Helene Demuth

Helene or Helena Demuth (30 December 1820 – 4 November 1890) was a German housekeeper who worked for Jenny 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. After Marx's death in March 1883, Helena Demuth moved to Engels's home, where she ran the household. The pair worked in tandem to organize and arrange for the publication of Marx's literary estate, discovering in the process the manuscript from which Engels was able to reconstruct the second volume of Das Kapital. In October 1890, Helena was diagnosed with cancer. She died in London on 4 November that year at the age of 69. She was buried in the Marx family grave in accordance with Jenny's wishes, and later re-interred in the tomb of Karl Marx at Highgate Cemetery.