The Red flag
The newspaper Die Rote Fahne was founded on November 9, 1918 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin - initially as the journalistic organ of the Spartakusbund . As a result of the constitution of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on January 1, 1919, it was the central organ of the party until 1945 . Banned after the end of the Weimar Republic , it was spread underground during the dictatorship of National Socialism under the conditions of illegality in party-affiliated resistance groups .
The name of the newspaper is derived from the widespread symbol of the revolutionary-socialist labor movement , the red flag . Already during the German Empire in 1876/77 there was a magazine under the title Die Rote Fahne , first published as a pamphlet and then as a weekly paper . The editor was a social revolutionary dissident of the then social democracy , the Reichstag member Wilhelm Hasselmann , who was expelled from the Socialist Workers' Party in 1880 .
After the newspaper, founded in 1918, had ceased to appear after 1945 for a period of 30 years, various left-wing socialist groups or small parties began to reissue print products under the name Die Rote Fahne since the 1970s .
Founding phase of the newspaper
Political environment
The foundation of the newspaper Die Rote Fahne took place at a time of political upheaval in Germany at the end of the First World War . On November 9, 1918, the day the November Revolution reached the German capital, revolutionary workers moved to the Hohenzollern Palace in Berlin , and Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a "Socialist Republic" (a Soviet republic based on the model of the October Revolution in Russia, which had been successful a year earlier ). Shortly before that, Prince Max von Baden had announced the emperor's abdication and transferred the office of Chancellor to the SPD chairman Friedrich Ebert , while Philipp Scheidemann had proclaimed a bourgeois parliamentary "German Republic". The provisional newly formed government, the Council of the People's Deputies , was equal to three representatives of the SPD and USPD occupied. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg criticized the measures taken by the SPD and accused their leading politicians of cooperating with the imperial military in order to save part of the previous balance of power into the post-monarchist era and thus betray the revolution. In fact, in a secret telephone conversation with the chief of the Supreme Army Command , General Wilhelm Groener , Ebert had secured the support of the Reichswehr in order to intercept the revolution. In return, he gave the imperial military extensive assurances regarding the preservation of old structures in the military and administration. Against this background, the Spartacus group, as the left wing of the USPD under the leadership of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, refused to cooperate with the SPD and propagated the continuation of the revolution.
Beginnings of the newspaper
On the evening of November 9, 1918, revolutionary workers occupied the editorial office of the conservative Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and declared the newspaper the property of the revolutionary proletariat . The paper was now published under the title Die Rote Fahne , although the print-ready set of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger was largely used in the first edition . The November 10 issue already contained the central political demands of the Spartacus League. This included disarming the police and arming the people. The group called for the dissolution of parliaments and the removal of the existing government, instead workers 'and soldiers' councils should be elected for all of Germany. In addition, they called for the abolition of all dynasties and individual states.
The local gazette was occupied against the objection of Rosa Luxemburg and this institution remained in the hands of the Spartacists for only two days. After units loyal to the government had cleared the editorial office, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger appeared again in its old form on November 11th . On the same day, the Spartakusgruppe (until then a grouping of the left wing of the USPD) decided to rename it the Spartakusbund , giving itself the status of an independent revolutionary organization. The editing of the Rote Fahne was placed in the hands of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, August Thalheimer , Paul Levi , Paul Lange and Fritz Rück . The third issue could not appear until November 18, as a printer was not immediately found that agreed to work for the Spartakusbund. Further branches were then established in Dresden , Kiel and Leipzig and the revolutionary guidelines were concretized. On December 14th, the official program of the Spartakusbund followed, which now emphasized a sharp contrast between the Weimar National Assembly and the "council power".
On January 1, 1919, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was founded, which emerged from the Spartakusbund and other left-wing revolutionary groups. Die Rote Fahne operated as the journalistic party organ .
In its further history, Die Rote Fahne was repeatedly exposed to state repression. Due to rationing in the paper allocation, it could often only appear with a volume of four sheets, sometimes only as a single sheet print. On December 6, 7 and 13, 1918, the editorial offices were occupied by soldiers. On January 15, 1919, a large part of the current edition was confiscated and the editorial staff was re-appointed. Some editors were arrested and others managed to go into hiding.
By 1919, the clashes between left-wing revolutionary workers and soldiers on the one hand and Reich Defense Units in association with right-wing extremist Freikorps units recruited by Gustav Noske on the other hand assumed almost civil war-like proportions. In Berlin, after the dismissal of the Berlin Police President Emil Eichhorn , a member of the USPD, a general strike organized by the Revolutionary Obleuten took place , which resulted in the so-called Spartacus uprising . In the course of this there was bitter fighting, especially in the Berlin newspaper district , with the revolutionaries also occupying the Vorwärts publishing house (party organ of the SPD). On January 12, the Spartacus uprising was bloodily suppressed by counter-revolutionary units.
On January 15, 1919, the secretaries of the Rote Fahne , Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were abducted by Freikorps soldiers in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , handed over to the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division under commandant Waldemar Pabst , and interrogated in the Eden Hotel on his orders and badly mistreated and then murdered after consulting the commandant with Gustav Noske. The hunter Otto Wilhelm Runge, standing by at the side exit of the hotel, knocked Rosa Luxemburg down with a rifle butt while she was being transported away, while Lieutenant Hermann Souchon murdered her with a shot in the head while driving. Her body was thrown into the Berlin Landwehr Canal and was only found there on June 1, 1919. On June 13th she was buried next to the grave of Karl Liebknecht in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde . After the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, there were several changes in the leading editors of the Rote Fahne in quick succession .
The newspaper during the Weimar Republic
History until 1933
Die Rote Fahne was able to appear again on February 3, 1919, but was faced with new bans in March and April. In the period that followed, the newspaper was often banned from eight to fourteen days. One of the longer prohibition phases as a result of the ban of the KPD comprised the period from October 1923 to March 1924. During the prohibition periods, Die Rote Fahne was illegally published among other things in various printing works. As the Rote Sturmfahne or Die Fahne der Revolution , it was distributed from secret quarters, with 60% of the circulation going to factories and the rest being distributed to residential areas. During this time, Hermann Remmele (who was briefly chairman of the KPD in 1924) was one of the editors of the paper.
In 1926 the publishing house and editorial team of the Rote Fahne moved into their own rooms in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus in the Kleine Alexanderstraße in Berlin-Mitte . Among other things, a modern rotary press for printing the Red Flag was installed in the basement of the wing on Bartelstrasse on a specially built foundation , which extended to the first floor. On February 23, 1933, after the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists and the beginning of the dictatorship under Adolf Hitler, the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus was occupied by the SA and the police. The house was officially closed on February 24th.
Organization, distribution, circulation between 1918 and 1933
The subtitle of the Red Flag is until December 30, 1918 "Central organ of the Spartakusbund", until September 19, 1920 "Central organ of the Communist Party of Germany (Spartakusbund)", then "Central organ of the Communist Party of Germany (Section of the Third Communist International )"
The circulation of the Rote Fahne already exceeded 15,000 copies with its third issue, in October 1920 there were over 30,000 copies and in 1932 the circulation was over 130,000. In the beginning, it was mainly distributed by organized groups of workers in the street trade, but soon a fixed circle of subscribers emerged. In 1932 the Rote Fahne cost 60 pfennigs a week and 2.60 Reichsmarks a month.
The first issues had four pages per issue, from 1926 the number of pages rose to an average of twelve to fourteen pages. From January 1, 1921, Die Rote Fahne appeared twice a day in a morning and an evening edition, but only once on Sundays and Mondays. From December 31, 1922, it appeared once a day except on Monday; from March 1, 1924 daily again, then from August 1928 until the ban in 1933 again daily except Mondays. During the period of illegality during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1942, the number of copies and the number of copies fluctuated depending on the situation.
In addition to the central organ of the KPD, Die Rote Fahne, there were some offshoots as regional newspapers of the Communist Party of Germany, such as the Munich Red Flag , Red Flag of Lusatia , The Red Flag of Westphalia and the workers newspaper for Silesia and Upper Silesia .
Before 1933, the title page mostly showed pictures with a high impact, from 1924 onwards partly with full-page red-black printing and with frequent use of political caricatures . The draftsman Helen Ernst was usually responsible for designing the title pages . George Grosz and especially John Heartfield also designed front pages, including collages that are famous to the present day .
In addition to the broad daily political section, a feature section was set up in the early 1920s, workers' correspondence was added, and from 1930 the regular commentary on Roter Sport . Information about the daily radio program and the permanent section on Proletarian Films played an important role . In the glossary What interests you , workers' education on technical and medical problems was offered in an easily understandable form. This offer was completed by the self-education corner , in which the party history and Marxist theory were made understandable for workers.
In addition to the daily newspaper, numerous topic-specific special supplements appeared in the newspaper, including: Tribune of the proletarian woman , The working woman , For the proletarian youth , Wirtschaftsrundschau , Literatur-Rundschau (from 1931), The red fist , The communist , The communist trade unionist and class justice - Messages from the Red Aid Berlin - Brandenburg . The publisher also published the magazine Der Rote Stern .
The Red Flag in the time of National Socialism
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In January 1933, Die Rote Fahne was one of the few socialist newspapers that appeared until shortly after the NSDAP came to power . With the Reichstag Fire Ordinance of February 28, 1933, allegedly introduced as an emergency ordinance “to ward off acts of violence that could endanger communist government” , restrictions on personal freedom were declared legal. However, the Rote Fahne continued to appear illegally in the anti-fascist resistance until 1942. It was published in Prague in 1935 and in Brussels from 1936 to 1939. Regular printing ended when the war began. In the course of these years, the number of copies decreased, and the quality of the printed product steadily decreased. The last editions in the 1940s were only typed on a typewriter , copied and redistributed conspiratorially . Numerous employees of the newspaper were deported to concentration camps during the Nazi regime and many of them were murdered.
After the Second World War
KPD organs
After 1945, Die Rote Fahne no longer existed under this name for decades. The KPD, re-approved by the Allied occupation powers, initially published the Deutsche Volkszeitung , after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946, it became the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland , which became the central organ of the SED .
In the West German occupation zones and then in the early Federal Republic of Germany from 1949, the central organ of the KPD was called the Free People until the party was banned in West Germany in 1956 .
MLPD organ
With the 1968 movement , several projects arose in the Federal Republic by ideologically divergent groups of the so-called old and new left to build a new communist party . In addition to the DKP , which is widely regarded as the West German KPD successor party and which publishes the newspaper Our Time as the party organ , various small communist parties competing against each other , the so-called K groups , were founded, each of which saw themselves linked to different ideological concepts of communism ( from Maoism to Stalinism to Trotskyism ). From these groupings there were various newspaper projects with the title Rote Fahne in the 1970s . The MLPD or its predecessor organization, the KABD , has been publishing the Rote Fahne newspaper since 1970 , and since the mid-1990s with an Internet edition.
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Organs of the newly founded KPD
The Communist Party of Germany (structural organization) , after only calling itself KPD , was also called KPD (Red Flag) after its newspaper . The same applies to the KPD founded in the GDR in 1990 . This describes their newspaper as the official continuation of the newspaper founded by Liebknecht and Luxemburg.
The same claims a newspaper published since 1992 by the Berlin publicist Stephan Steins on behalf of the KPD Initiative , which has only appeared on the Internet since 2000 as an anti-Zionist , historical revisionist , ideological conspiracy news site. Since then, Steins has been spreading “anti-Jewish clichés and inciting against Israel”; He also claims that Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, did not commit suicide, but rather became a murder victim of the “imperial matrix” or “imperial oligarchy”. In connection with Pegida , he wrote about the "real existing problem of mass immigration, foreign infiltration and, ultimately, the ethnocide against the Germanic cultural area".
Web links
- Digital copies of many issues 1918–1933 in the newspaper information system (ZEFYS) of the Berlin State Library
- Die Rote Fahne (Mannheim) (editions of February 22, 1919 and March 6, 1919)
- The red flag . Central organ of the Communist Party of Germany
- The Red flag. socialist magazine , published by Stephan Steins
- Red flag. Weekly newspaper of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany
- Short description the Marxists Internet Archive (Engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ August Bebel: From my life . ( archive.org [accessed December 29, 2019]).
- ^ Ossip K. Flechtheim : The KPD in the Weimar Republic . Offenbach 1948, p. 39-41 .
- ↑ www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de
- ↑ Publikative.org Querfront: Rosa Luxemburgs Erben for Rudolf Heß ( Memento from October 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ http://www.taz.de/!61422/
- ↑ http://rotefahne.eu/Geschichte/#2000-2003
- ^ "Under false flags" , SZ from February 16, 2017
- ↑ Roger Willemsen writes for "Compact" With Thilo and Eva in a sheet by Rene Martens, TAZ 17. 11. 2010
- ↑ Robin Avram: How the New Right infiltrates the peace movement , rbb of April 13, 2017