Remembering Marx on Yom HaShoah

Plaque dedicated to Karl Marx in London 

Me standing outside the
Marx Memorial Library 

Marx was born on this day (5 May) in 1818. This encyclopedic entry:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/karl-marx

shows how Marx's works were badly treated by university students in Nazi Germany. This is relevant because it's also Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) starting tonight. 🕯️

The Jewish, Czech philosopher Karl Kautsky (b. Prague) was also on the student target list: 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/karl-kautsky

All his books that he had written and published up to that time were burnt, bar one. 

Kautsky is relevant here not only because he edited Marx's 'Theories of Surplus Value' (3 volumes) while in London but also because his son was sent to concentration camps while his wife sadly died in one. 🕯️

Benedikt, son of Kautsky, was included in a project on concentration camps, supported by Birkbeck College UoL:

http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents/060-competing-for-resources.html

http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/themes/inmate-relations.html

This is the very same college that has the newly named (2021) Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, which was set up while I was an undergraduate student there, which at that time, was named the Pears Institute during my first/second year of my BA (Hons) in Philosophy, (Nov 2010). In 2021 the Pears Foundation disassociated itself from the above named institute but are still funding it. You couldn't make it up! An extract from Benedikt's memoirs was used as a resource for the project.

It's a small world. You'd think as a result I'd be treated decently, then and now. Goes to show that just because there's a project going on it doesn't mean that it changes attitudes.

The German students ransacked libraries targeting books they deemed un-German. Marx (born in Trier, Germany, originally Prussia) was also one of those whose books were targeted and burnt ritually (May 1933) because he was a Jew (Protestant convert out of necessity) and a socialist. Hitler already had it in for him because his ideology clashed with Nazi ideology. 

So much for students upholding freedom of speech and rigorous scholarship!