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The Karl Marx House museum (Karl-Marx-Haus) is the birthplace of the German economist, philosopher, author and revolutionary Karl Marx. Today it is a writer's house museum in Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) about Karl Marx's life and writings as well as the history of communism.

History of the house
The house was built in 1727 at Brückengasse 664 (today Brückenstraße 10) in the typical Trier Baroque style by order of the Polch family of civil servants. The two-story building corresponded to the regional building scheme of the Saar-Moselle region in the 18th century. In 1802 it was bequeathed to the parish church of St. Laurentius by the court council widow Johanna Catharina Haas, from whose estate it was auctioned off only three years later to the pharmacist Franz Martin Peillers. After the death of Mr. and Mrs. Peillers in 1818, the Jewish Marx family moved into the house for rent in April of the same year. Karl Marx was born there on May 5, 1818, the third child of the lawyer Heinrich Marx and his wife Henriette Marx. In October 1819, the Marx family moved into a smaller residence (Karl-Marx-Wohnhaus) bought by Peter Schwarz in Simeongasse (today Simeonstraße 8), near the Porta Nigra. Today, only a memorial plaque commemorates Karl Marx there.

After a fire that destroyed the mansard roof, the house was raised by another floor in 1875, and a store was added on the first floor in 1893. In 1901, the house was connected to the sewerage system. In 1909, master glazier Peter Fries purchased the house at a forced auction.

Discovery, SPD purchase and Nazi expropriation
The house where Karl Marx was born fell into oblivion. It was not until 1904 that the Social Democratic graphic artist Friedrich Schnetter discovered an advertisement of Heinrich Marx's move in the Trierische Zeitung of April 5, 1818. After the Communist party failed with an attempt to purchase the house in 1926, the Social Demoncratic Party succeeded in acquiring it in 1928 for 93,739 gold marks. Beginning in 1930, it was restored by the Trier architect Gustav Kasel (1883-1951). In the process, an attempt was made to restore the building to its original condition as far as possible; among other things, a floor that was added later was removed again and the original mansard roof was reconstructed. On the first floor, shop windows that were added later were removed again; the former rear buildings and the garden had only been preserved in remnants and also had to be reconstructed. The slow progress of this work delayed the opening as a museum planned for May 5, 1931, the 113th birthday of Marx. The plan was to open it as a "House of the Workers" in the form of a Marx museum with an international research center. Apparently, the building of a collection for this institution had also already begun; at least various books with a corresponding ownership stamp of the institution from other libraries are known. In the final phase of the Weimar Republic, the house was the subject of political controversy because of its symbolic power; the museum did not open. In September 1932, the publishing house and editorial office of the SPD party newspaper "Die Volkswacht" moved into the premises.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists, the house was occupied by the Sturmabteilung on March 6, 1933, forcibly expropriated on May 4, and subsequently used as a printing plant for the local NSDAP party newspaper "Trierer Nationalblatt." During World War II, the house was damaged to a degree of 33%, but was able to be renovated after 1945.

Establishment of the Karl Marx House Museum
On May 5, 1947, the birth room of Karl Marx, furnished in a manner typical of the time, was first opened to the public and the remaining rooms continued to be used as offices of the SPD. In 1968, the museum was reopened by Willy Brandt and a research center was added. In March 1977, the 100,000th visitor was welcomed to the Karl Marx House. In 1981, a study center with a scientific library and MEGA research center was newly built at Johannisstrasse 28, in the immediate vicinity of the birthplace. On March 14, 1983, the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx's death, the museum reopened its doors after a year of reconstruction and renovation work, with all three floors redesigned. On September 10, 1987, the Chairman of the State Council of East Germany, Erich Honecker, was a guest in Trier as part of his visit to the Federal Republic. There, together with the Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate, Bernhard Vogel, he visited the Karl Marx House and laid a wreath. Honecker saw this as a "special highlight" of his trip. At the time, more than 50,000 people visited the museum annually, a number that temporarily halved after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 2005, the house for the first time received a completely redesigned exhibition. It took into account not only the life of Karl Marx but also the history of communism and devoted more attention to the history of Marx's impact in the 20th century in general. In 2009, the library and original documents of the research center were transferred to the archives of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

Current exhibition
In preparation for the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth in 2018, the building was closed for eight months for extensive renovation and implementation of a completely new permanent exhibition. The reopening took place on May 5, 2018, in the presence of then SPD Chair Andrea Nahles, FES Chair Kurt Beck, Minister President Malu Dreyer, Karl Marx's descendants, and TV host Günther Jauch, whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had signed Karl Marx's birth certificate as Trier's second mayor. The new exhibition was opened on May 5, 2018.

The new permanent exhibition, entitled "From Trier to the World: Karl Marx, His Ideas and Their Impact to the Present Day," is divided into three sections. The first floor houses the "Biography" exhibition unit and a room for special exhibitions. The second floor deals with Karl Marx's work and its creation, as well as its reception up to 1939; the armchair from Marx's private apartment, in which he likely died in 1883, is also exhibited here. The second floor concludes with the history of Marx's impact from 1939 to the present.

The exhibition received a mixed reception in the media and academia. While Barbara Grech on SR 3 Saarlandwelle praised the life and work as "very modernly interpreted" and emphasized the "vivid, symbolic exhibition architecture," Wiebke Wiede at H-Soz-Kult criticized that the pictures and information painted on the wall "more than once, however, get lost in trivia" or are poorly recognizable. The weekly magazine Forum described the exhibition design as inspiring, while the World Socialist Web Site called it the "most overlaid with bourgeois prejudices" exhibition of the anniversary year.

Until the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Karl Marx House had around 50,000 visitors annually; in the anniversary year 2018, the number was 62,000. Around 60% of these are international guests, the majority of them tourists from China, for whom it is one of the main attractions in Germany. Accordingly, the museum offers guided tours in various languages. Since 2018, the museum has been increasingly opening up to digital tools, for example with live-streamed events and a 360° online tour of the entire building.