If someone were to ask me to give them a first name for someone named Marx, I’d say, “Groucho.” I can assure you that the Chinese would say, “Karl.”

Trier is the birthplace of Karl Marx, the intellectual font of communism. We visited his house on, you guessed it, Karl-Marx-Strasse (“Karl Marx Street”). They should have called it the Red Street, instead, because it also seems to be the Red Light District of Trier.

Besides us, all the other tourists in this place were Chinese; and they all wanted their picture taken in the room that also had a photograph on the wall of Chairman Mao. Likewise, the guest register was filled with Chinese entries; ours was one of the very few not written in oriental characters.

Karl Marx wrote “The Communist Manifesto” and I bought a copy here in his birthplace, but his best work was “Das Kapital” which, unfortunately, brought famine, ruin and poverty to millions of people in the former U.S.S.R. and China, to mention but a few.

Some things work better in theory than in practice.