On 10 May 1953, for Karl Marx Year, the East German government renamed both the city and the district of Chemnitz after the philosopher. Marx had never visited the place. He had no connection to it of any kind — no family, no correspondence, no factory floor he had ever walked across. What the city did have was heavy industry and a long working-class history, and that was apparently enough. Having attached the name, the government decided the namesake needed a face, and commissioned one from the Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel. The pedestals were cut from Korninskij granite, quarried in a mining region of southern Ukraine, so the finished monument was an object assembled out of half the Soviet sphere and bolted down in Saxony.

It was inaugurated on 9 October 1971 in front of a crowd of around 250,000 people, on the boulevard then called Karl-Marx-Allee and now called Brückenstraße. The city took to it faster than anyone in the culture ministry can have expected, and it took to it irreverently. Locals called the thing the Nischel, from the Saxon word for a head or a skull, and the street it stood on became Nischelgasse — Skull Alley. For the rest of the GDR's existence the monument did the work such monuments do: backdrop for state holidays, parade route marker, assembly point for the mass events that punctuated the calendar. On the wall immediately behind it, the closing line of the Communist Manifesto is spelled out in four languages — German, English, French and Russian. Workers of the world, unite.

When Karl-Marx-Stadt became Chemnitz again in 1990, the obvious question arrived immediately. Proposals to demolish the monument set off a genuinely heated public argument, and it was not a simple one: the head was a piece of political imposition, and it was also the only thing about the city that anybody outside it could reliably picture. Cities elsewhere in the world sent enquiries about buying it, and at one point there were discussions about a sale to Cologne. Chemnitz kept it. The decision has aged into something more interesting than either side of the argument anticipated — a city that voted its own name back and then declined to remove the face, on the grounds that the face was now also part of what had happened here.

Until 2007 the municipal motto was Stadt mit Köpfchen, which means both the city with brains and, with a nudge, the city with a little head. The pun does a lot of work. It acknowledges the monument without endorsing it, claims the engineering and machine-building tradition that actually built Chemnitz, and manages to be faintly self-deprecating about the whole situation. The motto has since been retired. The head has not. It remains the best-known monument in the inner city, sitting at the top of Brückenstraße with the plaza in front of it, large enough that photographs never quite convey the scale until you stand at the base and look up past the beard.

Very few political monuments outlive the politics that put them up, and fewer still do it without being quietly moved to a park somewhere. The Nischel is still where it was placed, still on the axis it was designed for, still legible as exactly what it is. Kerbel's Marx is not a portrait so much as a mask: heavy-browed, deeply undercut, the hair and beard cut into a single mass that reads from a hundred metres away. It was made to be looked up at by crowds, and the people who gather at its base now are visitors with cameras and residents cutting across the plaza on their way somewhere else. Chemnitz spent its year as European Capital of Culture in 2025 inviting Europe to come and look, and a great many of the visitors began by looking at the head.