OK, so, if an English speaking reference in the late 19th century reported someone had said he was from “Capitolheim Germany”… where might that be? Could be a city, village, region… could be that one or both of the person who heard it and the person who wrote it down could have totally messed up the word and spelling… could theoretically not even really be in Germany at all. Anyone have any suggestions?
Ok, so, I don’t find anything like that in Lippincott’s Gazetteer of the World (1913), looking under Cap- or Kap-.
Do you have some context?
My (not very comprehensive) German dictionaries do not even recognize either Capitol or Kapitol. They also fail to recognize Capitalheim and Kapitalheim, although, at least Kapital is a genuine German word pretty much cognate to English’s Capital. Heim means home. Could it be either a guess or attempted word play on Berlin (capitol or capital home)? The German capitol was the Reichstag*, but that seems a stretch for what you have.
- (The -tag in Reichstag and Bundestag comes from a form of a verb “to meet” and not from the German word for “day.”)
Capitol- looks very wrong to be German. I would expect Kapital- or Kapitel- or something. The nearest thing I can find is Kapitelshof, which is supposed to be a farm near the Dutch border at 51° 47’ 00" N 006° 14’ 00" E
Well, apart from the fact that there are apparently a million movie theaters that are called “Capitol”, I found that one quarter of Cologne is called “Kapitol”, which could have been spelled with a C in the old days…
-heim is a fairly common suffix for village/town names in German regions conquered by the Franks in the 5th-7th century (the part before the suffix derives from a particular Frank’s personal name, which is why four-syllable -heim placenames are uncommon.)
The list in the German Wikipedia of pleces ending in -heim shows nothing that rings a bell for me. But it could of course be a former village that is part of a larger municipiality now.
Of course if the reference to a place in Germany is from the late 19th century it could well be in Alsace-Lorraine (i.e. in France now).
Kapitol (for US and Latin American parliamentary buildings and for one of the seven hills of Rome) exists as a word in German, and so does Kapitale (as a synonym for “Hauptstadt,” meaning “capital city”), but both words are rarely used, and I’ve never seen a city name which is made up of one of these words, Kapitel also exists, and since it refers (among others) to colleges of high-ranking priests, it could show up in place names, but I’ve never encountered it. If “Capitolheim” was indeed a place name, it would almost surely designate a town or city, not a region, due to the suffix.
Could it be that your source was simply making up a fictitious town?
For some reason I didn’t get an email alerting me that there were replies until just now… Thanks everyone for the assistance.
The context is that some criminal was said by some witness to have come from there. Not much to go on. Could be that it was made up, could be that the witness totally misinterpreted what was said, could be that the witness said something and a reporter who didn’t know German did the best he could at guessing what was said.
We may just not have enough information here to get anywhere, which happens sometimes. It’s not anything important, really, just a big question mark that came up during research.
(I took German a long time ago, so just a guess)… Maybe the witnesses were saying that the accused came from the capital city of whatever province they were in?
Maybe he was just trying to establish he didn’t come from Lowercaseheim, Germany.