SALON LUITPOLD | „Karl Marx in Algier" | Mit Uwe Wittstock

In the organizer's words:

we Wittstock reads and talks about his new book "Karl Marx in Algiers"

An evening in cooperation with C.H. Beck Verlag

From the author of "Marseille 1940": The amazing story of Karl Marx's last journey.

On February 18, 1882, Karl Marx boarded the steamer "Said" in Marseille and left Europe for the first time. He had not got over the death of his wife Jenny three months earlier. He is ill and hopes to recover in Algiers. While he takes in the impressions of the new culture there, he unsentimentally draws up a kind of résumé of his life and work. Uwe Wittstock vividly recounts the great thinker's last great journey and looks back with him on his extraordinary life. In the port of Algiers, Karl Marx is welcomed by a former fighter of the Paris Commune. But Marx could no longer speak of political struggle. He has left the ideological battlefields of Europe behind him, and the doctor has forbidden him all intellectual endeavors. What could he do but indulge in memories? Using partly unpublished sources, Uwe Wittstock describes the months in Algiers and at the same time sheds light on the life of this thinker who was as often exaggerated as he was rashly condemned: the wild years of study in Bonn and Berlin, Marx's early poetic ambitions, his strangely retarding role in the revolutionary year of 1848, then the eternal exile, the impositions of poverty. Why did Marx remain politically isolated for most of his life and why did he leave his magnum opus, Capital, unfinished? At the end of his time in Algiers, Marx goes to the barber and has his revolutionary beard removed: A late retraction?

The book will be published on 20.03.2025

Uwe Wittstock is a writer and journalist and was editor of Focus until 2018. He previously worked as a literary editor for the FAZ, as an editor at S. Fischer and as deputy head of the features section and cultural correspondent for Die Welt. He was awarded the Theodor Wolff Prize for Journalism. His books published by C.H.Beck include: "Februar 33. Der Winter der Literatur" (6th ed. 2021; paperback 3rd ed. 2024) and "Marseille 1940. Die große Flucht der Literatur" (7th ed. 2024).