Karl Liebknecht

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Karl Liebknecht (ca.1911)

Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht (born  August 13, 1871 in Leipzig , †  January 15, 1919 in Berlin ) was a prominent Marxist and anti-militarist during the German Empire . A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 1900 , he was one of its members in the Reichstag from 1912 to 1916 , where he represented the left- wing revolutionary wing of the SPD. From 1915 he and Rosa Luxemburg essentially determined the line of the Internationale Gruppe. In 1916 he was chosen for its rejection of burgfriedenspolitik excluded fraction from the SPD and a little later because of " war treason " to four years in prison convicted. After about two years in prison, he was released just under three weeks before the end of the First World War .

During the November Revolution, Liebknecht proclaimed the "Free Socialist Republic of Germany" from the Berlin Palace on November 9, 1918 . On November 11th, together with Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches , Ernst Meyer , Wilhelm Pieck , Hugo Eberlein and others, he founded the group Internationale as the Spartakusbund . In December his concept of a council republic was rejected by the majority in the Reichsrätekongress . At the turn of the year 1918/19 Liebknecht was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany . Shortly after the Berlin January Uprising was suppressed , he and Luxemburg were shot by members of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division after consulting Gustav Noske .

Life

origin

Karl Liebknecht's birthplace at Braustraße 15, Leipzig, in a photo from 1951 that comes close to its original condition. After extensions and renovations, it was named after him in the GDR and now operates under the (family) name Liebknecht-Haus as the Leipzig office City association of the DIE LINKE party , office of the Leipzig member of the Bundestag, a law firm and the seat of a sports club.

Karl Liebknecht was born in Leipzig in 1871. He was the second of five sons of Wilhelm Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie (née Reh). His older brother was Theodor Liebknecht , his younger Otto Liebknecht . From the 1860s onwards, his father and August Bebel were among the founders and most important leaders of the SPD and its predecessor parties. Liebknecht was in the Thomas Church baptized Protestant. His godparents included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , albeit not personally present, but evidenced by written declarations of sponsorship .

In the 1880s, Liebknecht spent part of his childhood in Borsdorf , which is now on the eastern outskirts of Leipzig. His father had moved into a suburban villa there with August Bebel after they had been expelled from Leipzig due to the small state of siege , a provision of the Socialist Law , which was directed against social democracy between 1878 and 1890 .

study

In 1890 he graduated from the Old St. Nicholas School in Leipzig his high school and started on 16 August 1890 at the University of Leipzig law and cameralistics study. He studied with Bernhard Windscheid , Rudolph Sohm , Lujo Brentano , Wilhelm Wundt and Anton Springer . When the family moved to Berlin , he continued his studies there on October 17, 1890 at the Friedrich Wilhelms University . Here he heard among other things. lectures by Heinrich von Treitschke and Gustav Schmoller . His leaving certificate is dated March 7, 1893. On May 29, 1893, he passed his legal traineeship.

Liebknecht then did his military service as a one-year volunteer with the Guard Pioneer Battalion in Berlin from 1893 to 1894 .

After a long search for a trainee position , he wrote his doctoral thesis “Compensations Execution and Compensations Proposals according to Common Rights”, which was awarded the title magna cum laude by the Law and Political Science Faculty of the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg in 1897 . On April 5, 1899, he passed his assessor examination with "good".

Practice as a lawyer

Together with his brother Theodor and Oskar Cohn , he opened a law firm at Chausseestrasse 121 in Berlin in 1899.

In May 1900 he married Julia Paradies, with whom he had two sons (Wilhelm and Robert Liebknecht ) and a daughter (Vera).

In 1904, together with his colleague Hugo Haase, he became known abroad as a political lawyer when he defended nine Social Democrats (including Franciszek Trąbalski ) in the Königsberg secret society trial. In other sensational criminal trials, he denounced the class justice of the empire and the brutal treatment of recruits in the military.

Commitment to socialism

In 1900 Liebknecht became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in 1902 a Social Democratic city councilor in Berlin. He held this mandate until 1913.

He was an active member of the Second International and also one of the founders of the Socialist Youth International . He was elected chairman of the liaison office in 1907 at the first international conference of socialist youth organizations .

High treason trial

For the youth work of the SPD he published the work Militarismus und Antimilitarismus in 1907 , for which he was convicted of high treason that same year . In this work he stated that external militarism needed chauvinistic obstinacy towards the external enemy and internal militarism needed incomprehension or hatred towards every progressive movement towards the internal enemy. Militarism also needs the stupidity of people so that it can drive the masses like a herd of cattle. The anti-militarist agitation must educate about the dangers of militarism, but it must do this within the framework of the law. The Reichsgericht did not remove the latter advice later in the high treason trial. Liebknecht characterized the spirit of militarism in this work with a reference to a comment by the then Prussian Minister of War General Karl von Eine , according to which he preferred a soldier loyal to the king and poorly shooting than a soldier whose political sentiments were questionable or dubious. On April 17, 1907, von Eine applied to the Reich Prosecutor to initiate criminal proceedings against Liebknecht because of the text Militarism and Antimilitarism .

On October 9, October 10 and October 12, 1907, the high treason trial against Liebknecht took place before the Reichsgericht under the chairmanship of Judge Ludwig Treplin . On the first day of the trial, Liebknecht said that imperial orders were null and void if they were intended to breach the constitution. On the other hand, the Imperial Court later emphasized in its judgment that the soldiers' unconditional duty of obedience to the emperor was a central provision of the constitution of the empire. When Liebknecht replied to a corresponding question from the chairman that various newspapers and the ultra-conservative politician Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau were calling for the constitution to be violated, the latter cut him off with the remark that the Reichsgericht could assume that statements had been made, which he understood as an invitation to breach the constitution. On the third day of the trial he was charged with conspiracy to commit high treason and a half years imprisonment convicted.

Kaiser Wilhelm II. , Who had a copy of Militarism and Antimilitarism , was informed of this process several times by telegram. A detailed trial report was sent to the emperor after the verdict was pronounced, but Liebknecht was not served the written verdict until November 7, 1907. His self-defense in the process brought him great popularity with the Berlin workers, so that he was led in a group to go to prison.

In order to find Karl Liebknecht in his economic existence, an application was made to the Lawyers' Disciplinary Court of the Province of Brandenburg in Berlin to exclude him from the legal profession due to his conviction for preparing for high treason by the Reich Court. On April 29, 1908, the Higher Lawyers' Court, under its chairman Dr. Krause off this application. As a justification, he stated, among other things, that although the actual findings of the Reichsgericht in the high treason trial are binding, this does not necessarily result in an honorary punishment. On May 7, 1908 , the Oberreichsanwalt appealed against this judgment . On October 10, 1908, the Court of Honor in legal matters, chaired by the President of the Reich Court, Rudolf von Seckendorff , refused to exclude Liebknecht from the legal profession. The reason given was that the Reichsgericht had already denied the defendant's dishonor in this sentence.

Member of the Prussian Landtag and the Reichstag

Sophie and Karl Liebknecht with the children from his first marriage, 1913

In 1908 he became a member of the Prussian House of Representatives , although he had not yet been released from the Glatz Fortress in Silesia. He was one of the first eight Social Democrats ever to become a member of the Prussian state parliament despite the three-class voting rights . Liebknecht was a member of the state parliament until 1916.

His first wife Julia died on August 22, 1911 after a biliary operation. Liebknecht married Sophie Ryss (1884–1964) in October 1912 .

In January 1912 he entered the Reichstag as one of the youngest SPD MPs . Liebknecht won - after two unsuccessful attempts in 1903 and 1907  - the "Kaiser Wahlkreis" Potsdam-Spandau-Osthavelland, which until then had been a secure domain of the German Conservative Party . In the Reichstag he immediately appeared as a staunch opponent of an army bill that was supposed to grant the emperor tax money for armament and naval armament. He was also able to prove that the Krupp company had illegally obtained economically relevant information by bribing employees of the War Ministry (so-called Kornwalzer scandal ).

First World War

In the first half of July 1914 Liebknecht had traveled to Belgium and France, met with Jean Longuet and Jean Jaurès and had spoken at several events. He spent the French national holiday in Paris. It was not until July 23 that he became fully aware of the imminent danger of a major European war - after the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia became known (see July crisis ). At the end of July he returned to Germany via Switzerland.

When the Reichstag was convened on August 1st, the day the mobilization was proclaimed and war was declared on Russia, on August 4th, Liebknecht was still out of the question that “the rejection of war credits for the majority of the Reichstag faction was natural and unquestionable. “On the afternoon of August 4th, however, the Social Democratic parliamentary group voted - after the previous day in the preparatory parliamentary group meeting according to Wolfgang Heine to“ disgusting noise ”because Liebknecht and 13 other MPs decided against this step - closed in favor of the approval the war credits, which enabled the government to provisionally finance the conduct of the war. Before the parliamentary group meeting on August 3, the supporters of the approval had not expected such a success and were by no means certain that they would get a majority in the group at all; Even in the break after the Chancellor's speech - immediately before the vote on August 4th - there was tumult in the parliamentary group because Frank , David , Südekum , Cohen and some other Bethmann had demonstratively applauded Hollweg's remarks. Liebknecht, who in previous years had repeatedly defended the (unwritten) rules of party and parliamentary group discipline against representatives of the right wing of the party, bowed to the majority decision and also approved the government proposal in the plenary session of the Reichstag. Hugo Haase , who, like Liebknecht, had opposed the approval in the parliamentary group, even agreed, for similar reasons, to read out the declaration by the parliamentary majority, which was received with jubilation by the bourgeois parties. Liebknecht repeatedly addressed and thought through August 4th, which he perceived as a catastrophic political and personal turning point, both privately and publicly. In 1916 he noted:

“The fall of the faction majority came as a surprise even to the pessimist; the atomization of the previously predominant radical wing no less. The scope of the loan approval for the shifting of the entire parliamentary group policy into the government camp was not obvious: there was still hope that the resolution of August 3 was the result of a temporary panic and would be corrected immediately, at least not repeated and even trumped. These and similar considerations, but also uncertainty and weakness, explained the failure of the attempt to win the minority for a public separate vote. It should not be overlooked, however, what sacred veneration was still shown to the faction discipline at that time, most of all by the radical wing , which until then had to defend itself in ever more acute form against disciplinary breaches or inclinations to breach discipline by revisionist faction members. "

Liebknecht expressly did not endorse a statement by Luxemburg and Franz Mehring (the full wording of which is considered lost), in which they threatened to leave the party because of the behavior of the parliamentary group, because he felt it "was half-hearted: then you would have had to leave." On August 5, 1914, Luxemburg formed the Internationale Gruppe , in which Liebknecht was a member with ten other SPD leftists and which tried to form an internal party opposition to the SPD's policy of truce . In the summer and autumn of 1914 Liebknecht traveled all over Germany with Luxembourg in order - largely unsuccessfully - to persuade opponents of the war to refuse the financial approval for the war. He also contacted other European workers' parties in order to signal to them that not all German social democrats were for the war.

Liebknecht encountered the first major conflict with the new party line that attracted broader public attention when he toured Belgium between September 4 and 12, where he met with local socialists and  talked about those of Germans - in Liège and Andenne , among others Mass repression ordered by the military was informed. Liebknecht was then accused in the press - including the Social Democrats - of "treason of the fatherland" and "betrayal of the party" and had to justify himself to the party executive on October 2nd.

He was then all the more determined to vote against the new loan application at the next relevant vote and to make this demonstrative statement against the “high tide of unanimous phrases” the basis for a gathering of opponents of the war. In the run-up to this session, at which the Reichstag met on December 2, 1914, it tried to persuade other opposition MPs for this position in hours of talks, but failed. Otto Rühle , who had previously promised Liebknecht that he would also vote openly with no, could not withstand the pressure and stayed away from the plenum, Fritz Kunert  - who, which is little known, had already acted on August 4th - left shortly before the vote the hall. Liebknecht was the only member of parliament who did not get up when the President of the Reichstag Kaempf asked the House to approve the supplementary budget by raising their seats. At the next vote - on March 20, 1915 - Rühle voted together with Liebknecht. A request from around 30 other group members to leave the room together with them during the vote had both previously refused.

In April 1915, Mehring and Luxemburg published the magazine Die Internationale , which appeared only once and was immediately confiscated by the authorities. Liebknecht could no longer take part in this advance. After December 2, 1914, the police and military authorities had thought about how Liebknecht could “put the trade down”. The high command in the Marche appointed him early in February 1915 to serve in a reinforcement battalion one. Liebknecht was thus subject to the military laws that prohibited him from any political activity outside the Reichstag or the Prussian state parliament. He experienced the war on the western and eastern fronts as a reinforcement soldier, both on leave of absence from the sessions of the Reichstag and the Landtag .

Nevertheless, he succeeded in enlarging the International Group and in organizing the resolute opponents of the war in the SPD throughout the Reich. This went on 1 January 1916, the Spartacus group out (after the final separation from the Social Democracy in November 1918 renamed the Spartacus League ). On January 12, 1916, the SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag excluded Liebknecht from its ranks with 60 to 25 votes. In solidarity with him, Rühle also resigned from the parliamentary group two days later. In March 1916 another 18 opposition MPs were expelled and then formed the Social Democratic Working Group , which Liebknecht and Rühle did not join.

During the war, Liebknecht hardly had a chance to make himself heard in the plenary session of the Reichstag. Contrary to customary practice, the President of the Reichstag did not include the reasons he had submitted in writing for his vote on December 2, 1914 in the official minutes and subsequently refused, on various pretexts, to allow Liebknecht to speak. It was not until April 8, 1916, that Liebknecht was able to speak from the speaker's platform on a subordinate budget issue. This led to a "wild scandal scene" that had not been seen in the Reichstag until then - according to MP Wilhelm Dittmann : Liebknecht was shouted down by "obsessively" raging liberal and conservative MPs, insulted as a "rascal" and "English agent" and asked to to "shut up"; MP Hubrich snatched the written notes from him and threw the papers into the room, MP Ernst Müller-Meiningen had to be prevented from physically attacking Liebknecht by members of the SAG parliamentary group.

At the “Easter Conference of Young People ” in Jena , Liebknecht spoke to 60 young people on anti-militarism and changes in social conditions in Germany. On May 1, 1916, he led an anti-war demonstration that was surrounded by police on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He spoke up with the words “Down with the war! Down with the government! ”. He was then arrested and charged with high treason. The first day of the trial, actually intended as an example against the socialist left, turned into a fiasco for the imperial judiciary: Organized by the Revolutionary Obleuten , a spontaneous solidarity strike with over 50,000 participants took place in Berlin. Instead of weakening the opposition, Liebknecht's arrest gave new impetus to resistance to the war. On August 23, 1916 Liebknecht to four years and one month was the penitentiary sentenced until he of mid-November 1916 his amnesty and release on October 23, 1918 Brandenburg Luckau ableistete. Hugo Haase , SPD chairman until March 1916, campaigned in vain for his release. During Liebknecht's imprisonment, the split in the SPD and the founding of the USPD occurred in April 1917. The Spartacus group now joined them in order to work towards revolutionary goals there too.

In addition to Eduard Bernstein and the Catholic Reichstag member Matthias Erzberger from the center , who like Liebknecht was later murdered by right-wing extremists, Liebknecht was the only German parliamentarian who publicly denounced the massive human rights violations of the Turkish-Ottoman allies in the Middle East, in particular the genocide of the Armenians and the brutal crackdown on other non-Turkish minorities, especially in Syria and Lebanon . The majority SPD (which was politically allied with the Young Turkish party CUP ) and the liberal parties tacitly approved this practice and in some cases even publicly justified it with the strategic interests of Germany and the alleged existential threat to Turkey from Armenian and Arab terrorism ( Lensch- Cunow-Haenisch Group (SPD), Ernst Jäckh , Friedrich Naumann (DDP)).

November Revolution 1918

Liebknecht as a speaker at a rally in the Großer Tiergarten , 1918
Portal IV of the Berlin Palace , around 1900
Liebknecht portal of the State Council building , 2015

As part of a general amnesty , Liebknecht was pardoned and released early from prison on October 23, 1918. He immediately traveled to Berlin to reorganize the Spartakusbund , which now emerged as a separate political organization. When he arrived, the embassy of Russia, which had been under communist leadership since the end of 1917 after the October Revolution , gave him a reception in his honor.

Liebknecht now urged one of the revolutionary stewards who had organized the January strike , the USPD base and the Spartakusbund to prepare a nationwide revolution that was jointly coordinated. A simultaneous general strike was planned in all major cities and armed strikers would march in front of the barracks of army regiments to get them to join in or lay down their weapons. The stewards, who orientated themselves on the workers' mood in the factories and feared an armed confrontation with army troops, postponed the set date several times, most recently to November 11, 1918.

On November 8, the revolution triggered by the Kiel sailors' uprising , independently of these plans, spread to the Reich. Thereupon the Berlin officers and USPD representatives called on their supporters for the planned parades the following day.

On November 9, 1918, masses of the population streamed into the center of Berlin from all sides. There Liebknecht proclaimed the "Free Socialist Republic of Germany" from Portal IV of the Berlin Palace , standing at the large window on the first floor. The SPD politician Philipp Scheidemann had previously announced the emperor's abdication and proclaimed the "German Republic" from the Reichstag building .

Liebknecht now became the spokesman for the revolutionary left. In order to advance the November Revolution in the direction of a socialist soviet republic, he and Luxemburg published the daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne . In the following arguments, however, it soon became apparent that most of the workers' representatives in Germany were pursuing social democratic rather than socialist goals. A majority at the Reichsrätekongress from 16 to 20 December 1918 advocated early parliamentary elections and thus self-dissolution. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were excluded from participating in the congress.

Since December 1918, Friedrich Ebert tried to overthrow the council movement in accordance with his secret agreement with the OHL General Wilhelm Groener with the help of the imperial military, and to do this he had more and more soldiers gather in and around Berlin. On December 6, 1918, he tried to militarily prevent the Reichsrätekongress and, after this had failed, to defuse resolutions to disempower the military at the Congress. On December 24, 1918, he deployed the imperial military against the People's Naval Division , which was close to the revolutionary Kiel sailors and was supposed to protect the Reich Chancellery and was not ready to move without pay. As a result, the three USPD representatives resigned from the Council of People's Representatives on December 29 , so that, according to the agreement, it no longer had any legitimacy when it was founded. Nevertheless, it was continued by the three SPD representatives alone.

As a result, the Spartakists, which were gaining popularity throughout the Reich, planned to found a new left-wing revolutionary party and invited their supporters to its founding congress in Berlin at the end of December 1918. On January 1, 1919, the Communist Party of Germany presented itself to the public.

From January 8, Liebknecht and other KPD representatives took part in the Spartacus uprising, with which the revolutionary chairmen reacted to the dismissal of the Berlin police president Emil Eichhorn (USPD) who had previously been legally appointed . They tried to overthrow Ebert's transitional government with a general strike and to do this they occupied several newspaper buildings in Berlin. Liebknecht joined the strike leadership and called against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg together with the USPD to arm the people. KPD emissaries tried unsuccessfully to convince some of the regiments stationed in Berlin to overflow. After two days of fruitless deliberations, the KPD resigned from the executive committee, then the USPD representatives broke off parallel negotiations with Ebert. He then used the military against the strikers. There were bloody street fights and mass executions of hundreds of people.

assassination

Poster on Berlin advertising pillars 1918
“The hour of reckoning is approaching!” In the German Reichsanzeiger
Article in the Reichsanzeiger on the murder
Käthe Kollwitz : Memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht (1920). Käthe Kollwitz got to know the Liebknecht family during the preparatory work for the picture and advised the then 16-year-old son Robert Liebknecht to train as an artist.

The leading figures of the young KPD were searched intensively by "numerous informers from various 'state-supporting associations'". As early as December, numerous large-format red posters directed against the Spartakusbund had been posted in Berlin with the request “Beat your leaders to death! Kill Liebknecht! ”Culminated. Handouts with the same content were distributed hundreds of thousands of times. Eduard Stadtler's Anti-Bolshevik League was responsible for this . In Vorwärts Liebknecht was repeatedly portrayed as "insane". The entire Council of People's Representatives signed a leaflet on January 8, announcing that “the hour of reckoning is approaching”. The following day this text appeared as an official message in the Deutsches Reichsanzeiger . On January 13, Vorwärts printed a poem by Artur Zickler , which contained the lines of verse "Hundreds of dead in a row - / Proletarians! / Karl, Rosa, Radek and Kumpanei - / there is no one there, there is no one there!" Rumors circulated among civilians and members of the military - spread among others by Scheidemann's son-in-law Fritz Henck - that the "Spartakist leaders" had been given real bounties. On January 14th, an article appeared in a newsletter for the social democratic regiments Reichstag and Liebe , in which it was said that “the next few days” would show that the “heads of the movement (...) are now being taken seriously . "

Liebknecht and Luxemburg - since their lives were now clearly in danger - initially hid in Neukölln after Gustav Noske's troops marched in , but after two days they moved to new quarters on Mannheimer Strasse in Wilmersdorf . The owner of the apartment, the merchant Siegfried Marcusson, was a member of the USPD and a member of the Wilmersdorf Workers 'and Soldiers' Council, his wife was friends with Luxemburg. On January 14th Liebknecht wrote his article Despite all this! , which appeared the next day in the Rote Fahne . In the early evening of January 15, five members of the Wilmersdorfer vigilante group - a bourgeois militia formed by civilians - broke into the apartment and arrested Liebknecht and Luxemburg. It is still unclear who gave the vigilante the relevant order or advice. What is certain is that it was not a more or less random search, but targeted access. At around 9 p.m. Wilhelm Pieck , who had entered the apartment unsuspecting, was also arrested.

Liebknecht was first transported to the Wilmersdorfer Cecilenschule . From there, a member of the vigilante group called the Reich Chancellery directly and informed its deputy press chief Robert Breuer (“by chance” a member of the Wilmersdorf SPD) about the arrest of Liebknecht. Breuer announced a recall, which allegedly did not take place. Members of the vigilante group delivered Liebknecht by car to their superior office at around 9:30 p.m. - the headquarters of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division (GKSD) in the Eden Hotel on the corner of Budapester Strasse and Kurfürstenstrasse , whereupon the hotel guests and military officers present "Collective state of excitement" should have broken out. Liebknecht, who had denied his identity up to this point, was identified in the presence of the actual commander of the division, Captain Waldemar Pabst , by means of the initials on his clothing. After a few minutes of reflection, Pabst decided to let Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who arrived at around 10 pm, "take care of". He called the Reich Chancellery to discuss how to proceed with Noske. Noske asked him to consult with General von Lüttwitz and, if possible, to obtain a formal order from him. Pabst thought that was out of the question. Then Noske replied: "Then you have to know what to do yourself."

With the murder of Liebknecht, Pabst commissioned a group of selected naval officers under the command of Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung . They left the hotel - dressed in team uniforms for camouflage - around 10:45 p.m. with Liebknecht. When leaving the building, Liebknecht was spat at, verbally abused and beaten by hotel guests. The hunter Otto Runge, who had been promised money for this by an uninitiated GKSD officer, struck the prisoner who had just been placed in the car with the butt of the rifle. The automobile, on which Lieutenant Rudolf Liepmann, who was also not informed by Pabst about the murder, jumped into the nearby zoo . There the driver faked a breakdown at a point "where a completely unlit footpath led off". Liebknecht was taken out of the car and shot from behind after a few meters on the banks of the New Lake "at close range". Captain Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, Lieutenant zur See Heinrich Stiege , Oberleutnant zur See Ulrich von Ritgen and Liepmann - who "instinctively participated" - fired shots . Also present were Captain Heinz von Pflugk-Harttung , Lieutenant zur See Bruno Schulze and the hunter Clemens Friedrich, the only team member involved.

The perpetrators delivered the dead person as an “unknown corpse” to the ambulance station opposite the Eden Hotel at 11:15 pm and then reported to Pabst. Half an hour later, Luxemburg, which was transported in an open car, was allegedly shot by Lieutenant zur See Hermann Souchon about 40 meters from the entrance to the Eden Hotel . Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal between the Lichtenstein and Cornelius bridges . Pabst's press officer Friedrich Grabowski then circulated a communiqué claiming that Liebknecht was "shot while trying to escape" and that Luxemburg was "killed by the crowd".

Pabst commented on the background to the murders in a private letter in 1969:

"The fact is that the implementation of measures ordered by me orders is not so done, as it should be. But it is done, and it should these German idiots Noske and thank me on his knees, put us monuments and have named after our streets and squares! The Noske was exemplary at the time, and the party (except for its semi-communist left wing) behaved impeccably in this affair. It is clear that I could not carry out the action without Noske's consent (with Ebert in the background) and also had to protect my officers. But only very few people understood why I was never questioned or charged, and why the court martial went like this, Vogel was freed from prison, etc. As a gentleman, I acknowledged the behavior of the SPD at that time by saying that I I kept my mouth shut for 50 years about our collaboration. [...] If it is not possible to get past the truth and my paper collar bursts, I will tell the truth, which I would like to avoid in the interests of the SPD. "

Burial of Liebknecht and 31 other victims of the January uprising on January 25, 1919

Liebknecht was buried on January 25, along with 31 other dead from the January days. The burial initially planned by the KPD in the cemetery of the March fallen in Friedrichshain was prohibited by both the government and the Berlin magistrate . Instead, the funeral commission was referred to the poor cemetery in Friedrichsfelde , located on the (then) urban periphery (cf. Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde ). The funeral procession developed into a mass demonstration in which tens of thousands of people took part despite the massive military presence. At the graves, Paul Levi spoke for the KPD and Luise Zietz and Rudolf Breitscheid for the USPD.

In January 1935, the Nazi authorities had the monument, inaugurated in 1926, removed. The graves were leveled in the summer of 1941, but the bones of the dead were not - as is often claimed - deliberately removed. One of the cemetery workers was able to hide some grave slabs - including those of Liebknecht and Luxemburg - and years later handed them over to the Museum of German History .

In December 1967 Paul Celan traveled to West Berlin , where he visited the Plötzensee memorial and a Christmas market. He also wrote the poem DU LIEGST in the great Gelausche , which is reminiscent of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Prosecuting the murderer

Revolutionary monument with the graves of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , 1926

The officers Horst von Pflugk-Harttung , Heinrich Stiege , Ulrich von Ritgen and Rudolf Liepmann are to be regarded as the murderers of Karl Liebknecht . The officers Heinz von Pflugk-Harttung , Bruno Schulze and the soldier Clemens Friedrich were also involved.

A civil murder trial against the murderers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg did not take place, an investigation into the background was not initiated. Only after the KPD had announced the whereabouts of some of the perpetrators through its own investigations led by Leo Jogiches did the GKSD open a court martial against them . The Prosecutor Judge-Martial Paul Jorns covered up the murders in the investigations, and in the main hearing only Runge and Horst von Pflugk-Harttung were sentenced to low prison terms, which the convicts did not have to serve. At the appeal hearing, a Prussian court martial acquitted her. The judgment was signed by Noske. This also caused the suspension of the following revision proceedings. The perpetrators later received compensation from the Nazis.

Pabst was neither prosecuted nor charged. Runge, recognized and beaten up by workers as early as 1925 and 1931, was tracked down by members of the KPD in Berlin in May 1945 and handed over to the Soviet headquarters in Prenzlauer Allee on the instructions of Chief Public Prosecutor Max Berger . Runge was presumably shot there.

Political theory

During his entire political activity, Liebknecht dealt with questions of political theory and practice, as the genesis of his posthumously published “Studies on the Laws of Movement in Social Development”, which began in 1891, shows. Since he was mainly active in agitation, he had rarely spoken out on political theory in public and rarely took part in the theoretical disputes within the SPD (debate on imperialism, etc.). He only found leisure and tranquility for his studies during his stays in prison. With his philosophically oriented “studies” consisting of the parts “basic concepts and classification”, “connections and laws” and “individual cultural phenomena” he wanted to revise and further develop the theory of scientific socialism of Marx with a more constitutive-constructive theory.

In his opinion, Marx had restricted his theory too much to the epoch of capitalism and was therefore unable to grasp the complexity of social development. He considered the philosophical and economic foundations of Marx to be wrong, since they were limited to the materialistic conception of history . Only through the spiritual and psychological nature of economic relationships would a relationship to human development be possible, through which alone they are social phenomena. He rejected the theory of value because, in his view, labor power could not create any surplus value beyond its own value as the product of an economic spontaneous generation. Rather, the value of goods, including labor, is determined by the average social production conditions. For him, exploitation was a problem of distribution and not of production, as Marx had claimed. The value is not a capitalist-social fact because it already existed before and after the capitalist development. His system would better show that the exploitation of the proletariat through rape and disadvantage in the distribution of the total social product would take place.

In contrast to Marx, his universal approach was based on ideas of natural philosophy . He saw human society as a unified organism that follows an urge to develop further with the aim of a new, all-encompassing humanism . For him, the history of mankind was not determined by class struggles, but by struggles over the distribution of social and political functions within a society. It was not a dialectical process, but an evolutionary process determined by objective and subjective factors . Objective factors would be the gradual convergence of the various interest groups in a society, because they would be driven by an understanding of the nature and needs of society - which would increasingly coincide with the individual. Subjective factors would be the conscious political action of politicians in the sense of a higher development. The higher development would be initiated by the social movement of the proletariat, as the origin and form of struggle of the new humanism, because all other social groups would have to give up some of their privileges.

For Liebknecht, the evolutionary process included further training as well as cultural and social setbacks. The revolution would only be a particularly intensive section within the evolutionary process. Liebknecht's utopian and vague goal of a new humanism failed to attract the masses during the November Revolution.

Honors

Liebknecht Luxembourg commemoration

A wide range of left-wing groups, parties and individuals are taking part in the annual Liebknecht Luxembourg commemoration celebrations on the occasion of the anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on the second Sunday in January in Berlin.

Berlin monument

Monument pedestal

At the site of the anti-war demonstration of 1916, Friedrich Ebert junior , Lord Mayor of Greater Berlin (East) and member of the Politburo of the SED, unveiled the foundation stone of a memorial for Karl Liebknecht on August 13, 1951. The occasion was his 80th birthday. The award took place during the III. World Festival of Youth and Students took place and was part of a campaign against the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany. But the monument on Potsdamer Platz was not completed in the next ten years.

On August 13, 1961, the sector border to West Berlin began to be sealed off. After the barriers were expanded, the monument base stood in the border strip on the front wall until 1990. When planning for the new construction of Potsdamer Platz began with German unification on October 3, 1990, the monument base was cleared and stored in 1995. In 2002, the district assembly of the Berlin district center campaigned for the re-erection of the base - as a document of the city's history and the way in which the socialist and anti-militarist traditions in Germany were dealt with.

Luckau monument

Karl Liebknecht memorial by Theo Balden in Luckau (April 2010)

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Karl Liebknecht's death, a Karl Liebknecht memorial created by Theo Balden was inaugurated in Luckau ( Niederlausitz ) in 1969 . The larger than life statue was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the GDR . One of the main local initiators for the erection of the monument was Siegfried Kühnast, the then director of the Luckau Extended High School, which bore the name of Karl Liebknechts.

The artist was of the opinion that the best location for the bronze sculpture was on the city wall in front of the former penitentiary in which Liebknecht was imprisoned. At the initiative of the client, however, after consultation with Theo Balden, the memorial was erected on the market square. After German reunification , the sculpture finally came to the place that the artist had originally intended for it in 1992.

More monuments

  • In 1912 Liebknecht spoke in Ilmenau , which a memorial today commemorates

  • Stele commemorating the murder of Karl Liebknecht at the Neuer See in the Berlin zoo

  • Karl Liebknecht monument in Stralsund

  • Sculpture (1996),
    Berlin-Friedrichshain

  • Relief (1984),
    Berlin-Mitte

Postage stamp of the German Post of the GDR (1955)

Other honors

Karl Liebknecht's grave, taken in 2005

In the Soviet Union there was a Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow , a school for German émigré children. The Russian warship Karl Liebknecht (1905) bore his name, as did several places in Russia (see Imeni Karla Libknechta and Libknechtiwka ).

In the GDR Liebknecht was honored as a “pioneer of socialism”. This led to the erection of numerous monuments in his honor as well as the naming of streets and schools after him. Some of these were renamed again after the reunification of Germany in 1990, and some of them remained the same.

The following were also named after Karl Liebknecht:

On the occasion of the commemoration of the beginning of the First World War 100 years ago, the party Die Linke demanded a plaque for Liebknecht on the Reichstag building.

factories

  • Compensation execution and compensation submissions according to common law. Dissertation . R. Heydeck, Paderborn 1897. Digitized
  • Militarism and anti-militarism. With special consideration of the international youth movement. Leipziger Buchdruckerei, Leipzig 1907. Digitized Digitized 2nd probably edition 1908
  • The wartime suffrage issue. Speech on the budget of the Ministry of the Interior in the Prussian state parliament on March 2, 1915 . Hermann Müller, Berlin 1915.
  • The prison sentence against Karl Liebknecht. Verbatim reproduction of the trial files, judgments and submissions by Liebknecht . Frankes Verlag, Leipzig 1919. Digitized
  • Karl Liebknecht. Letters from the field. From pre-trial detention and from prison . Publisher of the weekly “Die Aktion” (Franz Pfemfert), Berlin-Wilmersdorf 1920. Digitized
  • Studies on the laws of motion of social development. Edited posthumously by Rudolf Manasse. Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich 1922. Digitized
  • Collected speeches and writings. 9 volumes. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1958–1968.
  • Spartacus speaks. Battle documents of the Spartacus group from the time of the First World War. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1961.
  • Thought and action. Writings, speeches, letters on the theory and practice of politics. edited and introduced by Ossip K. Flechtheim. Ullstein, Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Vienna 1976.
  • Thoughts about art. Fonts. Talk. Letters. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1988 ( Fundus series 116/117)
  • Farewell, you dear fellows. Letters to his children. Edited by Annelies Laschitza and Elke Keller. Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 978-3-7466-0172-4 .
  • Karl Liebknecht or: Down with the war, down with the government! Edited by Klaus Gietinger , Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2021, ISBN 978-3-320-02387-4 .

literature

Biographical

Contemporary history

  • Class struggle against war! Material on the "Liebknecht case" . o. O. 1915. Digitized
  • Bernt Engelmann : We subjects. A German anti-history book. Steidl, Göttingen, ISBN 3-88243-201-2 .
  • Bernt Engelmann: United against law and freedom. Goldmann, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-442-06683-2 .
  • Sebastian Haffner : The Revolution 1918/19. Also published under the title: The betrayal .
  • Manfred Spata: Karl Liebknecht's imprisonment in Glatz 1907/09. In: AGG communications. No. 11, Cologne 2012.

Fiction

  • Alfred Döblin : Karl and Rosa. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1950.
  • Emil Rudolf Greulich : The anonymous letter. 2nd Edition. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1972.

bibliography

  • Helga Kögler: Karl Liebknecht - Rosa Luxemburg. Publications by and about Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in the GDR. Bibliography . (= Bibliographical contributions to the history of the labor movement 5). Institute for Marxism-Leninism, Berlin 1988.

Movies

Web links

Commons : Karl Liebknecht  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Karl Liebknecht  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Karl Liebknecht  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wilhelm Liebknecht asked Karl Marx, Paul Singer , August Bebel and Friedrich Engels to be his son's godfather.
  2. ↑ Further information on the Liebknecht House in Leipzig on the website of the Leipzig city association of the party Die Linke (www.die-linke-in-leipzig.de, accessed on July 13, 2016).
  3. ^ Family photo on www.sozialistenfriedhof.de
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Schröder : Focus on Borsdorf: August Bebels and Wilhelm Liebknecht's Asylum 1881–1884 . Published in 2003 by the “Bebel-Liebknecht-Haus Borsdorf” working group in the Heimatverein Borsdorf und Zweenfurt eV: http://d-nb.info/96917022X
  5. ↑ Facsimile in Matthias John, p. 47.
  6. ^ Mathias John, pp. 48-56.
  7. ↑ Heinz Wohlgemuth, p. 29.
  8. ^ Wilhelm Liebknecht to Friedrich Engels on June 9, 1893.
  9. ↑ Heinz Wohlgemuth, p. 33.
  10. ↑ Karl Liebknecht: Militarism and Antimilitarism. With special consideration of the international youth movement . Leipziger Buchdruckerei, Leipzig 1907. Cf. Horst Syrbe: On the national significance of Karl Liebknecht's work “Militarism and Antimilitarism”. In: Contributions to the history of the German labor movement . Volume 3, Diez, Berlin 1961, pp. 573-592. Reprinted as: Karl Liebknecht: Recruiting farewell. Militarism and anti-militarism with a special focus on the international youth movement. Weltkreis-Verlags-GmbH, Dortmund 1971.
  11. ^ Reichsgericht, October 12, 1907
  12. ^ The high treason trial against Liebknecht before the Imperial Court. Negotiation report and an afterword . Buchhandlung Vorwärts, Berlin 1907. See newspaper reports in Vorwärts of October 11, 1907 and October 13, 1907 (title pages).
  13. ^ Newspaper report in Vorwärts of September 29, 1908, title page.
  14. ^ Official collection of decisions of the Court of Honor for Legal Matters at the Reich Court of Justice (EGH) . Volume 14, pp. 81-84. See newspaper report in Vorwärts of October 13, 1908, p. 2.
  15. ^ Karl Liebknecht in the database of the members of the Reichstag
  16. ↑ See Frank Bösch: "Krupps' Kornwalzer". Forms and perception of corruption in the German Empire. ”In: Historische Zeitschrift 281, Munich 2005, pp. 337–379.
  17. ↑ See Annelies Laschitza: Die Liebknechts. Karl and Sophie - Politics and Family. Berlin 2007, p. 230.
  18. ↑ Quoted from Annelies Laschitza, Elke Keller (ed.): Karl Liebknecht. A biography in documents. Berlin 1982, p. 214.
  19. ↑ Quoted from Wohlgemuth, Heinz, Karl Liebknecht. Eine Biographie, Berlin 1973, p. 242.
  20. ↑ See Groh, Dieter, Negative Integration and revolutionary Attentism. The German social democracy on the eve of the First World War, Frankfurt am Main-Berlin-Wien 1973, p. 694.
  21. ↑ See Groh, Social Democracy, p. 700.
  22. ↑ Quoted from Laschitza, Keller, Karl Liebknecht. P. 218. Italics in the original.
  23. ↑ See Laschitza, Die Liebknechts, p. 239.
  24. ↑ Quoted from Laschitza, Keller, Karl Liebknecht, p. 221.
  25. ↑ See Laschitza, Die Liebknechts, p. 242 ff.
  26. ↑ Quoted from Laschitza, Keller, Karl Liebknecht, p. 219.
  27. ↑ See Prager, Eugen, History of the USPD. Origin and development of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, Berlin 1921, p. 25. Kunert, Member of Parliament for the constituency of Halle / Saale, returned shortly after the vote. If Konrad Haenisch is to be believed, his voting behavior remained “completely unnoticed at the time”. See Haenisch, Konrad, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie in und nach dem Weltkriege, Berlin 1916, p. 21.
  28. ↑ See Laschitza, Die Liebknechts, p. 258.
  29. ^ The Berlin Police President Traugott von Jagow on December 5, 1914, quoted in Laschitza, Annelies, Die Liebknechts. Karl and Sophie - Politics and Family, Berlin 2007, p. 263.
  30. ^ Dittmann, Wilhelm (edited and introduced by Jürgen Rojahn), Recollections, Frankfurt-New York 1995, p. 466.
  31. ↑ Dittmann, Memories, p. 467.
  32. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge : Richard Müller - the man behind the November revolution. Pp. 38-41.
  33. ↑ Higher War Court of the Gouvernement Berlin, August 23, 1916 ; Reich Military Court , November 4, 1916
  34. ^ Ernst Stock, Karl Walcher: Jacob Walcher (1887-1970): trade unionist and revolutionary between Berlin, Paris and New York. Trafo-Verl. Weist, Berlin 1998, p. 193, ISBN 3-89626-144-4 .
  35. ^ Ralf Hoffrogge: Richard Müller - the man behind the November Revolution. Pp. 63-73; Book excerpt online
  36. ↑ see Juhnke, pp. 83–89 and Sabrow, pp. 121–125
  37. ↑ Klaus Gietinger: A corpse in the Landwehr Canal. The murder of Rosa L. Berlin 1995, p. 26.
  38. ↑ Facsimile in Illustrated History of the German Revolution, Berlin 1929, p. 241.
  39. ↑ See Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography. Düsseldorf 1987, p. 313.
  40. ↑ See Illustrated History, p. 238.
  41. ↑ Facsimile in Illustrated History, p. 277.
  42. ↑ Facsimile in Illustrated History, p. 293.
  43. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 25 f. And Illustrierte Geschichte, p. 293 f.
  44. ↑ Quoted from Illustrierte Geschichte, p. 296.
  45. ↑ See Pieck, Wilhelm, Memories of the November Revolution and the Founding of the KPD, in: Forward and not forget! Experience reports from active participants in the November Revolution 1918/19, Berlin 1958, pp. 29–78, p. 73.
  46. ↑ Karl Liebknecht: In spite of all that! In: The Red Flag . January 15, 1919.
  47. ↑ Everyone involved in the arrest received a reward of 1,700 marks from the chairman of the Wilmersdorfer Citizens' Council. See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 31.
  48. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 29 f. And Gumbel, Emil Julius, Vier Jahre political Mord, Berlin 1922, p. 10.
  49. ↑ Gietinger, Leiche, p. 30.
  50. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 31.
  51. ^ According to Gietinger: "Pogrom Mood". See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 33.
  52. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 17.
  53. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 111.
  54. ↑ Quoted from Gietinger, Leiche, p. 111.
  55. ↑ Pflugk-Harttung said in a conversation with a Norwegian journalist in January 1932 that Noske had expressly ordered Liebknecht to be shot. When Noske objected publicly, Pflugk-Harttung let it be known that the journalist had "misunderstood" him. See Gietinger, Leiche, pp. 130 f.
  56. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 34 f.
  57. ↑ Gumbel, Vier Jahre, p. 11.
  58. ↑ So the result of the inquest. Quoted from Illustrated History, p. 306.
  59. ↑ Gietinger, Leiche, p. 113.
  60. ↑ See Gietinger, Klaus, Der Konterrevolutionär. Waldemar Pabst - a German career, Hamburg 2008, p. 126.
  61. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 40 ff.
  62. ↑ Quoted from Gietinger, Counterrevolutionary. P. 394. Italics in the original.
  63. ↑ See Heinz Voßke : History of the Socialist Memorial in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. Berlin 1982, p. 22.
  64. ↑ See Joachim Hoffmann : Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. A German national cemetery . Berlin 2001, p. 89.
  65. ↑ Elke Schmitter : Also a Kassandra . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , January 5, 2019, p. 102-107 .
  66. ↑ Barbara Wiedemann: Paul Celan - The Poems - Annotated Complete Edition in one volume . Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-41390-2 , pp. 315 .
  67. ↑ Thomas Menzel: The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In: https://www.bundesarchiv.de/ . Federal Archives, accessed on February 26, 2020 .
  68. ↑ See Gietinger, Leiche, p. 132.
  69. ^ Helmut Trotnow : Karl Liebknecht - a political biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1980.
  70. ↑ See Wolfgang Leonhard .
  71. ↑ Left Party wants memorial plaque for Karl Liebknecht. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 4th July 2014.
  72. ^ Motion by the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag
  73. ↑ Review by Volker Ullrich In: Die Zeit. 3/2008, p. 44 ( A socialist as he is in the book .)
  74. ↑ As long as there is life in me with the DEFA Foundation
  75. ↑ In spite of all that! - A film about Karl Liebknecht at the DEFA Foundation
personal data
SURNAME Liebknecht, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liebknecht, Karl Paul August Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD), MdR
BIRTH DATE August 13, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1919
PLACE OF DEATH Berlin