Trier, Germany, the birthplace of Karl Marx, erected a statue to celebrate the founder of communism’s 200th birthday Saturday, less than 30 years after communist…
Trier, Germany, the birthplace of Karl Marx, erected a statue to celebrate the founder of communism’s 200th birthday Saturday, less than 30 years after communist regimes literally divided the country.
The west German town, just about as far from Berlin as one can be and still be in Germany, unveiled an 18-foot-tall statue of its native son Marx — covered before the ceremony in dramatic red cloth — to both cheers and protests.
VIDEO: Germany marks 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth by unveiling statue in his birth city of Trier, but celebrations risk being marred by protests over the divisive figure #Marx200 pic.twitter.com/T3ilXcD9HP
— AFP news agency (@AFP) May 5,2018
“It is hard for many victims of the communist system to accept that a west German city is putting up a monument like this,” Hubertus Knabe, who runs a memorial at the site of a former political prison in East Berlin, told The Los Angeles Times.
The statue has some supporters in Germany, but it was donated by the Chinese government, and around 150,000 Chinese tourists visit Trier each year, where Marx lived for the first 17 years of his life.
Two high-level Chinese officials attended the unveiling of the Marx statue, underscoring the political reasons for China’s donation. The Chinese ambassador to Germany, Shi Mingde, explained that China had “modernized” the theories Marx laid out in The Communist Manifesto in such a way that it can achieve 30 percent of all global economic growth.
