Karl Marx: A Biography

45 2 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

back to the hotel to change and have a nap before lunch, which was

preceded every other day by a bath. After lunch there was further walking

or longer organised tours followed by a light meal and early bed, all

entertainments ending at 9.0 0 p.m. Marx enjoyed the life very much,

particularly the long walks among the pine-clad granite foothills of the

Erzgebirge. He also liked to pursue his habit of conferring witty nick-

names on the more conspicuous passers-by. Franziska Kugelmann recalled

a visit to a porcelain works at which they observed a man supervising an

intricate turning machine.

'Is this always your job?' Marx asked him, 'or have you some other?'
'No,' the man answered, 'I have not done anything else for years. It is
only by practice that one learns to work the machine so as to get the
difficult shape smooth and fauldess.' 'Thus division of labour makes
man an appendage of the machine,' Marx said to my father as we went
on. 'His power of thinking is changed into muscular memory.'^56
In the afternoon and evening, in general company, Marx preferred light
conversation with such men as Otto Knille (a well-known painter) and
Simon Deutsch (an Austrian journalist whom Marx remembered from his
Paris days). Father and daughter were inseparable whether on walks or
writing letters on the terrace behind their hotel. According to Eleanor,
still embarrassingly forthright in her reactions to people and smoking
almost continuously, she and her father got on very well in Carlsbad and
'his immense knowledge of history made every place we went to more
alive and present in the past than in the present itself.^57
For Marx, the only drawback to Carlsbad was Kugelmann. From the
start of his stay he annoyed Marx by his 'carping criticisms with which
he quite needlessly embitters his own life and that of his family'.^58 Unfor-
tunately, Kugelmann had chosen for Marx a room between his own and
Eleanor's. The upshot was that

I had the pleasure of his company not only when I was with him, but

also when I was alone. I put up patiently with the continual flow of his

solemn chatter uttered in a deep voice ... but my patience at last broke

down when he began to bore me too utterly with domestic scenes.

This arch-pedant, this bourgeois hair-splitting philistine, imagines that

his wife does not understand or comprehend his Faust-like nature,

which is struggling to some higher conception of the world; and he

torments the poor woman, who is in all respects his superior, in the

most revolting manner. It came to an open quarrel between us. I moved

to a higher floor and so was completely quit of him (he had seriously

spoiled the cure for me). We were only reconciled just before his

departure, which took place last Sunday. But I said positively that I

would not visit his house in Hanover.^59