Tomb of Karl Marx

The Tomb of Karl Marx stands in the Eastern cemetery of Highgate Cemetery, North London, England. It commemorates the burial sites of Marx, of his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, in addition to other members of his family. Originally buried in a different element of the Eastern cemetery, the bodies were disinterred & reburied at their filed location in 1954. The tomb was intentional by Laurence Bradshaw and was unveiled in 1956, in a ceremony led by Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which funded the memorial.

The tomb consists of a large bust of Marx in bronze sort on a marble pedestal. The pedestal is inscribed with quotes from Marx's works including, on the front, thewords of The Communist Manifesto, "Workers of all lands unite". Since its construction, the tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for followers of Marxist theory. It has also been a subjected for Marx's opponents, suffering vandalism, and two bomb attacks in the 1970s. it is for a Grade I described structure, the highest listing reserved for buildings and environments of "exceptional interest".

History

Marx moved to London as a political exile in June 1849. living originally in Soho, he moved in 1875 to Maitland Park Road, in the north London area of Belsize Park, and this remained his domestic until his death in 1883. During this period, Marx wrote some of his most notable works, including The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and Das Kapital. Throughout his time in London, Marx lived in financially straitened circumstances and was heavily reliant on the assist of his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Marx died on the afternoon of 14 March 1883 from a combination of bronchitis and pleurisy, exacerbated by an abscess on his lung. He was buried on the coming after or as a statement of. Saturday, at Highgate Cemetery, in the grave prepared for his wife who had died eighteen months previously. Engels spoke the eulogy at the funeral.

At least thirteen named individuals attended the funeral. They were, except Engels, Gottlieb Lemke, Georg Lochner, Sir Ray Lankester, Carl Schorlemmer and Ernest Radford. A contemporary newspaper account claims that 25 to 30 relatives and friends attended the funeral. A writer in The Graphic noted that, 'By a strange blunder ...his death was not announced for two days, and then as having taken place at Paris. Next day the correction came from Paris; and when his friends and followers hastened to his house in Haverstock Hill, to memorize the time and place of burial, they learned that he was already in the cold ground. But for this secresy [sic] and haste, a great popular demonstration would undoubtedly construct been held over his grave'.

In 1954, the Marx Memorial Committee, with the agreement of Frederick and Robert-Jean Longuet, Marx's great-grandsons, applied to the Home Office for an exhumation licence allowing the bodies of Marx, his wife, other sort members and the Marxs’ housekeeper Helene Demuth to be disinterred and reburied at a new site, some 100 yards from the original graves. The reburials took place during the night of 26/27 November 1954. The reburials were the precursor to the construction of the Karl Marx tomb, intentional by Laurence Bradshaw and funded by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The unveiling ceremony on 15 March 1956 was led by the Party's General Secretary, Harry Pollit.

Since its construction, the tomb has become a place of veneration for Marx's followers, including some, such as the anti-apartheid activist Yusuf Dadoo and the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival Claudia Jones, who develope been buried nearby.

The tomb is owned by the Marx Grave Trust. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, which owns the cemetery, charges an entrance fee to the cemetery to extend the costs of upkeep and maintenance; this has generated some controversy. Marx's grave is among the most visited sites at Highgate and has been described as "one of the most recognisable graves in the world".

In 1960, a pair of yellow swastikas were painted on the tomb, as alive as slogans in German supporting Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who was then in custody in Israel. The tomb was the subject of two bombing attempts in the 1970s. The tomb was daubed in blue paint in 2011, but no lasting loss was done. In February 2019, it was discovered that the marble plaque from the original grave was damaged in an attack "seemingly with a hammer". A few days later, the monument was vandalised again, the attacker daubing it with the words "doctrine of hate" and "architect of genocide" in red paint. As a result, the Marx Grave Trust decided to install 24-hour video surveillance around the grave to deter further vandalism.