In search of Karl Marx

NCP leader Andy Brooks at Marx' statue

by Carole Barclay

London comrades went to Trier in July – a small German town in the Moselle valley just a few miles from the border with Luxembourg.  Trier was once an imperial capital in Roman times. In the Middle Ages it was the capital of an independent German state ruled by the Archbishop of Trier that only ended during the Napoleonic occupation.  

These days visitors roam through the medieval cathedral and the old town painstakingly restored after Allied bombing during the Second World War or gaze at spectacular Roman remains like the monumental Porta Nigra gate and a Roman palace that’s now a Protestant church.

But for us Trier is first and foremost the home of Karl Marx. He was born here on 5th May 1818. The city, now under Prussian control, was his home until he moved to continue his studies in Berlin in 1836. 

Marx's birthplace is now the Marx House museum. He spent the first 18 months of his life here. But the rent was too much for his father to bear so the family moved to cheaper rooms above a shop near the Porta Nigra that you can spot if you look out for the plaque on the wall. 

Karl Marx House was a project of the old German Social Democrats (SPD) in the 1920s. They restored the building as a permanent tribute to the man who, together with Frederick Engels, penned the Communist Manifesto and helped launch the First International in 1864. Seized by the Nazis when Hitler came to power in 1933 the house was returned to the SPD in 1947. It is now run by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a social-democratic political trust with close ties to the modern SPD. This is clearly reflected in the displays which reflect modern European social-democratic thinking rather than that of the world communist movement.

Though there are some personal mementoes from Marx’s life, like his pocket watch and his favourite armchair, the galleries largely focus on Marx’s political career and the working class movements that embraced the banner of scientific socialism during his life-time and right through to the present. 

The SPD was part of the anti-communist West German bourgeois consensus that worked to bring down the old German Democratic Republic in the east. So Marx remains a controversial character in Germany. Neo-Nazis and reactionaries protest at any promotion of Karl Marx. But the city worthies, including the SPD that has a major presence on the Trier council, know the added value of the ‘Marx trail’ to their burgeoning tourist industry.

A giant bronze statue of Karl Marx stands in the heart of town. It was unveiled in 2018 on the 200th anniversary of the great thinker’s birth. It was a gift from People's China created by China's most famous sculptor - Wu Weishan. Some 150,000 Chinese tourists come to Trier to see Marx House every year. They join thousands of other communists and socialists, like us, following Marx’s footsteps in the town of his youth.