As Germany prepares to mark Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, the revolutionary philosopher’s legacy remains divisive more than a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With scars from the Cold War still fresh, people from capitalist former West Germany and the once communist East are of two minds about the 19th-century philosopher. Some hail Marx as a visionary scholar who foretold the ills of the market economy, while others revile him for inspiring Stalinist regimes. In the western town of Trier, the icon’s birthplace which is planning 600 events for his bicentenary, it is not lost on...