Karl Marx

The Karl Marx House museum is the house in Trier, Germany in which Karl Marx was born in 1818; it is now a museum. The importance of the house went unnoticed until 1904, at which point the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) worked hard to buy it, following in 1928. After the Nazi party came to power in 1933 the building was confiscate and turned into a printing house.

On May 5, 1947 the house was opened as a museum of the life and works of Karl Marx. In 1968 it was included into the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a charity foundation closely aligned with the SPD. On March 14, 1983, on the 100th anniversary of Marx's death, the museum was re-opened after a year-long renovation that extended it to three floors.

In 2005, the Karl Marx House museum was again closed for 3 months. The re-inauguration, on June 9, was attended by such celebrities as Anke Fuchs, Franz Muntefering, Kurt Beck, and Helmut Schroer. The exhibition now also includes the history of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Central and Eastern Europe. The Karl Marx House museum presently receives about 32,000 visitors a year, about a third of whom are tourists from China, for whom it is one of the main attractions in Germany.