About him as a person, his historical conditions, his life, his loved ones. Does anyone have any favorite biographies or even just passages from primary or secondary sources? Alternatively, if anyone has the time, what do you think is most important or interesting to understand about Karl Marx as a person, or perhaps about the historical context he lived in?
That duel did occur, with Konrad Schramm standing in for Marx. Schramm was a member of the Communist League and an associate of Marx. That duel is kind of funny because after setting a time and date, Willich and Schramm then both discovered pistol dueling wasn't legal in the UK, so instead they held it in Belgium.
Schramm got shot in the head in the duel, but apparently survived and died of TB 8 years later.
Dueling is one of those things from history I just cannot wrap my head around. Especially a duel among comrades.
Throughout most of European history it operated as a pressure relief valve. It was conflict resolution among nobility, more than that it kept the noble class united. Most duels weren't to the death, they were declared over when one person forfeited or had their blood drawn. Both parties in a successful duel were considered honorable, both the winner and the loser, so both had reputation to gain even if they lost.
Even though they weren't fighting to the death, people did frequently die in them. That's part of how they worked as a uniting force among nobles. Even the threat of a duel was frightening, because even a simple scratch on the cheek could lead to infection, fever, and death. Even winning a duel was often deadly, because even if you kill your opponent, your wounds could also prove lethal. So, more often than not, nobles would choose to play nice with one another and resolve mutual conflicts in diplomatic ways, or just use their own soldiers, because the alternative was a swordfight that could kill both of them.
August Willich was a Prussian army officer and grew up among people with noble titles. Dueling was the culture he was acclimated to. I don't know much about Schramm, but in my head I've imagined the story as he saw the duel as defending Marx against some haughty guy with a noble title trying to inject something as ridiculous as dueling between comrades. Schramm might have seen victory against Willich as proof of how proletariat revolutionaries could defeat aristocrats. Schramm was also only 27 years old at the time and full of piss and vinegar, so he also might not have been thinking straight to begin with.
I hope that explains it.
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