, I would do the same. I would not marry, however. As far as it lies within my power, I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother's life was wrecked. In the end, he could not save any of them. At times, Jenny wished for death for herself and her children so as to escape their financial hardships.

In 1872, she wrote to a longtime friend who was awaiting trial for treason in Germany and said she was thinking of his wife. In all these struggles, we women have the harder part to bear because it is the lesser one. to bear, because it is the lesser one. A man draws strength from his struggle with the world outside and is invigorated by the sight of the enemy be their number legion. We remain sitting at home, darning socks. This does not banish the worries and the daily small miseries now slowly but steadily on one's courage to face life. I speak out of 30 years experience,

and I can probably say that I didn't lose heart easily. Now I have become too old to hope for much, and the last unfortunate events have completely shaken me. I fear that we won't experience much good anymore, and my only hope is that our children will have an easier time of it. And my only hope is that our children will have an easier time of it. Those last unfortunate events were the publication, after 16 years of writing, of the book Capital, Volume 1, its lukewarm reception, Marx's struggle with ideological rivals and chaos agents for control of what would come to be known as Marxism, and the 1871 uprising in Paris, which earned Marx the ire and blame of governments across Europe. The children did not, as it turned out, have an easier time of it. Jenny Chen, the eldest, lost a child, but then had five

more. She died a few months after giving birth to the last of them, in 1883, at the age of 38. Marx himself died not two months later. Eleanor, or Tussie, the youngest, struggled with anorexia nervosa, and then later fell for a guy who was seriously bad news. She spent years working with labor unions in the spirit of her father's legacy. But after learning of her lover's marriage to another woman, she ingested cyanide and ended her life in 1897 at the age of 43. Laura, the second born, lost all three of her children.

She had married a Frenchman who fought for the revolution, but also published a book entitled The Right to Be Lazy, which, fittingly, he was accused of plagiarizing. Laura reportedly resorted to alcohol to numb her lifetime of emotional pain and died when her husband injected them both with potassium cyanide in an apparent suicide pact in 1911.

And then there was Freddie, the child conceived by Lenchin and Marks who had been raised by strangers. Freddy stayed in touch with his mother, and the Marx girls thought of him as a sort of cousin or family friend. They even went to him to borrow money. When Lenchin lay dying at the age of 70, she said to Engels, Tussie, and her son, Explain to Freddy the name. This prompted a lot of questions but not many answers.

The truth of Freddie's parentage was revealed to Tussie five years later by Engel's lawyer during some wrangling over Engel's estate. Tussie confronted Engel's, who Freddie still thought of as his father. By that point, Engels was so diminished by disease, he could not speak, and so he scrawled on a slate that Freddie was, in fact, Marx's son. Doubly, or maybe triply betrayed, Tussie was devastated. Freddie, naturally, was confused. Engels died the next day of throat cancer,

but Tussie and Freddie stayed close. Freddie lived the longest of all the Marx children, dying in 1929, still not certain of which man was actually his father. Karl Marx, the man, is full of surprises. He had a sense of humor. When blamed for the 1871 uprising in Paris, he wrote it was a relief to be so publicly hated after spending 20 years toiling in obscurity. He was a softie when it came to kids. Forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child. He was a romantic.

a romantic. Mere spatial separation from you suffices to make me instantly aware that time has done for my love just what the sun and the rain do for the plants, made it grow. He was selfish, writing when Engle's common-law wife died to say why did it have to be her who had died and not the woman who was sitting on his inheritance. Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life? With all his vision, he had blind spots. He identified that the secret to capitalist success lay in the exploitation of unpaid labor. And he did that work while relying on the unpaid labor

of not just one or two, but a whole handful of women in his home. He gave his life to protesting unfair practices. And yet when his wife lay recovering from childbirth, licking her emotional wounds over his affair with their maid, and that maid was herself on the verge of giving birth to his child while single-handedly

caring for the children, the house, and the woman who could be seen as the rival for his affections, what did he do? He buried himself in the reading room at the British Museum to continue his work. And, I mean, I haven't read all 1,042 pages of all three volumes of Capital, but I don't think he was writing about the unfairness of any of that. Marx once said, If anything is certain, it is that I am not a Marxist. In fact, it might be most accurate to describe the entire Marx clan in terms of what they were not. in terms of what they were not. Engels was not a father.

Tussie was not a wife. Laura was not a mother. Their other sons and other daughters were not alive. And Jenny Marks, who later in life took to handing out calling cards that read, Madame Jenny Marks, née Baroness von Westphalen, was not the woman she was born to be. Jenny died of cancer in 1881

at the age of 67, a couple of years before her husband. Two days earlier, Marx had read her a review of Capital that compared it to the foundational, revolutionary thinking of Copernicus and Newton. So it's possible she died feeling her sacrifices had

not been made in vain. But her place in history is still coming into focus. A biography of her, published in 1986, sports a photograph on the front cover that was recently determined not to be a picture of her at all. But one thing that is clear is that she loved her husband. Early in their marriage, she wrote in a letter to a friend, Do not suppose that I am bowed down by these petty sufferings, for I know only too well that our struggle is not an isolated one, and that furthermore, I am among the happiest and most favored few, and that my beloved husband, the mainstay of my life, is still at my side.

Special thanks to Ted Danson, Maddy Ogden, and Patton Oswald for voicing Karl Marx, Jenny von Westphalen, and Friedrich Engels. I'd also like to thank Katie Scherer and Matt O'Brien for lending their voices to the story. Finally, I'd like to thank my significant other for insisting on a brief engagement. insisting on a brief engagement. Join me tomorrow for my conversation with MIT Institute Professor Darren Asimoglu to talk about the revolution we're all living through right now. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources, but most often I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I.

Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters,

and we tend to focus on just a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Thank you.