Marx's Engels

FRIEDRICH EXCELS--Gustav Mayer-- Knopf ($3.50).

The two famed dead men of whom present-day Germany is least proud are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Though in Naziland their names are a byword and a hissing, they are revered by radicals the world over. Marx, the Holy Ghost of the Soviet Trinity, author of Capital and the Communist Manifesto, is now a familiar spook even to men-in-the-street, but few newspaper readers have ever encountered the shade of Engels. Until Gustav Mayer's German life of Engels was last week translated into English, there was no biography of him available to U. S. readers.

Marx and Engels were a queer team to work so long and well together. Their beginnings had little in common. Marx was a poor German Jew; Engels was the promising son and heir of well-to-do textile manufacturers. His family were deeply pained when he became an adolescent pinko; as his political shade deepened to red their annoyance turned to alarm. And from their point of view, the strangest thing about Friedrich was that he was a good business man. He made such a suc cess of the English mill at Manchester that he was eventually made a partner, in spite of his regrettable politics. But. from the time he met Marx, Engels had no real interest in anything but the always-imminent Revolution. He worked hard and well to make money, because he had to live and because Marx needed his financial support, and when he had made enough he quit.

But Engels was much more than a revo lutionary scholar's meal ticket. He and Marx collaborated constantly on their analysis of capitalism, their prophecies of capitalism's doom. He was quicker-witted and a more facile writer than Marx, who once told him: "You know that I am slow to grasp things, and that I always follow in your footprints." The Communist Manifesto, gist of the gospel according to Marx, was their joint work, as was also the monumental Capital (finished by Engels after Marx's death). Both of them were gluttons for work, both of them believed the Revolution was just around the corner. But while Marx was content to spend his days in a library, spinning out his gigantic web of theory, Engels lived a more normally diversified life. He hunted with the English landowners he despised, just for the exercise. He rushed off to join the dud German revolution of 1848.

Contemptuous of marriage, he took his mistresses from the British proletariat, but married the second on her deathbed, just to please her. He knew he was second fiddle to Marx. and. according to Biographer Mayer, was quite content to be.

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