Helene Demuth

Helene or Helena Demuth (30 December 1820 – 4 November 1890) was a German housekeeper who worked for Jenny von Westphalen and Karl Marx, and later served as the household manager and political confidante of Friedrich Engels.

Biography Helena Demuth was born of peasant parents on 31 December 1820 in Sankt Wendel in today's Saarland. In 1840 Helena and her older sister Katharina worked in Trier as maids, Helena in the von Westphalen household, her sister in the house of a soapmaker two blocks away. They only worked there for about a year, then Katharina got pregnant and both went back to St. Wendel. Helena was living in the house of her mother in Grabenstrasse, St. Wendel in 1843, when Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. Helena joined their household in April 1845 in Brussels, where she was sent by Jenny's mother. She stayed with the Marxes as a lifelong housekeeper, friend, and political confidante, and was commonly known to the family by the nicknames Lenchen or Nim.

Frederick Demuth On 23 June 1851 Helene Demuth gave birth to a boy, Henry Frederick Demuth, the birth certificate leaving the name of the father blank. Some scholars accept that the child had been sired by Karl Marx, a view that reflects surviving correspondence from the Marx family and their wider circle, as well as the fact that Marx's wife had been on a trip abroad nine months prior to the birth.

Shortly after the birth, the baby, to be known as Frederick Lewis Demuth, was placed with a working class foster family in London named Lewis. He later trained as a toolmaker, and was active in the Amalgamated Engineering Union and a founder member of the Hackney Labour Party. Eleanor Marx, Marx's youngest daughter, came to know Frederick some time after her father's death and made him a family friend.

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