 Henriette was never completely at ease either in writing or in speaking high German, and biographers of Marx often describe Henriette as uneducated, and perhaps of modest intellect, a view partly based on her surviving letters written in ungrammatical German with little punctuation.However this flawed German may suggest that Yiddish was her mother tongue, while her speech also reflected the fact that she grew up in the Netherlands and only moved to a German speaking city in her mid-twenties.Indeed, she always felt something of a stranger in Trier, being both closely attached to her own family and the country of her birth.