Karl Marx Case

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was one of nine children born to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx. His father was a productive lawyer who respected Kant and Voltaire, and was a avid activist for Prussian reform. Although both parents were Jewish with rabbinical ancestry, Karl's father converted to Christianity in 1816 at the age of 35. (Marx, 2014)

Born in Prussia on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx started studying sociopolitical theories at university among the Young Hegelians. He then became a journalist, and his socialist writings got him expelled from Germany and France. In 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels and was banished to London, where he wrote the first volume of Das Kapital. (Marx, 2014)

In October of 1835, Marx began studying at the University of Bonn. At the end of the year, Marx's father demanded he register in a more serious University of Berlin. In Berlin, he studied law and philosophy and was introduced to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. In 1836, as he was politically zealous, Marx was secretly engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, a woman from an esteemed family in Trier who was four years his senior. In June of 1843, he finally married Jenny von Westphalen, and in October, they moved to Paris.

Marx did not settle down. He received his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but his radical politics prevented him from procuring a teaching position. He began to work as a journalist, and in 1842, he became the editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper in Cologne. (Marx, 2014)