GREAT BRITAIN: The Weeds

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, lives far away in a Paris suburb.

Last month, members of the Swiss Socialist Party became disturbed over the fact that the last resting place of the great Karl Marx was thus ignored. They sent a delegation to Dr. Longuet in Paris offering to tend and beautify the London grave. The doctor, onetime Socialist who turned Communist in 1939, indignantly refused. “As long as I live,” cried Longuet last week, “I will not permit any anti-Marxists to meddle with the grave. The Socialists have no business at my grandfather’s grave.”

On the plot in Highgate Cemetery the proliferating weeds grew thick and strong above the conquered grass.