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Front: Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), German women's rights advocate

Zetkin was born Clara Eissner in Saxony, Germany. She was educated as a teacher. She was active in German politics and a fighter for women's rights.

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Front: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), writer

Goethe was born in Penner Haus, Germany. He studied at the University of Leipzig and the University of Strasbourg and, in 1772, became a lawyer at Wetzlar. Around 1794, he devoted himself chiefly to writing. Goethe produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, and scientific work, including a theory of optics and early work on evolution and linguistics. Almost every major German composer from Mozart to Mahler set his poetry to music. His epic drama Faust was completed in stages, and was only published in its entirety after his death.

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Front: Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), German political philosopher

Engels was the eldest son of a successful German textile industrialist. His father sent him to England to help manage his cotton factory in Manchester. Shocked by the widespread poverty, he wrote an eyewitness account in 1845 titled Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In the same year, Engels began contributing to a journal called the Franco-German Annals, which was published by Karl Marx in Paris. After their first meeting in person, they discovered that they both shared the same views on capitalism, and decided to work more closely together. He and Marx developed communist theory and co-authored The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Engels also edited several volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.

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Front: Karl Marx (1818-1883), German philosopher and political economist

Marx was born into a progressive and wealthy Jewish family in Trier, Germany. He studied at universities in Bonn and Berlin, and received a doctorate in 1841. Marx wrote much poetry and essays concerning life during this period. He also absorbed the atheistic philosophy. As he grew older, he developed into a highly educated economist, a historian, a social scientist and, eventually, a revolutionary.

His most famous works are The Communist Manifesto that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels and Das Kapital.

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