The Karl Marx House museum (German: Karl-Marx-Haus) is the house in Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) in which Karl Marx was born in 1818; it is now a museum. The significance of the house went unnoticed until 1904, at which point the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) worked hard to buy it, succeeding in 1928. After the Nazi party came to power in 1933 the building was confiscated and turned into a printing house. On May 5, 1947 the building was opened as a museum of the life and works of Karl Marx. In 1968 it was integrated 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 expanded it to three floors. In 2005, the Karl Marx House museum was again closed for three months. The re-inagauration, on June 9, was attended by such celebrities as Anke Fuchs, Franz Müntefering, Kurt Beck, and Helmut Schröer. The exhibition now also includes the history of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Central and Eastern Europe. The Karl Marx House museum currently 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.
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