Jenny Marx, née von Westphalen

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Engels wrote this obituary “Jenny Marx, Née von Westphalen” for Der Sozialdemokrat. It is based on the draft of his speech over Jenny’s grave (see this volume, pp. 419-21).

The obituary was printed in issue No. 50 on December 8, 1881. That was Engels’ first contribution to Der Sozialdemokrat.

On December 18, 1881 the obituary was reprinted by the Arbeiter-WochenChronik (No. 51, Budapest).

Once again death has claimed a victim from among the ranks of the old guard of proletarian, revolutionary socialism.

On December 2 this year, the wife of Karl Marx died in London after a long, painful illness.

She was born in Salzwedel. Her father, a state counsellor, was soon afterwards posted to Trier, where he became a close friend of the Marx family. The children grew up together. These two highly talented natures found each other. When Marx entered university, it was already decided that their future destinies were to be inseparable.

The wedding took place in 1843, after the suppression of the first Rheinische Zeitung, which had, for a while, been edited by Marx. From then on, Jenny not only shared her husband’s destiny, work, and struggles; she took part in them with the deepest understanding, with the most fervent passion.

The young couple moved to Paris, into a voluntary exile that all too soon became an actual one. The Prussian government persecuted Marx there, too. Alexander von Humboldt allowed himself to become a party to procuring a deportation order against Marx. The family was forced to leave for Brussels.

Then came the February Revolution. During the disturbances it engendered in Brussels, too, not only Marx was arrested. The Belgian police insisted on throwing his wife into prison as well, without any reason.

The revolutionary upsurge of 1848 collapsed as early as the following year. Renewed exile, first in Paris, then, as a result of further intervention by the French government, in London. And this time it was indeed, for Jenny Marx, exile with all its terrors. She would, nevertheless, have got over the material pressures beneath which she saw her two boys and a little daughter sink into the grave. But the fact that government and bourgeois opposition, from the vulgar-liberal to the democratic, combined in a great conspiracy against her husband; that they heaped the vilest, most despicable slanders on him; that the entire press closed its columns to him, depriving him of any means of defence, so that he was left momentarily helpless against opponents whom he and she must despise—this hurt her to the life. And so it remained for a very long time.

But not forever. The European proletariat regained such conditions of existence as allowed it, to a certain extent, to move independently. The International was founded. The class struggle of the proletariat pressed on from one country to another, and Jenny’s husband was among the foremost, in fact he was the foremost. Then there began for her a period that made up for many harsh sufferings. She lived to see the slanders that had rained down in torrents on Marx dispersed like chaff in the wind; she lived to hear his doctrines, which all reactionary parties, both feudal and democratic, had taken such tremendous pains to suppress, now preached from the rooftops in all civilised countries and in all cultured tongues. She lived to see the proletarian movement, to which her entire being was wedded, shake the foundations of the old world from Russia to America and press onwards, increasingly certain of victory and defying all resistance. And one of her last joys was the striking evidence of indestructible vitality that our German workers provided in the last elections to the Reichstag.

The contribution made by this woman, with such a sharp critical intelligence, with such political tact, a character of such energy and passion, with such dedication to her comrades-instruggle—her contribution to the movement over almost forty years has not become public knowledge; it is not inscribed in the annals of the contemporary press. It is something one must have experienced at first hand. But of one thing I am sure: just as the wives of the Commune refugees will often remember her—so, too, will the rest of us have occasion enough to miss her bold and wise advice, bold without ostentation, wise without ever compromising her honour to even the smallest degree.