Caliban or Prospero?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 461, 23 April 1948, Page 19

Caliban or Prospero?

THE RED PRUSSIAN. By Leopold Schwarzschild. Hamish Hamilton, ARL MARX was not an attractive character. Like many great men, in personal relations he was altogether impossible. The apostle of the proletarian revolution, he lived all his life in miserable dependence on the bounty of his bourgeois relatives or of his equally bourgeois disciple, Engels. Fanatically jealous, avid of power and influence, a frustrated poet and intellectual, drunken, lazy, treacherous, slanderous, extravagant, impractical, inconsistent, unoriginal, a man whom it was more dangerous to befriend than to oppose, all these heads of indictment are skilfully drawn against him by a writer who matches the venom of his victim in this derisive biography. This is debunking in excelsis. Karl Marx is thrown out the window like so much dirty water. And yet. ..- And yet, is the story quite complete? Has the baby perhaps been tossed out with the bathwater? Marx, disorderly and spiteful as he was, had a curious consistency, even a sort of twisted heroism. However crudely and absurdly he formulated them, he sacrificed his life to his theories. True, he demanded that he, and he alone, be given credit for them, and, like Uncle Joe, he dearly loved to purge his former associateseventually his followers purged him. But his unhappy life-debts, disease, hounding from one European country to the next, the death of children from lack of proper care and food-was hardly that of a man moved solely by motives of self-interest. Even his marriage becomes a romance. Schwarzschild, setting out to demolish Marx in the same vigorous fashion that Marx himself used to demolish his opponents, has, I feel, rather over-reached himself. This new biography, itself a translation from German, is based on material mostly not available in English, especially on the correspondence between the two great Marxists published by the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow. Of this publication Schwarzschild appositel remarks: "Apparently the mental an moral schism between Soviet Russia ‘and the rest of the world has grown so deep that the editors were not even conscious that they were doing a poor service to the memory of their hero." The Red Prussian is a fascinating book. The parts played by Communist, Social-Democrat, or other forward-look-ing parties in the European upheavals of 1848 and 1870 are graphically described. Schwarzschild writes with spirit, banteringly planting little blows of satire but never pressing for a knockout, no doubt believing that would spoil the fun. Those honest, those honourable men, Lassalle, Liebknecht, Bakunin, and Engels (for everyone else is a pretty staunch fellow by comparison with the monstrous Karl Marx) are prudently and clearly sketched. The incidental history of early working-class political activity is itself valuable. This is, in fact, an extremely able book which will infuriate the faithful. It may also cause some faint uneasiness to those

who do not feel it necessary to annihilate the man in order to refute the man’s doctrines. Marx’s true character is now rather beside the point.