In the final elections before the war elected vice-president of the Reichstag by the Social Democrats. When Karl Liebknecht emerged from prison, from that stone cell, when the raging workers' movement tore him from there, the first movement of his spirit was to recall the working class of the country in which that class raised the banner of the Commune and to which befell the great joy of victory. He’ll not reach Moabit (the prison) alive.” “Nor Rosa.”. Jahrhundert! And they did not deceive the Berlin workers or tell them that if the communards win tomorrow everyone would be well fed. 16, Osnovopolozhniki i vozhdi kommunizma; biograficheskie ocherki, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924, 198–212). If they were victorious tomorrow––it would not mean that the workers of Berlin would receive two pounds of bread apiece and that there would be foodstuffs in Berlin and that rivers of milk with banks of jelly would flow there. Ober-Lieutenant Vogel puts his pistol to her head, and blows her brains out with a bullet. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the key leaders of the Spartacist movement. Armed soldiers bunch around him, and he is led deeper into the dark wood. Rosa Luxemburg [ˈʁoːza ˈlʊksəmbʊɐk]1 Écouter, souvent retranscrit en français Rosa Luxembourg [ʁoza lyksɑbuʁ]2 Écouter, en polonais Róża Luksemburg [ˈruʐa ˈluksɛmburk]3, née le 5 mars 1871 à Zamość dans l'Empire russe (actuelle Pologne) et morte assassinée le 15 janvier 1919 à Berlin en Allemagne, est une militante socialiste et communiste, et une théoricienne marxiste. A Marxist Utopian between East and West: Karl Schmückle A Place for Polemic: Audacity, Implosion, and the Politics of Transition A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin. We know only one example from French history when a German socialist was so loved by French workers: I speak of Friedrich Engels. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive „Die großen Revolutionäre wurden zu Lebzeiten von den unterdrückenden Klassen ständig verfolgt, die ihrer Lehre mit wildestem Ingrimm und wütendstem Hass begegneten, mit zügellosen Lügen und Verleumdungen gegen sie zu Felde zogen. Please credit The automobile drives away into the night with Liebknecht, but not in the direction of Moabit, but into the Tiergarten (a large well-wooded park in the centre of Berlin). She falls. The best in humanity is following our path, seeing the inevitability and rightness of that path. In Berlin, one morning in April 1916, Sophie and Karl Liebknecht received a telephone call from Rosa Luxemburg. Their killings came after the crushing of the January Uprising in Berlin, and enjoyed the tacit approval of leading members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had taken power only […] Do you want to know why exactly Rosa Luxemburg was killed? Is this not the greatest satisfaction for the workers, for the peasants and Red Army soldiers of Soviet Russia? The Burgergerwehr (Civil Guard) of Wilmersdrof, a suburb of Berlin, raided the illegal dwelling of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and arrested and took them both to the Eden Hotel in Berlin, the Staff Headquarters of the Gardeschuetzen (Horse Guards) Division. Who stands for the constituent assembly in Germany? Liebknecht achieved fame immediately after the war by leading, with Rosa Luxemburg , the Spartacists in the so-called German Revolution against the government of Friedrich Ebert . After 1914 a patriot and defensist. ON Wednesday, January 15th, 1919 Karl Libeknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered. For what did the German communards fight; what were German workers seeking, what were their great leaders––Liebknecht and Luxemburg––seeking? Bernstein and the revisionists, as they were called then, insisted that, in essence, the working class should not reject the so-called colonial policy or imperialism (as we would put it now) but carry it out, as they said, in cultural forms and for the benefit of culture. The Spartacists called workers not only to the fight against the war but also to social revolution. Liebknecht sent us a letter at the Zimmerwald conference which ended with famous words in response to the slogan that Schiedemann and his fraternity had issued at the start of the war: "Civil peace, reconciliation between classes, between wolves and sheep, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, between the butcher-monarchs and the soldiers and peasants." Stefan Kipfer, Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide. This party was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a Russian educated, Jewish woman, who came to Germany via Ukraine. They fully appreciated the meaning of the victory that they could gain. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg always felt the most intimate and fraternal connection to our revolution. Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 1998, ISBN 3-933240-20-4. [1]  "Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg," a speech delivered to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on 18 January 1919, was published in a special brochure together with a speech of Comrade Trotsky. members of the "Spartacus" union (Spartacus was the name of the leader of a well-known uprising of Roman slaves), formed at the beginning of the war by K. Liebknecht, R. Luxemberg, L. Jogiches (Tyszka), and others. There is a document––and, probably, there are many of them––that bears witness to the love in France for Karl Liebknecht. In the presidential election of 1920 he was replaced by the "Republican" Harding. Some tried to present Scheidemann's policies as though they were a consistent implementation of Marx's teaching. Karl Liebknecht was born in August 1871 and died in January 1919. Luxemburg quickly became the figurehead of the revolution, and foreign journalists nicknamed her and Karl Liebknecht the "two German Lenin's". man is told that the motor has broken down, and is asked if he can walk. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and her co-leader Karl Liebknecht are killed in Berlin by soldiers who were suppressing the uprising, and their bodies were thrown into a canal. And Luxemburg and Lenin answered:  the task will be to use the entire economic and political crisis that will result from the war to lift the masses to struggle against the capitalist order! In fact the corpse is the old, rotten Social Democrats who have turned into bourgeois executioners. During the war became an ardent chauvinist and in 1918 played a leading role in the counterrevolutionary movement in the Baltics. The French general rebuked the German general for the help that German soldiers supposedly gave to us, the Bolsheviks, in occupied places around Riga. Bebel himself, knowing Liebknecht since childhood and loving him as a son, attacked him harshly for such, in his view, an "adventurist" proposal. So what would have happen if Karl and Rosa weren't killed and turned Germany into their version of communist haven, with a Jewish woman in charge? Stavros Tombazos and the Discordance of Times, The Challenges of Understanding Digital Labour: Questions of Exploitation and Resistance, The General Theory of Permanent Revolution, The Humanisation of Nature and the Naturalisation of Marxism, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, Two Revolutions, One International Legal Order, Marxism & Latin America: Jeffery R. Webber, Borderland Marxism and Russia’s Revolutionary Periphery: Eric Blanc, Marxism, Space and a Few Urban Questions: A Rough Guide to the English Language Literature. Vor­rei soprat­tut­to par­la­re di Rosa Luxem­burg, che ho per­so­nal­men­te cono­sciu­ta. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps(paramilitary units formed of World Wa… In other words, they said then: the task will be to turn the imperialist war into a civil war––into a war of workers, peasants, and soldiers against the bourgeoisie, against the authors of the war! They knew this perfectly well. German Social Democrats decided that only an adventurer could propose that! After all, the same government that calls itself the government of a socialist republic is in power. Rosa Luxemburg stands in the ranks of the few figures of the Third International who combine the qualities of ardent agitator, brilliant politician and, along with them, one of the greatest theoreticians and writers of Marxism. [9]  August Winnig––one of the leaders of the Hamburg trade-union movement, prior to the war was editor of the central organ of construction workers, Grundstein (Winnig was a mason by trade) and member of the local Hamburg parliament. We know that the ‘Lefts’ were mistaken.” (Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, pp. Her brilliant books and articles on the mass strike, her speeches in Jena[3] at the German Social-Democratic congress, taking place at the moment of our revolution, her identification of the role that awaited the Soviets of Workers' Deputies to play––all of these points, made over a decade ago, were of colossal historical significance. Did Marx Ever Meet Walras (on a Lake in Switzerland)? In: Michael Fröhlich (Hrsg. The Bolsheviks pinned their hopes on German radicals to spread the revolution into Europe and, once victorious, extend a fraternal hand to the struggling Soviet state. Rosa Luzemburg, the Polish Jewess, Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacist, the agitator, the rebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, bloody Rosa. Rosa Luxemburg accused Scheidemann and his gang of wanting to help strangle the Russian revolution. 21 and 46) At present Scheidemann and his gang, Ebert. They drive to the Landwehr canal and throw her dead body over the bridge into its dark waters. Recent weeks have been especially difficult. You remember the recent dialogue between French and German generals. Karl Liebknecht, (born Aug. 13, 1871, Leipzig—died Jan. 15, 1919, Berlin), German Social Democrat, who, with Rosa Luxemburg and other radicals, founded the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a Berlin underground group that became the Communist Party of Germany, dedicated to a socialist revolution. Confronted with the violence and disruption of their lives, the German people squarely aliened behind the government, and the revolution was crushed. On this occasion, the call was not about their shared politics – … He was a founder of the union of international youth, which has a great future. Who now, after the death of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, will think of their own personal life? I remember conversations with Rosa Luxemburg in 1906 in the village of Kuokkala in the little apartment of Comrade Lenin, then in semi-emigration after the first revolution had been broken. The United States refused to ratify the Versailles agreement and did not agree to join the League of Nations. In the first place, contrary to the opinion of such outstanding political leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the German ‘Lefts’, as we know, considered parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete’ even in January 1919. Rosa Luxemburg has been dragged, senseless, into another car, Ober-Lieutenant Vogel sits at the side of the blood-soaked woman. They have followed our path, they have fallen by the thousands, and tomorrow thousands more will fall in the name of achieving what already exists in Petrograd and Moscow and in Soviet Russia. And right at that moment one thoughtful shout from a soldier resounded: "Are there not, after all, people who are fighting against this hell, even individuals who come out on their own in the course of world history and proclaim "down with the war"[?] Can you really doubt that the Parisian working men and women, who have such exalted revolutionary traditions––people who, in 1915 with reverence spoke the name of Karl Liebknecht––can you doubt at all that they, like us, are overflowing with determination to struggle to the end and that they also clench their fists and say, "We will avenge the sacred blood of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg! Will our class, under the influence of whatever deprivations may be, whatever misfortunes may be, really waver for even a moment? John Reed's name has been inextricably linked to the events of the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution.His book “Ten Days that Shook the World” is a first hand experience of the Revolution that changed the course of human history. In the course of the entire war, one can say, she did not spend a single month in freedom,––Wilhelm with his gang and Scheidemann. In 1917–1918 enjoyed immense popularity not only in liberal bourgeois circles but also among American and West European workers. More than once she rebuked the most stalwart leaders of German Social Democracy in the discussion of questions of foreign policy, saying that, when the issue is adopting resolutions, the socialists are very radical, but when it comes to genuine struggle against the war and against the government that called forth this war, then they all "hide in the bushes." ... //www.findagrave.com: accessed ), memorial page for Dr Rosalia “Rosa” Luxemburg (5 Mar 1871–15 Jan 1919), Find a Grave Memorial no. At the Stuttgart congress in 1907 two worlds stood opposed to one another. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, leaders of the radical Spartacus League, were eager to transform Germany into a republic of workers’ and soldiers’ councils (a Räterepublik) in imitation of the soviet republic being established by the Bolshevik leaders in … The hatred of these leaders of the German proletariat is now obvious! Would Hitler still find a way to come to power? He devoted his whole existence to his work as a socialist, and his followers idolised him.\" He had inherited money from his grandfather and was willing to use this for the good of the soci… Comrades, just as we are feeling in this hall, so, you can be sure, the working men and women of the whole world felt yesterday and feel today. Rosa Luxemburg is in their power. Do you want to know why exactly Rosa Luxemburg was killed? Even Bebel, who in his declining years made many concessions to the right wing of Social Democracy, even Bebel wavered. He, Liebknecht, is in their power. Translated, edited and introduced by Clayton Black. Jaeger Runge hits Liebknecht, who sits in the automobile, twice on the head from behind with a rifle butt. The murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and the suppression of the Spartacist uprising cast a pall on those hopes. In note 8 I have replaced "proletariat" with "bourgeoisie," as it seems obvious that this was intended. The murders in Berlin heightened the sense of vulnerability among the Bolsheviks, and Zinoviev sought both to underscore the rabid determination of global opposition to socialist revolution and assure his listeners of socialism's inevitable triumph. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were hated by them for bravely, brightly, and ably defending all that was best in the Russian proletariat; they were dedicated to the Russian revolution and wanted to follow in its footsteps. “It is probable that Gustav Noske had a hand in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,” she told the party faithful in November at an event to discuss the 1919 revolt. For his famous booklet, "Against Militarism," he was imprisoned for months on end. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Liebknecht was alone in voting against war credits in the German Reichstag, and his voice resounded across the entire world. A man strikes her again on the head with the butt end of a pistol. Would the Holocaust be avoided? Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. Translation involves difficult decisions about word choice and sentence structure, but I have tried to remain true to the author's meaning without doing violence to his words. Precisely for that they were especially hated by the Berlin social democrats. They smile. They rub their hands. Possessing all of these first-class attributes, Rosa Luxemburg worked on the stage of the labour movement no less than a quarter century. At a moment when things are particularly difficult, when our Red Army soldiers, somewhere around Archangelsk or in some other distant front in the cold, poorly dressed and shoed, have to lie side-by-side and return fire from imperialist bands; or when our women workers have to return to hungry children with an eighth of a pound of bread or have to overcome these or other new adversities––at that difficult moment we will remember Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. For his famous booklet, "Against Militarism," he was imprisoned for months on end. Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing 4 times a year, based in London. Leader of a small group of Blanquists. I am convinced that the best of the German proletariat is repeating to itself, "Can we really tolerate for even one more hour the power of the bourgeois murders who call themselves Social Democrats, who killed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg––the pride of the international proletariat?". [7]  Wilson, Woodrow (1857–1924)––"Democratic" president of the United States, formerly a professor. Perhaps several years of serious impoverishment, struggles, famine, starvation! Januar 1919 in Berlin Freikorpssoldaten der Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division die untergetauchten Führer des Spartakusbunds , Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht . Against Agamben: is a democratic biopolitics possible? “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Karl Liebknecht Biography German Social Democrat, who, with Rosa Luxemburg and other radicals, founded the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a Berlin underground group that became the Communist Party of Germany, dedicated to a socialist revolution.