![]() His upbringing taught him all he needed to know about religion's seductive tyranny, arming him with the didactic eloquence and self-confidence to exhort humanity to throw off its shackles. He may seem an odd representative of the oppressed masses, this respectable middle-class German, but his emblematic status would not have surprised Marx himself, who believed that individuals reflect the In his estrangement from religion, class and citizenship, he personified the alienation which he identified as the curse inflicted To predicting the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the withering away of the nation-state. He died an atheist and a stateless person, having devoted his adult life Marx was a bourgeois Jew from a predominantly Catholic city within a country whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Relations with his mother were icy and distant, not least because she had been inconsiderate enough to stay aliveĪnd thus keep the rebellious heir from his inheritance. Of his five sisters another sister died two years later, and even the survivors had little to do with him. His father was dead, as were three brothers and one He was aged thirty-six at the time and had long since severed his own umbilical ties. `Blessed is he that hath no family,' Karl Marx sighed wearily in a letter to Friedrich Engels in June 1854. ![]() But in fact he's thinking of an earlier son of Trier, a Jewish boy, born in the early hours of. `That's it, yes, that's it.' A childhood friend, he explains. This had to happen at Trier, of all places,' he laments. Voyage, and nothing on that journey to extinction - not even the anticipation of horrors to come at Buchenwald - pierces the narrator's heart more agonisingly than the stone-throwing child. Thus begins Jorge Semprun's great Holocaust novel, The Long German boy on the platform hurls a rock at the grille behind which the doomed passengers cower. When the train pulls up at a station he glances at the sign: TRIER. Gasping for breath in an overcrowded cattle truck, a young Spaniard captured while fighting with the French ResistanceĬounts off the days and nights as he and his fellow prisoners are borne inexorably from Compiègne to the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. A train grinds slowly through the Moselle valley - tall pines, terraced vineyards, prim villages, calm smoke in the winter sky. ![]()
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