Word: westphalen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...wrote poetry for his beautiful neighbor, Fraulein Jenny von Westphalen, who, whenever she read one of his poems, "burst into tears of joy and melancholy." Sample: "If we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt I shall fling my glove in the world's face; then I, a creator, shall stride through the wreckage...
Marx's only lasting comforts were algebra (his favorite form of escape) and Jenny. Protectively, she used to call him "my big child." Once, when he briefly returned to Trier, he wrote: "I have been making a daily pilgrimage to the old Westphalen house . . . which used to shelter my sweetheart. And every day people ask me right and left about the quondam 'most beautiful girl' in Trier, the 'Queen of the ball.' It's damned agreeable for a man to find that his wife lives on as an 'enchanted princess...
...church in Trier, in the recently Prussianized Rhineland, and baptized a Lutheran. His father, the first lawyer in an interminable line of distinguished rabbis, admired Prussia and its official religion. Here is Marx the future socialist, unsocially shunning his school fellows while his mental acrobatics charm Ludwig von Westphalen, a much older man of a much higher social position. Marx later repaid Westphalen for this early interest by marrying his daughter, Jenny, against the wishes of her family. And here is Marx the frustrated poet, wasting his time, and his father's (and later his widowed mother...