With interest in Karl Marx on the increase, Expatica Germany takes a look at the house turned museum, where he was born.

After years of neglect, interest among the young in Karl Marx, his life, thoughts and work, is again on the rise, according to the curator of the Karl Marx Haus in Trier, Germany.

"Something that was long believed dead is coming back to life," Beatrix Bouvier told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) in the city near the border with Luxembourg, where Marx - the 19th Century political philosopher whose theses inspired the Communist ideology - spent his first 17 years.

At a time when many young people were looking for direction, the need to understand one's own history was growing, the professor says, but she notes that the treatment of Marx has changed.

"They approach him with interest but without preconceptions," says Bouvier, who has seen a sharp rise over the past two years in the number of school classes visiting the house where Marx was born in 1818.

Chequered past

The baroque house built in the early 18th century has a chequered past. Germany's Social Democrats (SPD) bought it in 1928, only to have it confiscated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime that held power from 1933 to 1945, after which the SPD regained possession.

Today the museum is administered by the SPD's Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

The new exhibition, created in 2005, shows the effects Marx's ideas had on the 20th century, allowing the visitor to assess his impact on the present, whereas the previous exhibition ended with Marx's death in 1883.

Bouvier believes it is essential for an understanding of Marx to look at his ideas within their historical context. Many of those ideas were, in her view, later abused, and many concepts have changed over the course of the decades.

Class struggle

In 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto, in which they set out their theory of an inevitable class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

In terms of this early theory, communism represented the climax and final outcome of human development.

Even if the failed communist governments of the 20th century have put paid to Marx's predictions, there is much in his work that is still relevant to today, says Bouvier, who has been curator of the house and the study centre attached to it since 2005.

"He was primarily an analytic thinker, and he changed the world, whether abused or not," she says.

This year more than 41,000 people visited the Karl Marx Haus, more than ever before. The number of Chinese visitors was stable at around 12,000.

Internet: www.museum-karl-marx-haus.de

24th January 2008

DPA with Expatica