Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Miyamoto Yuriko

1: The Three "Saints" Karl Had

There was a great river that sprang from a small lake in southern Germany, flowed through deep gorges, passed through a region where grapes ripened beautifully, and finally opened its mouth into the distant Dutch sea.
That was the famous Rhine River.
Ancient civilizations had been brought to Central Europe along the waterways of this Rhine River.
The Rhineland region first embraced civilization among the primitive Germanic peoples of that era, then became a land that played a crucial role in the development of modern Germany and in the history of global social movements.
In the Rhineland, where commerce had developed early, academics had advanced, and a spirit that cherished human independence and freedom had been cultivated, when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, a branch of the Jacobin Party was established, and there were many Germans who strove for the French Revolution.
When Napoleon’s dictatorship began, the sixteen Rhenish states formed the Confederation of the Rhine, appointing him as their protector. Through this pact, commercial and industrial freedoms were guaranteed, and despite pressure from Germany’s reactionary policies, progressive liberal ideas flourished.

In the Rhineland of the early nineteenth century, characterized by these distinctive features, in the city of Trier, there lived a lawyer attached to the appellate court named Heinrich Marx.
There, on May 5, 1818, a sturdy-boned boy was born and named Karl.

The Marx family was of Jewish origin.
However, the life of Heinrich Marx's family—he being an excellent lawyer in Trier—was one of considerable comfort.
Father Marx deeply studied eighteenth-century French philosophy and was influenced by the works of Diderot (1713–1784), Voltaire (1694–1778), and the tragic playwright Racine.

In his youth, Karl seemed to freely enjoy life's simple pleasures, maintain a wide social circle, and possess a studious nature—yet his funds always mysteriously ran dry.
It appears he also faced significant difficulties with debts among fellow university students.
Father Marx would offer his son appropriate counsel during such times along with the kind of comfort and support only a devoted father could provide.
Karl loved and respected this father with all his heart.
On his father's fifty-fifth birthday, nineteen-year-old Karl at Berlin University compiled forty poems he had written up to that point—along with one act of a tragedy and several chapters of a comedic novel—as a celebratory gift titled "A Small Token of Eternal Love."
He presented it to this father of noble character.
Someone has said:
Karl had three "saints."
His father, his mother, and his wife.
This wonderful father died in Trier in 1838 due to kidney disease when Karl was twenty years old.

His mother Henriette was a Dutch-born Jewish woman who couldn’t even properly pronounce German, distinct from the Jewish language she grew up with. As a wife of home-centered affection devoted to her learned husband, Henriette supported both the spirit and body of her son Karl through a mother’s love expressed in few words. Had the boy not been cultivated with gentle consideration for women through his mother’s love and her way of life, how could Karl have loved a woman as he loved his wife Jenny?

When Karl was six years old, the Marx family converted from Judaism to Protestantism.

II: Marriage to Jenny — The Berlin Period —

Karl had an older sister named Sophie.
This fact would come to hold profound significance for his entire life.
Among Sophie’s close friends was a noblewoman named Jenny von Westphalen.
Jenny’s father was a privy councillor in Trier.
He had been close friends with the Marx family since his transfer there.
This Privy Councillor was an intelligent man free from bureaucratic pretensions who loved reading Homer and Shakespeare.
In the insular society of that era, a privy councillor was regarded as an aristocratic member of the upper class.
We know how solemnly Goethe’s grandfather—who served as Privy Councillor in the small town of Weimar—viewed that position.
That von Westphalen maintained such close ties with the Marx family—Jewish people burdened by social prejudice—and even approved of his daughters’ friendship with them alone marked him as extraordinary.
Karl’s cheerful and singularly vibrant nature endeared him deeply to Jenny’s father Westphalen, while gradually awakening in Jenny—four years his senior—sentiments distinct from childhood camaraderie.
When Karl was eighteen and Jenny twenty-two, they became engaged.

Karl had to enroll at Berlin University.
Leaving Trier, the hometown where Jenny lived, for Berlin—which seemed as vast as an ocean—apparently held little appeal for Karl.
Karl wrote in a letter to Jenny:

“If it had been any other time, this journey to Berlin would have enchanted me—excited me with observations of nature and ignited in me the joys of life. But now, even this very journey robbed me of all interest.”
“Far from that, this journey made me feel terribly unwell.”

Karl, who had gone to Berlin University at his father’s urging, immersed himself in scholarship and art with little social interaction.
He created three volumes of poetry.
The first two were titled Book of Love and the subsequent one Book of Songs—all three sent to beloved Jenny that December as Christmas gifts.
In 1839 he compiled another collection for her titled Folk Song Anthology.
While channeling his devotion to Jenny into verse, young Karl simultaneously plunged into legal studies and philosophical research while advancing his “extraordinary scholarship” through historical inquiry.

This Berlin period was a time when Karl laid a foundation for his life through serious research beyond university coursework.
In Berlin, there was a group of young philosophers who sought to take up the progressive aspects of Hegelian philosophy and develop its dialectical method.
This group, called the Hegelian Left, had organized the Doctor’s Club, and nineteen-year-old Marx joined this group.
The Doctor’s Club later developed into an organization called the Berlin Free People, and in 1842, Friedrich Engels, who would become Karl’s lifelong collaborator, also joined there.

In the previous year, at twenty-three years old, Karl became a Doctor of Philosophy through the dissertation he submitted to the University of Jena.
Karl’s deceased father, his mother, and Karl himself had all envisioned a life as university professors.
However, Germany’s social circumstances drove Karl from his tranquil plans.
In 1840, Friedrich Wilhelm IV became King of Prussia and began to suppress academic freedom with all his might.
Academic freedom was lost, and under the pretext of disrupting university unity, young progressive philosophers began to be expelled from universities.
With government-employed theologians like Schelling at the forefront, they drove out people capable of thinking and research.
Under these circumstances, Karl abandoned his aspirations of becoming a university professor.
He resolved to express his "inner light" as a "flame" in his capacity as a writer.
He began contributing to the German Yearbook.
It is said that during this period, Karl alternated between living in Bonn and staying with the Westphalen family in Trier, devoting his energy to successive family conflicts.
However, no one knows the details of these conflicts.

It was in June 1843 that Karl and Jenny finally married after a long seven-year engagement period.
It was three months before Karl’s marriage to Jenny that he was removed from his position as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung due to its historically famous suppression.
Moreover, it was only after Karl—having left the Rheinische Zeitung—decided to publish the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in Paris with friends, and when it became clear that as an editor he could secure a steady income of five hundred Thalers each, that his marriage to Jenny finally came to fruition.
The young couple, Karl and Jenny, departed for Paris in November 1843.
What storms of history awaited the Marx couple—newlyweds of five months—in Paris?

There is a photograph.
The photograph is labeled "undated."
Karl Marx, wearing light-colored trousers and a black coat, sits on a chair with his right leg crossed.
The Karl Marx we are accustomed to seeing in photographs depicts a figure with a sturdy, vigorous face entirely framed by a beard as dense as tassel ornaments.
In this photograph, Karl appears far younger than in those familiar images.
His broad forehead tilts slightly under the weight of inner substance, and his large, intense eyes beneath thick brows narrow somewhat toward the lens.
A hand rests lightly on his right shoulder.
That is Jenny's slender hand.
In a high-necked, long-skirted dress with wide sleeves, Jenny stands with her hand on Karl’s shoulder.
With one hand gracefully draped within the folds of her thick silk dress—her modest attire adorned with two simple frills—Jenny’s face radiates the sincerity of a young wife filled with trust and an expression imbued with fundamental serenity.
Though the unwavering harmony of their love flows between them, Jenny’s face—eyes wide open toward the outside world and lips closed seriously without trace of flattery—radiates the resolute strength of a wife standing squarely against life’s challenges.

When and where was this photograph taken?
Was it a memento of their newlywed days?
What a profound difference in human dignity exists between Jenny depicted in her youthful miniature portrait and this photographic image of her.
In her maiden years, Jenny wore soirée attire that boldly revealed two plump shoulders, her small mouth holding an innocent smile as she gazed outward with charming yet vacant eyes.
Now, from Jenny’s entire being as she stood with her hand resting on Karl’s shoulder emanated a solemn gravity.
A sensation of life overflowed within them—joy interwoven with anguish; moments verging on unbearable, yet upheld by an indomitable conviction.

III. The Paris Period Under Oppression

The 1840s in Paris were a period of historic revolutionary fervor.
Following the large-scale strike by Lyon silk workers came Blanqui’s uprising, and against the contradictions of rapidly developing capitalism, the working class’s resistance was boiling up.
In Paris, there were eighty-five thousand German exiles.
The barbaric oppression in Germany at the time had forced out such great numbers of people who wished for a humane society’s happiness and progress from within the country.

The Marx couple moved to this Paris and lived in a house with three families of friends, sharing a kitchen and dining room.
One can imagine how many minor worries young housewife Jenny experienced in their communal Parisian household life with its differing customs and languages.

The following year—May 1, 1844—Jenny gave birth to a girl.
The daughter was named Little Jenny.
The cries of an infant began to echo through their ordinary rented room in Paris, but this year was also an unforgettable one in Germany’s modern history.

In Germany, the Silesian weavers—whose wretched living conditions were known to all—launched a desperate and tragic revolt with their lives on the line.
This revolt drew the world's sympathy.
The blood of the weavers shed by Silesian landlords, factory owners, and the military ignited righteous indignation in the hearts of all people.
Years later, Hauptmann would immortalize this tragedy in his famous play *The Weavers*.
It is well known that after attending Hauptmann’s *The Weavers*, Käthe Kollwitz created her representative print series *The Weavers* out of irrepressible inspiration.

Jenny, who already understood life's bitter struggles, must have pondered deeply by her infant's cradle the fate of her homeland's wretched weavers and the hearts of their wives and children.

Among the exiles gathering at that house around Karl and the *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher* was the poet Heine—then forty-eight—mingling with leading figures from diverse fields.
A genuine friendship had formed between Heine, twenty-one years Karl Marx's senior, and Karl himself.
While Karl immersed himself nightly in his 'sea of books' studying social development's history and theory, Heine brought every new poem to show him.
When Karl offered sharp critiques, Heine would seek Jenny's review of those verses.
Thus emerged works like *A Winter's Tale* and *The Weavers* that crowned Heine's career.
Biographies recounting this episode in mere lines hint most eloquently at the Marx household's atmosphere among friends.
That Karl revered Jenny as a woman of fully independent intellect stood acknowledged among their circle.
Karl—who penned poetry himself and cherished literature lifelong.
Jenny—who treasured four poetry collections gifted by her university-student fiancé Karl.
Love's struggles and triumphs form life's living verse.
The Marx couple embodied death through living.
That Jenny read poetry to Heine amid crushing poverty while soothing this lonely poet's troubled spirit reveals her character's boundless richness.

The *Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher*, which had been the economic foundation for the Marx family in Paris, failed and ceased publication after only two issues.
The funds had run out.
Moreover, the German authorities prohibited entry to contributors such as Marx, Ruge, and Heine, banned imports of the *Yearbook*, and confiscated copies at the border.
Karl could no longer receive the stipend he had been entitled to.
However, could Jenny invite Karl and his friends to a table set with empty plates?

Karl began contributing to Vorwärts, a journal published in Paris.
Karl—who was beginning to understand that modern society's development could only be achieved through more rational methods of production and that the global working class would bear progress—vigorously combated German barbarism in essays such as "The Prussian King and Social Reform."
The Berlin authorities had grown unbearably concerned about this man named Marx in Paris.
At this time, Alexander von Humboldt—Germany's renowned natural scientist—took on an utterly shameful role despite his scholarly status, owing to his familial ties with the then Prussian Foreign Minister.
He succeeded in persuading the French Cabinet to expel Marx, Bakunin, and others from France.

Jenny had to end her Paris life after just fourteen months.
There was no money whatsoever.
There wasn't even rent money.
Engels strained himself to gather funds from friends.
Carrying their infant of about half a year old, the Marx couple relocated to Brussels, Belgium's capital.
It was January 1845.

IV. Karl Emerges from the “Sea of Books” — The Brussels Period —

The three-year Brussels period was the most hectic time in Karl Marx’s entire life.
Having acquired during his Paris years both revolutionary history and its developmental theory from that nation’s past, progressively studied advanced British economics, and—through philosophical research extending back to his university days—emerged from Hegel before developing beyond Feuerbach to establish a historical perspective grounded in dialectical materialism and class struggle theory, Karl now emerged from his "sea of books" in Brussels.
He founded the Workers' Educational Association, expanded it through international connections, and at the 1847 London Congress merged with Paris-based German exiles’ League of the Just to establish for the first time the Communist League.
By resolution of this first congress, Engels was to draft Principles of Communism in a twenty-five-point catechism format.
However, upon Engels’ recommendation, this question-and-answer format was revised and decided to be presented as the Communist Manifesto outlining “the policies of communists.”
Marx, who attended the Second London Congress, was commissioned by the Communist League to draft this Communist Manifesto.
In late January 1848, the historic manifesto—written in German—was published from London.
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!”
Within the manifesto’s concise yet potent prose lay crystallized all scientific research achievements Engels and Marx had attained up to that time.

The reason Marx was unable to attend the First London Congress stemmed from one simple and absolute cause.
He had been unable to secure travel funds.
Amidst this destitution, Jenny became mother to their eldest son.
(The boy named Edgar would pass away at eight years old.)

In Brussels, Engels began living next to the Marx household and working alongside them.
Their association with Weydemeyer—who alongside Engels would become a lifelong comrade of the Marx couple—also commenced.
Jenny was both a cherished friend to all their companions and a maternal presence.

In 1845, Karl renounced his Prussian nationality to shield himself from the joint expulsion policies of the Belgian and Prussian governments.
They became a family without a homeland.
Karl, ever the considerate husband, must have frequently discussed this matter with Jenny as she cared for their two young children.
Recognizing the historical significance of Karl's work and steeled to weather all upheavals for her family's future, Jenny would have comprehended his decision and supported this course of action.
Yet when contemplating her children's prospects and recalling the Rhine's beautiful currents—now lost as homeland—tears would course down Jenny's cheeks unseen by others.

In their Brussels home, among the friends who came and went, even revolutionary types like clockmakers and shoemakers began to appear.
Jenny, who had been raised as the daughter of a Privy Councillor.
In Paris, as Mrs. Dr. Karl Marx, Jenny read Heine’s poems to him.
In Brussels, that Jenny came to live as the wife of Karl Marx—revolutionary and enemy of the world’s bourgeoisie—at the forefront of the advancing tide of world history.

In February 1848, the February Revolution broke out in France, spread to Britain and Germany, and Belgium imposed martial law.
On March 3rd, the Belgian authorities arrested Marx and detained Mrs. Marx overnight in a holding cell.
This lawless conduct enraged Brussels' citizens at the time.
Yet they lacked the means to safeguard the Marx family's livelihood.
Marx and his group left for Paris the next day.

In Paris, exiles from various countries had gathered, riding the momentum of the February Revolution and attempting to launch liberation movements in their homelands.
Many members of the Communist League returned to Germany and began activities in various spheres.
Karl went to Cologne, the city in Germany where workers' class consciousness was most advanced.
Taking their two children, Jenny also headed to Cologne from Paris, where they had stayed for two months.
There, Karl joined the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and serialized "Wage Labour and Capital."
In November 1848, the "State Democratic Association"—organized by Karl and two comrades—opposed the cabinet’s attempt to relocate the parliament from Berlin to another city for its own defense, supporting the civic militia by issuing a proclamation.
The proclamation was used as grounds to indict Marx and his two comrades on charges of treason.
As a result of the trial, they were all acquitted.

This was a precious experience for Jenny.
The validity of Engels’ theory—which posited that her husband Karl and his comrades’ actions were “indeed permissible acts (...) that should have originally been the duty of the bourgeoisie to fulfill”—must have resonated profoundly through Jenny’s spousal devotion.
The Prussian Government issued an expulsion order for foreigners.
The stateless Marx family now stood as foreigners in their own homeland.
Karl placed a farewell address to Cologne’s workers in the red-inked final edition of *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*, Jenny pawned their possessions, and the couple left Cologne.

First Karl went to Paris, followed by Jenny and two children, but the French government decided to exile the Marx family to the marshy region of Brittany with its harsh climate.
At the end of August 1849, Karl finally made his way to London.

Karl wrote to the poet Freiligrath.
“Even though my wife is in her final month of pregnancy, she must leave Paris by the 15th. Moreover, I don’t know how to procure the funds needed for my wife’s departure or the expenses required for relocating here.”

For the Marx family, the bitter hardships of the 1850s began.

V. Unyielding Fighting Spirit — The London Period —

Pregnant Jenny endured physical and mental anguish and reached London. She brought three children with her. And she brought the jewel-like Lenchen. Helene Demuth, affectionately called Lenchen, had been Jenny’s maid since her girlhood days. From this time onward, Lenchen spent her entire life amidst the Marx family’s sorrows and joys, becoming their pillar through diligence and order. (After the Marx couple’s death, she lived with Engels, and her grave was placed under the same tombstone as theirs.)

To save the honor of *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* and that of their friends in Cologne, Karl sold all their property, including even Jenny’s silverware.
Jenny wrote in a letter:
“Three children and the birth of a fourth child.
To understand what that signifies, you must acquaint yourself with the circumstances here in London.”

Karl worked at the British Museum library from nine in the morning until seven in the evening.
Their means of livelihood were Engels' assistance and the manuscript fees—a mere five dollars per article—sent from the New-York Tribune.
The letter Jenny wrote to Weydemeyer in May 1850 vividly depicts the family's circumstances in London.
The fourth child was frail and could sleep no more than two or three hours each night.
Jenny couldn't hire a wet nurse and was raising the child by feeding it her own milk at the expense of her health.
Driven out by an unscrupulous landlord, Karl raced around searching for a house for his wife and children on a gloomy day of cold rain.
When they heard there were four children, there were no lenders.
Finally, with the help of friends, two small rooms were found.
When the landlord confiscated everything from the Marx family's sheets to handkerchiefs and from the children's toys to their clothes, the panicked chemist, baker, butcher and milkman came rushing in with their bills.
To cover those payments, every last bed had to be sold.
Surrounded by two to three hundred onlookers, the Marx family, having relinquished all their possessions, moved into new small rooms.

At the end of that year, their second son Henry died.
Two years later, their third daughter Franziska died.
They even had to borrow the two pounds needed for her coffin from French exiles.

"With that money I bought a small coffin, and in that coffin my poor child now slumbers.
When this child was born, she had no cradle.
And even the last small dwelling was not provided for a long time."

Jenny's diary held back overflowing tears.
In their London life, meals of bread and potatoes only weakened the family's health.
Jenny fell ill.
Little Jenny too was unwell.
Even sturdy Lenchen had begun developing a fever.
There were even times when Karl lacked the money to go read newspapers at the library.
At such times, he couldn't write articles for the Tribune either.
"What should I do...?"

Karl considered moving to Geneva where living costs were lower.
Yet the *Das Kapital* he was working on couldn't be completed without the British Museum library.
Once he tried becoming a clerk at the British Railway Office.
This wasn't approved due to Karl's illegible handwriting.

1859.
The great panic that swept through Europe, centered in America, increasingly worsened the Marx family's destitution.
But Karl declared, “I must overcome all obstacles and achieve my purpose.
“And I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine.”
During this period of panic, the first installment of his major work *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy* was published.

Life in the two-room dwelling without a garden on Dean Street in London was so difficult.
Yet the indomitable vitality and resourcefulness of the Marx couple drew forth whatever joy could be extracted from this life.
How all those writing their recollections of Marx must have depicted, with such unforgettable delight, the pleasures of those grand Sunday strolls taken in fine weather.
Karl loved children so much that a book titled *Children and Marx* was written about him.
The daughters, now coming into their bloom, did not call their incomparably gentle father Karl “Papa.”
They called him by the nickname “Moor,” given for his dark complexion and black beard.
Yet all the young revolutionaries were calling him “Father Marx.”

The large chunk of roast meat in the German-style basket that Lenchen—the pillar of the Marx family—carried hanging from her arm. Modest drinks obtained along the way. The Marx couple walked together harmoniously. The children went ahead joyfully. A group of young revolutionaries arrived, chatting and debating as they came together. On other days, Karl—who wore out the carpet around his desk by pacing as he worked from nine in the morning until midnight—became completely captivated by Jenny and the children only on Sundays. When the children were small, Karl would tell them endless impromptu fairy tales during such walks. The "cavalry game"—where Karl would give one daughter a shoulder ride, W. Liebknecht would give the other a shoulder ride, and they would race until breathless—was a pastime exclusive to the Marx household: a game played by adults and children alike. After the girls grew older, he became their companion in reciting Shakespeare’s poems and a shared enthusiast of Burns. Once Jean—their first grandson—reached his mischievous prime, this Jean became Marx’s most beloved ruler. Engels and Liebknecht became horses while Karl took the driver’s seat. Little Jean straddled these three great socialists and shouted in his funny international language: “Go on! Plus vite! Giddyup!” (“Charge! Faster! Giddyup!”).

Jenny gazed in rapt fascination at Karl—the "big child" frolicking playfully with sweat streaming down his forehead.
Impetuous, uncompromising, and upright, Karl was truly a giant of a child in Jenny's eyes.
Karl, whose short temper was evident in the shape of his nose, constantly required Jenny's astonishingly fair judgment and wisdom in all matters.

Jenny often made fair copies of Karl’s hard-to-read manuscripts.
But never in the manner of Mrs. Tolstoy’s “famous fair copies.”

In 1867, the first volume of the world-renowned masterpiece *Das Kapital* was finally published.
Karl was forty-nine, and Jenny was fifty-three at the time.

The First International was established in 1864.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune that erupted on March 18 of the following year—with its tragic yet honorable conclusion—brought about the historic schism between Bakunin and Marx.
The violent shifts in international circumstances and Marx’s theory—which increasingly provided objective insights into reality—clashed with Bakunin over the revolutionary phases of social development.
Thus he had broken away from the utopian Proudhon and distanced himself from the subjective Lassalle.
The slander that these men—seeking to vindicate themselves—heaped upon their polemical opponent Marx, combined with bourgeois society’s view of Marx as its greatest enemy, continued raining ceaseless abuse upon Karl.
Yet none of this could injure Jenny’s bright, warm heart.
Before anyone knew it, Jenny too had become a communist possessing firm understanding of world politics.

Karl’s health began to decline as he entered his fifties.
The poverty of London life, mental strain, and intense study began to wear down even Karl’s robust body.
He developed liver disease.
From 1874, spa therapy in Karlsbad was attempted.
The spa therapy proved somewhat effective.
However, at that very moment, beloved Jenny began to weaken.
She had to wage a pain-ridden, protracted battle with cancer.
The sixty-six-year-old Jenny could now rarely rise from her bed.
That year, the beloved “Moor” fell into despair from pleurisy.
“It was a terrible time.”
“These two who had been so inseparable could no longer be together in the same room.”
The youngest daughter Eleanor wrote.
She and the elderly Lenchen saved Karl’s life.
The two of them provided round-the-clock nursing care.
Eleanor movingly recorded the beautiful morning scene when “Moor,” who had miraculously survived, first entered ailing Jenny’s room.

“The two had rejuvenated together—she as a maiden in love, he as a youth in love, those stepping into life together—and were not the ailing old man and dying old woman bidding each other farewell for the last time.”

Karl seemed likely to regain his health once more.
At that moment—December 2, 1881—Jenny died.
“The dear, unforgettable lifelong companion” was lost.
Jenny, who until the very end never lost her good humor and even laughed while making jokes to lift everyone’s spirits, turned to Karl as her final consciousness began to fade and said:
“Karl, my strength is broken.”
Her eyes shone larger and more beautifully than ever before.
When she could no longer speak, Jenny pressed her daughters’ hands and tried to smile gently.
And she gradually fell asleep.
Thus Engels said when Jenny died:
“Moor has died too.”

Eleanor wrote.
“With Mother’s life, Moor’s life too had come to an end.”
“He fought fiercely to avoid succumbing to despair.”
“He endeavored to complete his magnum opus.”

Karl could not attend the burial of his lifelong companion.
because he had been prohibited by his doctors from going outdoors due to illness.
Several close friends sent her to Highgate Cemetery.

Engels’ graveside words were concluded as follows.

“A woman who possessed such energy and passion, who demonstrated such devotion to her comrades—the achievements she contributed to the movement over nearly forty years—no one speaks of this, nor is it recorded in the newspapers of her time.”
“But I know.”
“Just as the women of the Commune exiles will often remember her, we comrades shall all the more frequently lament her bold and wise counsel.”
“If there was a woman who considered making others happy her greatest happiness, she was indeed that woman.”

Marx’s effort to complete *Das Kapital* by overcoming his grief over losing Jenny was a heartrending sight.
Karl went to France, went to Switzerland, and this time resolved to return in good health.
However, every land on Earth without Jenny no longer suited his body and mind.
The journey appeared as restless tossing and turning.

On March 14, 1883—in the early spring of the third year after Jenny's death—Karl Marx, torchbearer of humanity's flame, closed his extraordinarily rich sixty-five-year life while seated in the armchair of his study at the Maitland Park house.
[January 1947]