He got to know the inhumane living and working conditions of the textile workers and committed his impressions to paper in the social study The Condition of the Working Class in England. Together with his future partner he would wander through Manchester's working class neighborhoods. Here he met the young Irish woman Mary Burns. Read more: Karl Marx: Right ideas, wrong ideas? Friendship with Karl MarxĮngels' father summoned him to his cotton mill in Manchester.
In Cologne in 1842 he first met Karl Marx, then editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung. As a guest student he attended university lectures on philosophy, Asian languages and finance, and socialized in left-wing intellectual circles. "In Elberfeld alone 1,200 out of 2,500 children have been taken out of school and are growing up in the factories to replace adult workers, just so that the factory owner doesn't have to pay an adult double the wages that he has to pay a child."īut what fueled the young Friedrich? Following his apprenticeship he voluntarily completed his military service with the royal Prussian artillery guard in Berlin. "A terrible misery reigns over the lower classes, especially the factory workers in Wuppertal," wrote the 19-year-old Engels, as eloquent as he was radical. Under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald he published the Letters from Wuppertal, his first social critique. The contradiction between the pious religiosity and the capitalist greed bothered the young Engels. But the father and son often knocked heads. He took his son out of school shortly before graduating so that he could take up a commercial apprenticeship. He was "a man who could enjoy shrimp and champagne in the morning and take a stroll through the poor working class neighborhoods of Manchester with his girlfriend in the evening," according to Lowisch, "both a capitalist and a revolutionary - in any case he had a great sense of social justice." Early struggles with his fatherĪs the eldest of nine children, Friedrich was his father's chosen successor. The sculptor from Wuppertal has designed a sculpture of the philosopher, sociologist, and revolutionary for his 200-year anniversary. "For me Engels is bipolar," says Eckehard Lowisch. Read more: Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital' still fascinates after 150 years Eckehard Lowisch and his sculpture of Friedrich Engels Image: privatĪ contradiction? Definitely a surprising turn, which fascinates many to this day. The industrialist's son, who studied and knew exactly how capitalism worked, would become - next to Karl Marx - its most famous critic. His father owned textile factories there and in Manchester, in England's industrial north. Armies of workers were rising up.Įngels' hometown of Barmen (now incorporated in the city of Wuppertal) was no exception. The industrial revolution was spreading out from England like a wildfire. Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, into a world on the cusp of change.
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