Beneath the shadow of the Porta Nigra: Karl Marx and the ruins of Trier

Roman Trier may first have begun to fall into architectural decay after the fall of the Roman Empire, but its buildings only began their current life as ruins with Napoleon Bonaparte. Roman Trier was reinvented at exactly the time when Karl Marx was growing up within its walls. Marx spent his childhood and adolescence in a house so near the Porta Nigra – one of the most famous Roman landmarks in Europe, then a museum housing Roman antiquities – that he could almost touch it from the window. It is symbolically appropriate that the great revolutionary came from a town intimately associated with revolutionary change, engineered by Augustus and Constantine long before Napoleon arrived; it must have been intellectually stimulating to the child who was later to develop the materialist theory of history that he was faced with antiquity's residual matter on a daily basis. This essay suggests that the ruins of Roman Trier may have informed in subterranean ways not only Marx's early writings, and his reactions to his classical education within the context of the ‘Rhineland Radicalism’, but passages in his doctoral dissertation on ancient materialism, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.