Live
Audio Only
The Jewish-born communist activist, killed in 1919 amid social and political unrest following WWI, and her political partner Liebknecht, became outstanding figures of the radical left.
Germany’s left-wing parties commemorated Sunday the larger-than-life revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg on the 100th anniversary of her murder.
RELATED:
Russians Pine for Soviet Times Amid Economic Stagnation
The memory of “Red Rosa” and prominent fellow leftist Karl Liebknecht — also murdered in January 1919 — brought together more than 20,000 people in the capital Berlin.
A whole week of events is planned for the commemoration, although local conservative politicians have tried to ban demonstrations honoring “enemies of democracy and free society.”
“Rosa Luxemburg arouses great interest among a very diverse public. There is no other historical tourist route with such varied participants,” said Claudia von Gelieu, a political scientist who guides visitors around the scenes of historic moments in Berlin.
A journalist and talented public speaker, Luxemburg was born in Lublin, in Russian-controlled Poland, to a family of liberal Jewish traders. Admired by Lenin, she was a tireless interpreter of Marx. She traveled around Germany stirring up crowds, often standing precariously on a stool to speak.
As for Liebknecht, he was a social-democratic member of parliament who went down in history for declaring a “socialist republic” the day of the Kaiser’s abdication.
Together, the two leftists created the Spartacist league, referring to gladiator slave Spartacus who led an uprising against Rome.
Two weeks before the pair were murdered they founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The day prior to its founding, New Year’s Day 1919, Luxemburg declared: “Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all. Nay, more; not merely are we today in a position to perform this task, nor merely is its performance a duty toward the proletariat, but our solution offers the only means of saving human society from destruction.”
The double killing on January 15, 1919, was the climax of a “bloody week” in the uprising of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers around Germany’s World War I defeat in November 1918. Demobilized former soldiers organized in so-called “Freikorps” killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht and hurled their bodies into a Berlin canal.
A shaky SPD government that took power after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II had turned to the Freikorps and their brutal methods to restore order in the fledgling Weimar Republic.
The violent repression and double murder slammed the door on cooperation between the social democrats and the communists, giving the Nazi party an opening on its march towards taking power in 1933.
Even today the division persists, with the SPD operating as a junior coalition partner to center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel while the Left — the successor to the official communist party of East Germany — battles both from the opposition benches.
In November, SPD leader Andrea Nahles admitted it was “likely” that Gustav Noske, the SPD defense minister at the time, played a role in the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.
“The murders created a gulf between the radical left and the social democrats that still exists, even if it had appeared as soon as World War I broke out,” political scientist Heinz said.
Newsletter
