Word: westphalen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time he has clearly been hiding in the clannish fold of South America's German immigrant communities. Brazil is home to more than 3.6 million ethnic Germans; in many areas, the German language is still more prevalent than Portuguese, and towns bear names such as Blumenau, Frederico Westphalen and Novo Hamburgo. Near the Chilean city of Parral, 300 Germans have set up a closed community called Colonia Dignidad. Protected by a high fence, the colony observes its own laws and has been reported to shelter at least two former ranking Nazis...
Perched on a hillside amid drab housing projects and crumbling Victorian relics, lies London's cluttered Highgate Cemetery. There, in a single grave rest the remains of a onetime 19th Century German beauty, Jenny von Westphalen, her grandson Harry Longuet, her servant girl Helene Demuth and her famed husband Karl Marx. Now & then a Communist or Socialist deputation stops by to pay its respects and leave behind a wreath. Otherwise the grave of the man whom both Communists and Socialists claim as their spiritual father is neglected and weed-grown. Its official custodian, another Marx grandson named Edgar Longuet...
...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...