‘Karl Marx in Karlsbad’ by Egon Erwin Kisch reviewed by David Black
Summary: Review of Karl Marx in Karlsbad (2025) by Egon Erwin Kisch. Originally published June 21, 2025 in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books here — Editors
Karlsbad is a German-speaking city in Bohemia on the River Teplá. As a spa resort it is renowned for the curative effects of its thermal springs, attracting those from all parts of Europe, ‘princes, ministers, aristocrats, chamber singers, order-hunters, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, spies, and courtesans.’ (19) Into this exotic place, in August 1874, steps Karl Marx, accompanied by his 19-year-old daughter, Eleanor, alias ‘Tussy’.
70 years later, Egon Kisch (1885-1948) tells the story. He is on a journalistic assignment for the press of the Communist Party, which is celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Marx’s visit. As such, he has access to police and state archives, plus the Marx-Engels Archive.
Marx is suffering from ill-heath, aggravated by overwork, especially translating Capital into French. Friedrich Engels gives Marx 40 pounds to ‘take the cure’ at Karlsbad’s springs, along with Tussy, who is also unwell. Before taking the trip, Marx has concerns they might be expelled upon arrival by the Austrian authorities. On 14 August, 1874, he writes to his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet: ‘After a long period in which neither the International nor myself had attracted any attention, it is very curious that my name should have figured again just now in trials in Petersburg and Vienna.’ (21)
Arriving in Karlsbad on 19 August, they lodge with Marx’s friend and correspondent, Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann. He has prescribed them an Austrian doctor, Leopold Fleckles, who shares a practice with his son Ferdinand. They advise that Marx might be able to hoodwink the authorities by registering as a ‘private gentleman’ (as opposed to a count, professor or doctor). This means he has to pay double the usual spa taxes. ‘But’, he writes to Engels, it will hopefully ‘remove the suspicion that I might be the notorious Karl Marx.’ As Marx continues to report: ‘We are both living in strict accordance with the rules.’ This entails early rising, drinking spa water, exercises and walks in the forest. In the evening the programme is varied by visits to the theatre, concerts and the reading room. (29-31)
Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor in the book’s afterword refer to Walter Benjamin’s fragment ‘Dream House, Museum, Spa’ in The Arcades Project. Benjamin says a trip to a spa resort might offer the bourgeois the illusion of ‘slipping the ties that bind’ – ‘the watering place fortifies his own consciousness as belonging to the upper class’. As Dolbear and Proctor add: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot see beyond themselves. There is no outside, only the rhythms of their petty lives, a rhythm that Marx generally moves to rather than disrupts during his visits.’ (72)
The main disruption to Marx’s peace of mind is having to share a house with Kugelmann: ‘The fact is that this arch-pedant, this pettifogging, bourgeois philistine has got the idea that his wife [Gertrude] is unable to understand him… and he torments the woman, who is his superior in every respect, in the most repulsive manner. So it led to a quarrel between us.’ (32)
The silver lining in the row is that Marx gets to meet Gertrude’s brother, the chemist Max Oppenheim, who he finds to be ‘a very pleasant fellow’. And Tussy enjoys the company of Gertrude’s daughter, Franziska. (32; see also Kugelmann 1972) ‘In addition’, he tells Engels, ‘half the local medical faculty soon assembled round my daughter and me; all very acceptable people for my present purpose when I have to think little and laugh often. Also [Otto] Knille, the painter from Berlin, a very charming chap.’ Another ‘pleasant’ companion is Simon Deutsch, who fought in the 1848 Revolution in Vienna and the Paris Commune in 1871. (32-34) As the season ends, Marx happily reports that the Karlsbad visit has done both him and Tussy the world of good.
Marx travels to Karlsbad the following year (1875) – this time without Eleanor. To avoid the double tax he registers as ‘Doctor of Philosophy Charles Marx’. At this point, the police ‘wake up’. On 4 September 1875, District Governor Joseph Veith reports to his superior in Prague that,
Charles Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, of London, ringleader of the Democratic-Social Party, is undergoing treatment in Karlsbad. Since he was also in Karlsbad for the cure last year and gave no cause for concern, I take the liberty of limiting myself to the present report, adding that Marx has so far behaved calmly, has no significant contacts with other guests and often takes longer walks alone. (35)
The report goes upwards to the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna. As a result, Veith is instructed ‘to discreetly and continuously monitor the behaviour of the aforementioned during his stay there, particularly with regard to the social relationships he cultivates.’ (36)
The Austrian police, in collaboration with their German counterparts, intercept Marx’s mail. He writes to Austrian physician Bernhard Kraus:
You will have seen from my daughter’s letter that, of the 3 letters you wrote me, not one has reached London, and that the same thing happened to the letters I wrote and those directed to me (during my stay at Karlsbad). This bears the stamp of – Stieber! [Wilhelm Stieber, Bismark’s spymaster]. (Marx 1991a: 103)
In August 1876, Marx, accompanied again by Eleanor, is back in Karlsbad. It is reported by the police spies that ‘he is to be found constantly with his daughter […] in regard to his cultivated relationships […] he has not given rise to any particular suspicions so far.’ (38) Marx writes from Karlsbad to Jenny Longuet: ‘We have made many acquaintances of late – aside from a few Poles, mostly German university professors and doctors of other descriptions.’ And as regards Austria, ‘[t]he more one hears of the details about the “situation in Austria” the more one becomes convinced that this state is coming to the end of the line.’ (Marx 1991b: 143) Another visitor is Russian Maxim Kovalevky, whose history of primitive communal systems is a source for Marx’s ethnological studies (the police don’t notice him either). (46)
To properly explicate Kisch’s revelations, it is necessary at this point to backtrack to Marx and Eleanor’s first visit to Karlsbad in August 1874. Marx writes to Engels on 31 August 1874 that he has been ‘denounced’ in the ‘Viennese scandal-sheet Sprudel (a spa paper)’. The short gossip item reads: ‘The long-standing leader of the International, Marx, and the leader of the Russian Nihilists, the Polish Count Plater, have arrived in Karlsbad to take the cure.’ (30)
Marx notes that the Count is, as is widely known, a ‘Polish patriot […] a good Catholic and liberal aristocrat.’ He is not unduly disturbed by being outed in such a frivolous fashion; and in any case he has a receipt for the tax he has paid, and so has acquired the ‘official’ status as a resident. (30) The following week, Sprudel editors admit they were ‘wrong’ and are happy to ‘clear such a pure patriot who has always and forever stood up for the Polish Cause with his person and possessions from the suspicion of going along with “nihilists” or “internationals”.’ (52)
This seems bizarre. Did Sprudel editors really believe in the first place that the Polish Count was a Russian nihilist? And why did they out Marx in the same breath? Thanks to Kisch’s detective work, we can begin to unravel these questions: ‘When Marx wrote that he been outed by “the gossip magazine Sprudel,” he had no idea that it was by the son of the man who had carefully advised him to disguise himself. Sprudel, the general German-language spa journal, was published by none other than Dr. Ferdinand Fleckles’ (50) – Eleanor’s trusted doctor and the son of Marx’s doctor, Leopold Fleckles. It is unclear if Kisch is right about Marx initially having ‘no idea’ of the Sprudel-Fleckles connection. Couldn’t it be that Marx, from the start, embraced Sprudel’s ‘trickster’ spirit? In any case, the Sprudel-Marx collaboration, as we shall see, is of considerable importance.
Kisch discovers that when, in 1898, Wilhelm Liebknecht was working on a biography of his late comrade Marx, he wrote to Eleanor, enquiring about their times in Karlsbad. She recalled that an article was published which Marx said was ‘very good’ and suggests that ‘M.O. in D’ might know something about it. The clue wasn’t followed up because Eleanor committed suicide that year and Liebknecht died in 1900. In 1946, Kisch followed it up. He trawled the directories in Prague and finds ‘M.O.’: Max Oppenheim, Marx’s visitor in Karlsbad and host in Prague. Kisch surmises that the said article must have been in a Karlsbad paper, and he finds it: in the 19 September 1875 edition of Sprudel. (46)
The 3000-word article is entitled ‘Carl Marx’ and written by ‘Julius Walter’, the nom de plume of Fleckles. It begins by stating that ‘yet another exceptionally interesting guest has come to the springs, Carl Marx is taking the cure in Karlsbad’. (55) It says Marx lacks the ‘romance hero’ status of his late ‘pupil Lassalle’ and can hardly be named by anyone outside the circles of his comrades. The article then says, quite inconsistently:
If he is indeed named, the frightened imagination of the bourgeois paints his picture in the manner of Breughel’s Hell, writing his name as Mene Tekel on the gates of the palaces, the doors of the middle classes, the smoking chimneys of the factories and the iron treasuries of the rich, and ever since the Commune it has been said of him:
“he it is who murderers call brother,
who in the bourgeois’ nightly prayers,
A footing with the Devil shares” (56)
Marx was born in Trier in 1818. But Sprudel – perhaps just to provoke – has him born in 1810 in Saarbrücken which, as it was then in Napoleonic France, would mean he was French rather than Prussian. Regardless, the main biographical note is impeccably accurate: charting Marx’s revolutionary career from the Rheinische Zeitung, to writing for the New York Tribune; writing Capital, etc, etc. Then comes the personal portrait:
Marx himself is as interesting and captivating as his appearance […] unusual erudition […] in all fields of knowledge […] his breath busting mightily from the depths only when he scorns opinions that seem to him erroneous; but when he wishes to spurn a person, he envelops the barb of his sarcastic wit with a voice of softness, thus creating an effect that is all the more brutal. When he expounds his own opinions […] he speaks softly and kindly and yet with artistic dignity […] a graphic image or illuminating flash of wit. (59)
In addition, the author has evidently spent time in the company of both Marx and Eleanor:
If we are in his company together with a spirited and charming lady – women, like children, make the best agents provocateurs, and since they can only understand general matters in their relation to personal matters, always locate them in the cozy bower of personal encounters – here, Marx has his hands full, drawing deeply from his beautifully ordered treasury of memories […] when romanticism was still singing its last forest song, when he, a black-curled fellow, sat at A.W. Schlegel’s feet when he entered into a relationship with Bettina [von Arnim] – who was of course already a grandmother by then – and brought the verses, still wet with ink, into [Heinrich] Heine’s room. (60)
As an ‘excellent dialectician’, his ‘speculative, critical spirit, his artistic predilection […] are not, as might appear, in order to transform the heavy bullion of his knowledge into coin for the mob, in order to arouse the masses […] more a philosopher than a man of action […] a historian of the movement, perhaps(?) rather a strategist than a fighter […] a man whose importance will last forever. (53-61)
The latter judgement is lost on the post-communist Czech Republic, in which Karlovy Vary (formerly Karlsbad) is a major tourist asset. In 1990, the town’s Marx Museum, founded in 1960, was closed down. Ironically, Eduard Goldstücker (1913-2000), who during the 1968 Prague Spring championed free speech as chair of the Czech Writers Union, never doubted that his friend Egon Kisch ‘would have been one of our comrades-in-arms in 1968.’ (12)
References
- 1972 Small Traits of Marx’s Great Character Marx and Engels Through the Eyes of their Contemporaries (Moscow: Progress Publishers).
- 1991a Marx to Bernard Kraus. 20 October 1875 Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 45: 1874-1879 (New York: Progress Publishers).
- 1991b Marx to Jenny Longuet. End of August-beginning of September 1876 Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 45: 1874-1879 (New York: Progress Publishers).
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