Luxemburg and Liebknecht: fallen heroes

January 15, 2008 at 12:05 am (class, democracy, Jim D, left, liberation, politics, socialism)

On January 15 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht, leaders of the German Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) paid the ultimate price for their Marxist beliefs and pro-working class organising:

“Karl Liebknecht was led out first before the curious and unsympathetic eyes of the soldiers and a few hotel guests. So this was what the legendary Spartakist looked like! As he emerged from a side door into a deserted street – nothing indicates premeditation more than the complete absence of passers-by – (Soldier) Runge carried out his instructions, and hit him hard over the head with a rifle butt. Liebnecht was then half dragged, half hustled into a waiting car, which went off in the opposite direction to that of the prison. In the Tiergarten he was made to get out of the car and was shot within a few yards. The fatal shot was actually fired by Captain von Pflughk-Hartung. The body was delivered to a local mortuary as that of an unknown man found by the roadside. On return to the Eden hotel this section (of the Garde-Kavallerie-Shutzen-Division – JD) reported to their chief that Liebnecht had been ‘shot while trying to escape’.

“Shortly afterwards it was Rosa Luxemburg’s turn. Already in the lobby of the hotel some of the soldiers had been excercising their muscles on her. Pieck (a witness who later wrote about these events -JD) heard one of the maids say, ‘I shall never forget how they knocked that poor woman down and dragged her around’.

“The transport of Rosa Luxemburg was in charge of a Lieutenant Vogel. Runge punctiliously performed again and, half-dead, she was dragged into another waiting car. There the messy proceedings were quickly brought to an end inside the car by a shot in the head from the officer in charge. The car stopped at a bridge over the Landwehr Canal and the body was thrown over into the murky waters, where it remained until March. Here the story was that an angry mob had stopped the car and carried Rosa Luxemburg off to an unknown destination. The soldiers were unanimously sorry: they had nothing definite to report about her fate.” (Rosa Luxemburg, by Peter Nettl, Oxford, 1969)

The courage and self-sacrifice of these two heroes puts our petty inconveniences in the course of political activity,  into some sort of perspective. Rosa, of course, was the greater theoretician and more important and prolific writer. Her work on nationalism and internationalism, her denunciations of reformism, her critical solidarity with Lenin and the Bolsheviks (critical of their curbs on workers’ democracy) and – perhaps most importantly – her seminal writings on the general strike and the spontaneity of the masses, make her one of the giants of socialist thought, to be ranked alongside Lenin and Trotsky.

But it was Liebknecht who wrote the valediction for both of them:

“Hold hard. We have not fled. We are not beaten…for Spartakus – that means fire and spirit, heart and soul, will and deed of the proletarian revolution. For Spartakus – that stands for all the longing and achievement, all the embattled resolution of the class-conscious proletariat…whether or not we shall survive when all is achieved, our programme will live; it will dominate the world of liberated peoples. In spite of all.”