Karl Marx

Striking throughout The Young Karl Marx, the new film by director Raoul Peck, is how often the three main characters smile at one another. It's almost as if the actors playing Marx, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, and his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels—who sometimes goes by “Fred”—couldn't ...

On March 15, 1883, the day after Karl Marx died, Friedrich Engels wrote to the German-American Socialist leader Friedrich Sorge to give him an account of the illnesses that led up to Marx's death. He went on to tell Sorge just how Marx breathed his last, and how Engels himself was trying to come to terms ...

In the mirror of an Arab beard shearer, Karl Marx saw himself taking leave of his familiar look. Like an actor who has finished performing and is sitting with his mask on, about to remove his makeup, he was bidding farewell to the character who had dictated his image throughout his life. He was destroying ...

The new film The Young Karl Marx dodges this problem by avoiding the years its subject devoted to his biggest book, Capital. It focuses instead on the years before Marx had developed anything like “Marxism.” His genius was apparent to his colleagues, and he had already written some of his most ...

Karl Marx is barfing in the street, but Friedrich Engels—cool as a German pastry under his blonde haircut and expensive hat—is fine. Both are young, in their early to mid-twenties. It is 1843, five years before the popular revolutions that would sweep across Europe. In the opening scene, a gang of poor ...

The history of the world may be the history of class struggle, but the history of class struggle — at least the decisive chapter chronicled in “The Young Karl Marx” — turns out to be a buddy movie. Marx (August Diehl), a scruffy journalist, and his sidekick Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), a renegade rich kid ...

In this, “The Young Karl Marx” engages in its own kind historical materialism, to use a loose sense of the term. Marx's work — and socialist and academic interpretations of it, in particular — can feel hallowed, like infallible sacred texts sent down from on high. True to life, the Marx we see is no saint: He ...