Not a man of solid principles. The relevance of Edgar Bauer’s polemical portrait of Karl Marx in his 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze!

The protagonist of Edgar Bauer’s 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze! is a young intellectual named “Karl”. It can hardly be doubted that Bauer’s novella is a polemical character study of Karl Marx: the rather demeaning picture of “Herr Karl” belongs to the heat of controversy between Marx and die Freien, the Berlin Young Hegelians, after the end of their participation in the Rheinische Zeitung in late autumn 1842. So far, Bauer’s novella has never been used as a potential source to shed light on the deeper causes of animosity between Marx and die Freien.