15. January, 1919, were killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht because of their political Beliefs. How Luxembourg posthumously to the Poster Girl of the Left, and a role model for feminists, and the student movement.
Thousands of people braved the cold on Sunday in the winter, as they ran through the Frankfurter Allee in Berlin at the Central cemetery Friedrichsfelde, where red carnations on the graves of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. 100 years ago, on 15. In January 1919, had been the two Communists.
After her death, Rosa Luxemburg became an icon of the revolutionary Left. Exerted equally on feminists, socialists, environmentalists, and pacifists, a great attraction. Rosa Luxemburg also became part of the cultural memory in Germany: the lives of the petite, Polish-born Jewish Intellectual, who was limping due to a Hüftleidens, has been repeatedly immortalized in art, in poetry, in an award-winning Film, a Musical and a Graphic Novel.
Side-by-side: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the SPD Congress in Leipzig in 1909
Luxembourg, who fled as a Teenager because of their socialist activities from the Russian-occupied Poland, had a doctorate in Zurich, before 1898 moved to Berlin, where she is the leader of the Left in the SPD climb. The SPD was at that time the largest workers ‘ party in Europe. As your party in 1914, supported the mobilization for the First world war, broke out in Luxembourg, with the SPD and formed the Spartacus group, which later became the Spartacist League. During the war, Luxembourg was most of the time in prison.
In November 1918, the Sailors ‘and workers’ uprising triggered by the November revolution in Germany. You had the end of the fall of the monarchy, the war and the founding of the Republic. Actually, there were two revolutions: one was led by the social Democrats, the other of Seamen, soldiers and workers had formed after the Russian model of councils.
In the year of the outbreak of war: Rosa Luxemburg, 1914 in Berlin
A failed rebellion, and murder
The Spartacus League was in December 1918, a new name: the Communist party of Germany (KPD). Luxembourg explained, to strive without the support of the majority of Germans, not a takeover. As on 5. In January 1919 the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, a second revolt broke out, supported in Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the movement nevertheless. The uprising had reached its limits, as the SPD leadership of the army and the free corps – a counter-revolutionary composite made up of former soldiers, volunteers, right-wing, conservative and supporters of the monarchy – ordered to down the rebellion.
In the night of the 15. January were deported to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, in the Hotel Eden by the members of the free corps, tortured and then murdered. Liebknecht’s body was delivered to a guard at a police station, while Luxembourg’s body was thrown in the Landwehr canal. She was not found until five months later, and finally at the Berliner Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in addition to Karl Liebknecht.
Red carnations on the grave of Rosa Luxemburg in the Berlin cemetery in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde
Model for the students – and the peace movement
A large part of its later fame to the murder, says Mark Jones, historian and author of the book “The beginning of violence: The German Revolution in 1918/19 and the beginning of the Weimar Republic”. “The destruction of the female body, the intense violence and the Absence of any public grief, left behind a Trauma that has shaped the memory of Rosa Luxembourg in Germany for the next 100 years,” he says.
The murder of Rosa Luxembourg had split the Left deeply, which contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the national socialists. After the war, there was speculation about whether the third Reich and the Holocaust could have been avoided, it would be Luxembourg remained alive. The student movement of 1968 and the peace movement of the 1980s took Luxembourg as a model.
“Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”
The murder of “Pink and Karl’s” was a Central founding myth of the GDR, says Mark Jones. Although the GDR celebrated as a Martyr, is not accepted in your political Thinking, in particular, the criticism of Lenin and the Terror of the Russian Bolsheviks.
As the GDR in 1988 shortly before its collapse, and kept the demonstrators Transparent with the Luxembourg-quote “freedom is always the freedom of dissenters” – a clear criticism of the totalitarian Regime.
Commemorative demonstration for Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Berlin in 1988
Jones believes, however, that the present representation of Luxembourg, fade master, that you have supported in the January, 1919 political violence. “People forget that before she was killed during the second uprising, articles and a newspaper published, in which it called upon workers, the armed struggle and to overthrow the state,” he says. The Option of a negotiated surrender have opposed it at a time when the uprising was already failed, and many civilians had died.
Rose Luxembourg in the art
Still, it was her murder, which had the greatest cultural impact. Already in 1919, produced by Max Beckmann, a series of lithographs, including “hell”, which represents your murder graphically. A drawing of the left-hand artist, Georg Grosz was the justice as a Ghost, with a blood-stained robe over the open coffins of the two murder victims. In 1929, Bertolt Brecht wrote on the occasion of the tenth death the poem “Epitaph”.
The Nazis destroyed in 1935, a monument for Liebknecht and Luxemburg, which had been designed by the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1926. The death of the two Communists was also reflected after the Second world war: in art of The American painter R. B. Kitaj created in 1960, “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg”, Heiner Müller wrote, in 1978, the piece of “Germania: Tod in Berlin”, the works of May Stevens, Jane Cooper and Donna Blue Lachman, referring to the women’s movement, to negotiate your life and your murder.
Barbara Sukowa as Rosa Luxemburg in Margarethe von Trott’s Film of 1985
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was planning a Film about Rosa Luxemburg, died in 1982, but prior to the implementation. In 1986, Barbara Sukowa won for her role of Rosa Luxemburg directed by Margarethe von Trotta at the film festival in Cannes, the prize as best actress. The Film was regarded as a feminist retelling of the story of a liberated woman – even though Luxembourg itself had shown little interest in organized feminism.
At the end of 2008, a Musical, celebrated in Berlin’s Grips Theater Premiere. In 2015, the cartoonist published Evans, Kate, the Graphic Novel, “Red Rosa”. For Evans, it was important to return to Luxembourg’s political writings, to the Transfiguration counter as a “sensitive, poetic flower”. In fact, says Evans, “is an evil revolutionary, which is pretty brutal and in your views extreme and passionate, an incredibly huge intellect.”
It is, of course, that many people would read so many different things from the Person of Rosa Luxemburg, says Evans. But she also says: “If you focus only on your seal, or your death, your legacy of credibility.”