Institute for Marxism-Leninism for the Central Committee of the SED

It was set up in East Berlin in 1949, renamed the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Institut on Stalin's death in 1953[1] and the Institute for Marxism-Leninism for the Central Committee of the SED (German: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or IML) as a result of early de-Stalinization in 1956.

As the SED's central academic library, from 1950 onwards it worked on a central catalogue of literature on the history of social and of the workers movement - at the time of an exhibition at the Museum for German History on that topic from 15 February to 19 March 1989 the IML's catalogued holdings were estimated at about 400,000 books and about 70,000 volumes of newspapers and magazines.

From 1969 onwards it was the leading research institution on the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and on the history of the German Democratic Republic.

In the late 1960s it and its Moscow equivalent began the second attempt at compiling a historical-critical edition of the complete works, speeches and manuscripts of Marx and Engels, sometimes known in German as MEGA2 (from the acronym for the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe).

The IML closed in January 1990, as did its successor the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement on 31 March 1992.