Berlin, November 10[-11, 1837] 
Dear Father, 

There are moments in one’s life which are like frontier posts 
marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly 
indicating a new direction. 

At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the 
past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to 
become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself 
likes to look back in this way and take stock, which often gives it 
the appearance of retrogression or stagnation, whereas it is 
merely, as it were, sitting back in an armchair in order to 
understand itself and mentally grasp its own activity, that of the 
mind. 

At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every 
metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great 
new poem, which endeavours to achieve a stable form in brilliant 
colours that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should 
like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in 
order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it 
has lost in our actions. And where could a more sacred dwelling 
place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most 
merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love 
whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our 
endeavours! What better amends and forgiveness could there be 
for much that is objectionable and blameworthy than to be seen 
as the manifestation of an essentially necessary state of things? 
How, at least, could the often ill-fated play of chance and intel- 
lectual error better escape the reproach of being due to a perverse 
heart? 

When, therefore, now at the end of a year spent here I cast a 
glance back on the course of events during that time, in order, my 
dear father, to answer your infinitely dear letter from Ems,’ allow 
me to review my affairs in the way I regard life in general, as the 
expression of an intellectual activity which develops in all direc- 
tions, in science, art and private matters. 

When I left you, a new world had come into existence for me, 
that of love, which in fact at the beginning was a passionately 
yearning and hopeless love. Even the journey to Berlin, which 
otherwise would have delighted me in the highest degree, would 
have inspired me to contemplate nature and fired my zest for life, 
left me cold. Indeed, it put me strikingly out of humour, for the 
rocks which I saw were not more rugged, more indomitable, than 
the emotions of my soul, the big towns not more lively than my 
blood, the inn meals not more extravagant, more indigestible, than 
the store of fantasies I carried with me, and, finally, no work of 
art was as beautiful as Jenny. 

After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing 
connections, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to 
immerse myself in science and art. 

In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry 
was bound to be my first subject, at least the most pleasant and 
immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous 
development it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became 
a world beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became 
hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines. All the poems 
of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by at- 
tacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, 
nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete 
opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical 
reflections instead of poetic thoughts, but perhaps also a certain 
warmth of feeling and striving for poetic fire. The whole extent 
of a longing that has no bounds finds expression there in many 
different forms and makes the poetic “composition” into “dif-— 
fusion’”’.” 

Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompani- 
ment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with 
philosophy. The two were so closely linked that, on the one hand, 

I read through Heineccius, Thibaut? and the sources quite 
uncritically, in a mere schoolboy fashion; thus, for instance, I 
translated the first two books of the Pandect into German, and, 
on the other hand, tried to elaborate a philosophy of law covering 
the whole field of law. I prefaced this with some metaphysical 
propositions by way of introduction and continued this unhappy 
opus as far as public law, a work of almost 300 pages. * 

Here, above all, the same opposition between what is and what 
ought to be, which is characteristic of idealism, stood out as a 
serious defect and was the source of the hopelessly incorrect 
division of the subject-matter. First of all came what I was pleased 
to call the metaphysics of law, i. e., basic principles, reflections, 
definitions of concepts, divorced from all actual law and every 
actual form of law, as occurs in Fichte,’ only in my case it was 
more modern and shallower. From the outset an obstacle to 
grasping the truth here was the unscientific form of mathematical 
dogmatism, in which the author argues hither and thither, going 
round and round the subject dealt with, without the latter taking 
shape as something living and developing in a many-sided way. A 
triangle gives the mathematician scope for construction and proof, 
it remains a mere abstract conception in space and does not 
develop into anything further. It has to be put alongside some- 
thing else, then it assumes other positions, and this diversity added 
to it gives it different relationships and truths. On the other hand, 
in the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, as exem- 
plified by law, the state, nature, and philosophy as a whole, the 
object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary divisions 
must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself 
must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself 
and find its unity in itself. 

Next, as the second part, came the philosophy of law, that is to 
say, according to my views at the time, an examination of the 
development of ideas in positive Roman law, as if positive law in 
its conceptual development (I do not mean in its purely finite 
provisions) could ever be something different from the formation 
of the concept of law, which the first part, however, should have 
dealt with. 

Moreover, I had further divided this part into the theory of 
formal law and the theory of material law, the first being the pure 
form of the system in its sequence and interconnections, its 
subdivisions and scope, whereas the second, on the other hand, 
was intended to describe the content, showing how the form 
becomes embodied in its content. This was an error I shared with 
Herr v. Savigny, as I discovered later in his learned work on 
ownership,* the only difference being that he applies the term 
formal definition of the concept to “finding the place which this 
or that theory occupies in the (fictitious) Roman system”, the 
material definition being “the theory of positive content which the 
Romans attributed to a concept defined in this way”,” whereas I 
understood by form the necessary architectonics of conceptual 
formulations, and by matter the necessary quality of these formu- 
lations. The mistake lay in my belief that matter and form can and 
must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a 
real form, but something like a desk with drawers into which I 
then poured sand. 

The concept is indeed the mediating link between form and 
content. In a philosophical treatment of law, therefore, the one 
must arise in the other; indeed, the form should only be the 
continuation of the content. Thus I arrived at a division of the 
material such as could be devised by its author for at most an easy 
and shallow classification, but inwhich the spirit and truth of law 
disappeared. All law was divided into contractual and non-contrac- 
tual. In order to make this clearer, I take the liberty to set out the 
plan up to the division of jus publicum, which is also treated in the 
formal part. 

I II 
jus privatum* jus publicum 
I. jus privatum 
a) Conditional contractual private law. 

b) Unconditional non-contractual private law. 
A. Conditional contractual private law 

a) Law of persons; b) Law of things; c) Law of persons in 

relation to property. a) Law of persons 

I. Commercial contracts; II. Warranties; III. Contracts of bail- 
ment. 

Karl Marx 

I. Commercial contracts 
Contracts of legal entities (societas). 3. Contracts of casements (lo- 

catio conductio). 

3. Locatio conductio 

1. Insofar as it relates to operae.* 

a) locatio conductio proper (excluding Roman letting or 

leasing); 

b) mandatum. 
2. Insofar as it relates to usus ret.‘ 

a) On land: usus fructus? (also not in the purely Roman 

sense); 
b) On houses: habitatio.* 
II. Warranties 
1. Arbitration or conciliation contract; 2. Insurance contract. 
III. Contracts of bailment 
2. Promissory contract 
1. fide jussio'; 2. negotiorum gestio. 
3. Contract of gift 
1. donatio; 2. gratiae promissum.' 
b) Law of things 
I. Commercial contracts 

2. permutatio stricte sic dicta. 
1. permutatio proper; 2. mutuum (usurae)*; 3. emptio venditio.! 
pignus.™ Il. Warranties 

III. Contracts of bailment 

2. commodatum?; 3. depositum.” 

But why should I go on filling up pages with things I myself 
have rejected? The whole thing is replete with tripartite divisions, 
it 1s written with tedious prolixity, and the Roman concepts are 
misused in the most barbaric fashion in order to force them into 
my system. On the other hand, in this way I did gain a general 
view of the material and a liking for it, at least along certain lines. 

At the end of the section on material private law, I saw the 
falsity of the whole thing, the basic plan of which borders on that 
of Kant,° but deviates wholly from it in the execution, and again it 
became clear to me that there could be no headway without 
philosophy. So with a good conscience I was able once more to 
throw myself into her embrace, and I drafted a new system of 
metaphysical principles, but at the conclusion of it I was once 
“more compelled to recognise that it was wrong, like all my 
previous efforts. 

In the course of this work I adopted the habit of making 
extracts from all the books I read, for instance from Lessing’s 
Laokoon, Solger’s Erwin, Winckelmann’s history of art, Luden’s 
German history, and incidentally scribbled down my reflections. At 
the same time I translated Tacitus’ Germania, and Ovid’s Tristia, 
and began to learn English and Italian by myself, i. e., out of 
grammars, but I have not yet got anywhere with this. I also read 
Klein’s criminal law and his annals, and all the most recent 
literature, but this last only by the way. 

At the end of the term, I again sought the dances of the Muses 
and the music of the Satyrs. Already in the last exercise book that 
I sent you‘ idealism pervades forced humour (Scorpion and Felix) 
and an unsuccessful, fantastic drama (Oulanem), until it finally 
undergoes a complete transformation and becomes mere formal 
art, mostly without objects that inspire it and without any 
impassioned train of thought. 

And yet these last poems are the only ones in which suddenly, 
as if by a magic touch—oh, the touch was at first a shattering 
blow —I caught sight of the glittering realm of true poetry like a 
distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing. 

Busy with these various occupations, during my first term I 

spent many a sleepless night, fought many a battle, and endured 
much internal and external excitement. Yet at the end I emerged 
not much enriched, and moreover I had neglected nature, art and 
the world, and shut the door on my friends. The above observa- 
tions seem to have been made by my body. I was advised by a 
doctor to go to the country, and so it was that for the first time I 
traversed the whole length of the city to the gate and went to 
Stralow. I had no inkling that I would mature there from an 
anaemic weakling into a man of robust bodily strength. 

A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and 
new gods had to be installed. 

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and 
nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the 
point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods 
had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre. 

I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy, the grotesque 
craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I 
wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of 
establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, 
concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body. My aim was 
no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring 
genuine pearls into the light of day. 

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: “Cleanthes, or the 
Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy”.’ Here 
art and science, which had become completely divorced from each 
other, were to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I 
set about the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of 
divinity, as it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as 
nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of 
the Hegelian system. And this work, for which I had acquainted 
myself to some extent with natural science, Schelling, and history, 
which had caused me to rack my brains endlessly, and which is so 
[...] written (since it was actually intended to be a new logic) that 
now even I myself can hardly recapture my thinking about it, this 
work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren 
delivers me into the arms of the enemy. 

For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of 
thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of 
the Spree, which “washes souls and dilutes the tea”.* I even joined 
my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and 
wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer. 

Shortly after that I pursued only positive studies: the study of 
Savigny’s Ownership, Feuerbach’s and Grolmann’s criminal law, 
Cramer’s de verborum significatione, Wenning-Ingenheim’s Pandect 
system, and Mihlenbruch’s Doctrina pandectarum, which I am still 
working through, and finally a few titles from Lauterbach, on civil 
procedure and above all canon law, the first part of which, 
Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum, I have almost entirely 
read through in the corpus and made extracts from, as also the 
supplement, Lancelotti’s Institutiones. Then I translated in part 
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read de augmentis scientiarum of the famous 
Bacon of Verulam, spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to 
whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind 
with delight, and also tackled German law, but chiefly only to 
the extent of going through the capitularies of the Franconian 
kings and the letters of the Popes to them. 

Owing to being upset over Jenny’s illness and my vain, fruitless 
intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at 
having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as 
I have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I 
burnt all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I 
could give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have 
not given any proofs to the contrary. : 

While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, to- 
gether with most of his disciples. Through a number of meet- 
ings with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors’ Club, 
which includes some university lecturers and my most intimate 
Berlin friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy here, many conflict- 
ing views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound 
to the modern world philosophy from which I had thought toes- 
cape, but all rich chords were silenced and I was seized witha veri- 
table fury of irony, as could easily happen after so much had been 
negated. In addition, there was Jenny’s silence, and I could not 
rest until I had acquired modernity and the outlook of contempo- 
rary science through a few bad productions such as The Visit, etc. 

If perhaps I have here neither clearly described the whole of 
this last term nor gone into all details, and slurred over all the 
nuances, excuse me, dear Father, because of my desire to speak of 
the present time. 

Herr v. Chamisso sent me a very insignificant note in which he 
informed me “he regrets that the Almanac cannot use my 
contributions because it has already been printed a long time 
ago”.’° I swallowed this with vexation. The bookseller Wigand has 
sent my plan to Dr. Schmidt, publisher of Wunder’s firm that 

trades in good cheese and bad literature. I enclose his letter; Dr. 
Schmidt has not yet replied. However, I am by no means 
abandoning this plan, especially since all the aesthetic celebrities of 
the Hegelian school have promised their collaboration through the 
help of university lecturer Bauer, who plays a big role among 
them, and of my colleague Dr. Rutenberg.” 

Now, as regards the question of a career in cameralistics, my 
dear father, I recently made the acquaintance of an assessor, 
Schmidthanner, who advised me after the third law examination 
to transfer to it as a justiciary, which would be the more to my 
taste, since I really prefer jurisprudence to all administrative 
science. This gentleman told me that in three years he himself and 
many others from the Minster high provincial court in Westphalia 
had succeeded in reaching the position of assessor, which was not 
difficult, with hard work of course, since the stages there are not 
rigidly fixed as they are in Berlin and elsewhere. If later, as an 
assessor, one is awarded a doctor’s degree, there are also much 
better prospects of obtaining a post as professor extraordinary, as 
happened in the case of Herr Gartner in Bonn, who wrote a me- 
diocre work on provincial legislation * and is otherwise only known 
as belonging to the Hegelian school of jurists. But, my dear, 
very good father, would it not be possible to discuss all this with 
you personally? Eduard’s? condition, dear Mama’s illness, your 
own ill health, although I hope it is not serious, all this makes me 
want to hurry to you, indeed it makes it almost a necessity. I 
would be there already if I was not definitely in doubt about your 
permission and consent. 

Believe me, my dear, dear father, I am actuated by no selfish 
intention (although it would be bliss for me to see Jenny again), 
but there is a thought which moves me, and it is one I have no 
right to express. In many respects it would even be a hard step for 
me to take but, as my only sweet Jenny writes, these considera- 
tions are all of no account when faced with the fulfilment of 
duties that are sacred. 

I beg you, dear Father, however you may decide, not to show 
this letter, at least not this page, to my angel of a mother. My 
sudden arrival could perhaps help this grand and wonderful 
woman to recover. 

My letter to Mama was written long before the arrival of Jenny’s 
dear letter, so perhaps I unwittingly wrote too much about matters 
which are not quite or even very little suitable.” 

In the hope that gradually the clouds that have gathered about 
our family will pass away, that it will be granted to me to suffer 
and weep with you and, perhaps, when with you to give proof of 
my profound, heartfelt sympathy and immeasurable love, which 
often I can only express very badly; in the hope that you also, 
dear, ever beloved Father, taking into account my much agitated 
state of mind, will forgive me where often my heart seems to have 
erred, overwhelmed by my militant spirit, and that you will soon 
be wholly restored to health so that I can clasp you to my heart 
and tell you all my thoughts, 

Your ever loving son, 

Karl 

Please, dear Father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad 
style; it is almost 4 o’clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my 
eyes are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not 
be able to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are 
dear to me. 

Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I 
have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new 
delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the 
most beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.