4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 41 6The family had two maids and also owned a vineyard near the city.
Nevertheless the low income tax paid by Heinrich Marx and some of his
remarks in letters to his son (he urged Karl to send several of his letters
together by parcel post as it was cheaper) suggest that there was not
much money to spare.^23
There were nine children in the Marx family of whom Karl was the
third; but the eldest, Moritz David, died aged four the year after Karl's
birth so that Karl occupied the position of elder son. He had an elder
sister, Sophie, to whom he seems to have been particularly attached during
his childhood; she later married a lawyer and lived in Maastricht in
Holland. Marx's two younger brothers both died early from tuberculosis,
as did two of his sisters. Of the two remaining sisters, Louise married a
Dutchman, Juta, and emigrated with him to Cape Town, and Emilie
married an engineer and lived in Trier. Most of the little information
about Marx's childhood comes from these sisters, who told their niece,
Eleanor, that as a child Marx was 'a terrible tyrant of his sisters, whom
he would "drive" as his horses down the Markusberg in Trier at full speed
- and worse, would insist on their eating the "cakes" he made with dirty
dough and dirtier hands. But they stood the "driving" and ate the "cakes"
without a murmur, for the sake of the stories Karl would tell them as a
reward for their compliance.'^24
Up to the age of twelve Marx was probably educated at home. For
the subsequent five years 1830- 5 he attended the High School in Trier
which had formerly been a Jesuit school and then bore the name Frederick
William High School. Here he received a typically solid humanist edu-
cation. The liberal spirit of the Enlightenment had been introduced into
the school by the late Prince-Elector of Trier, Clement Wenceslas, who
had adopted the principles of his famous predecessor Febronius and tried
to reconcile faith and reason from a Kantian standpoint. In order to
combat the ignorance of the clergy he turned the school into a sort of
minor seminary. It sank to a very low level under the French occupation,
but was reorganised after the annexation of the Rhineland and recruited
several very gifted teachers.^25 The chief influence in the school was its
headmaster, Hugo Wyttenbach, Karl's history teacher and a friend of the
Marx family. He had made a favourable impression on Goethe as 'an
adept of Kantian philosophy',^26 and took part in the founding of the
Casino Club. After a big demonstration at Hambach in favour of freedom
of the Press in 1832 , Wyttenbach was put under police observation and
the school was searched: copies of the Hambach speeches and anti-
government satire were found in the possession of pupils. As a result of
the Casino affair of 1834 , Karl Marx's fourth year at the school, the
mathematics teacher was accused of materialism and atheism, and the