Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

Friends of mine at university named their cats after Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg which tells you something of their politics but they were sweet, the cats that is!

We come across them in the German revolution and the Spartacus Uprising. But I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at their political areers before 1918.

Karl Liebknecht was born in Leipzig in 1871, He studied law and political economy and after university set up a law practice in Berlin, specialising in defending socialists. But in 1907 his political writings got him into trouble and he found himself in court. He was sentenced to eighteen months.

However this didn’t stop him from getting elected to the Reichstag as a member of the Social Democrats in 1912 and in 1914 he was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against the war credits.

Rosa Luxemburg was Polish, though she was born into a secular Jewish family in Zamosc in 1871 when it was a part of Russia. She got involved in revolutionary politics very early, when she was at school in Warsaw, and it forced her to flee the city and the tsarist police. From 1889 she lived in Zurich which was a centre for socialist exiles. In exile, she formed the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania.

However, she obtained German citizenship in 1898 by marriage and moved to Berlin and immediately joined the SPD. A radical revolutionary, she was arrested and imprisoned three times between 1904 and 1906.

Liebknecht and Luxemburg formed their own organisation within the SPD: the ‘Group of the International’ which, in 1916, was renamed the ‘Spartacus League’. The war saw no respite in their political activity. They issued pamphlets which were known as Spartacus Letters calling for an immediate end to the war and for a socialist revolution. The “letters” were soon banned by the German authorities.

Even though as a deputy of the Reichstag, Liebknecht should have had immunity from political “crimes”, he was arrested and sent to the Eastern Front. He was released from active duty due to ill health in 1915 but was arrested again in 1916 for leading an anti-war demonstration on May Day. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on the charge of treason. However, he was released early, in October 1918 when political prisoners were given an amnesty as a result of the German Revolution.

Luxemburg was also arrested again during the war. But even in prison she wrote a number of pamphlets which were smuggled out of prison and distributed.

They linked up together again during the German Revolution, agitating for a second revolution under the cry of ‘All power to the Councils’. They also co-edited the Red Flag.

And that’s where we pick them up in our studies.