Karl Liebknecht was a leading German revolutionary at the close of the First World War. who with Rosa Luuxemburg,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/01/remembering-rosa-luxemburg-100-years.html founded the Spartakist League and led opposition to WW1 in Germany.
Born on the 12th of August 1871 Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht a leading German Socialist. During his law and political economy studies at Leipzig and Berlin
Liebknecht himself developed Marxist views.
Before starting work as a
lawyer Liebknecht served with the Imperial Pioneer Guards from 1893-94.
Moving to Berlin in 1898 his political activities increased; he took to
defending people charged with political crimes and himself later spent 18
months in prison in 1907-08. He joined the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) in 1900 and married the same year to Julia Paradies. The couple had two sons and a daughter before Julia died in 1911. His
father and August Bebel had been the co founders of the SPD, which
started as an overtly Marxist party. It was the world's strongest and
most influential workers' party until 1914, when it capitulated to
nationalism and dispatched German workers to the trenches to kill fellow
workers from other European countries.
In 1901 Liebknecht was
elected to serve on Berlin's town council, a position he retained until
1913.
In 1912 he married Sophia Ryss, who had graduated from the University of Heidelberg and he was elected to the Reichstag with the SPD. Karl Liebknecht became a leading figure in the anti-militarist section of the SDP. In 1907 he published
Militarism and Anti-Militarism.
In the book he argued: "
Militarism is not specific to capitalism. It is
moreover normal and necessary in every class-divided social order, of
which the capitalist system is the last. Capitalism, of course, like
every other class-divided social order, develops its own special variety
of militarism; for militarism is by its very essence a means to an end,
or to several ends, which differ according to the kind of social order
in question and which can be attained according to this difference in
different ways. This comes out not only in military organization, but
also in the other features of militarism which manifest themselves when
it carries out its tasks. The capitalist stage of development is best
met with an army based on universal military service, an army which,
though it is based on the people, is not a people’s army but an army
hostile to the people, or at least one which is being built up in that
direction."
He then went on to argue why the socialist movement should concentrate
on persuading young people to adopt the philosophy of anti-militarism:
"
Here is a great field full of the best hopes of the working-class,
almost incalculable in its potential, whose cultivation must not at any
cost wait upon the conversion of the backward sections of the adult
proletariat. It is of course easier to influence the children of
politically educated parents, but this does not mean that it is not
possible, indeed a duty, to set to work also on the more difficult
section of the proletarian youth. The need for agitation among young
people is therefore beyond doubt. And since this agitation must operate
with fundamentally different methods – in accordance with its object,
that is, with the different conditions of life, the different level of
understanding, the different interests and the different character of
young people – it follows that it must be of a special character, that
it must take a special place alongside the general work of agitation,
and that it would be sensible to put it, at least to a certain degree,
in the hands of special organizations."
On 4th August, 1914, he was the only member of the
Reichstag who voted against Germany's participation in the First World War.
He argued: "
This war, which none of the peoples involved desired, was
not started for the benefit of the German or of any other people. It is
an Imperialist war, a war for capitalist domination of the world markets
and for the political domination of the important countries in the
interest of industrial and financial capitalism. Arising out of the
armament race, it is a preventative war provoked by the German and
Austrian war parties in the obscurity of semi-absolutism and of secret
diplomacy.
Liebknecht was soon arguing
in favour of a revolutionary uprising. The German state could not tolerate such opposition. Liebknecht,
although 43 years old, was called up into the army, and was enlisted as an
Armierungssoldat, a member
of a military unit that provided labour to the fighting divisions and
which consisted of men unwilling or not permitted to directly bear arms
(for example, because of criminal records or poor health). In this role
he experienced life on the Eastern Front and was directly involved in the clearing of the the rotting corpses of the dead, until he suffered physical collapse in October 1915. and he was allowed back to Germany as his health had become so poor.
Together with a small
but increasing number of socialist opponents of the Social Democratic
Party policy of
Burgfrieden, including Luxemburg
he founded the Group International which was later named the
“Spartacist league.” ,Together he and Luxemburg provided the leadership for illegal opposition to the war. Liebknecht edited the famous “Spartacus Letters,” the “official” organ of the subversive Spartakusbund. which was declared illegal but shared two of Liebknecht’s most
important anti-war polemics
Klassenkampf gegen den Krieg (
"Class War against the War") and
Der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land
("
The Main Enemy is in your own country")
In early 1916 Liebknecht was one of very
few German politicians to publicly question the German government’s
response to the massacre of Armenians by their Ottoman-Turkish allies. A day after raising this issue in the
Reichstag, he was expelled from the parliamentary party (
Reichstagsfraktion)
of the Social Democratic Party because of his opposition to the war and
criticism of the party leadership.
By 1916 opposition to the war among soldiers in the trenches and
hungry civilians was growing, and Liebknecht and his comrades in the
Spartacus grouping decided to raise the stakes. On 1 May 1916 they
called an illegal demonstration in the Potsdam Square in Central Berlin; 10,000
people attended, including many women and young people. As a
contemporary report describes, '
They were so numerous that the usual
skirmishes with the police began right away. The cops... quickly became
very nervous and began to drive the crowd back and forth with blows.
Suddenly, at the head of the crowd, right in the middle of the square,
the loud sonorous voice of Karl Liebknecht rang out: "Down with the war!
Down with the government!"'
Liebknecht was arrested and jailed for four and a half years for sedition. He told the court, '
No general
ever wore a uniform with as much honour as I will wear a prison
uniform.' Such was the discontent in German society already that his sentencing prompted a strike by 55,000 metalworkers in Berlin. Liebknecht, now became an international symbol. For socialists in
Britain and France his courage made it easier to oppose the official
demonisation of all Germans as warmongers.
With the collapse of the
German government in October 1918 Liebknecht was granted political amnesty
by Max Von Baden. However with Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartacists, soon Liebknecht was campaigning again openly for revolution. While Luxemburg and others had formed in early 1916 the loosely
organised, and repressed, Spartakus group, it was only as the revolution
began to unfold that steps were made to bring together and organise the
revolutionary forces into a party. The end of 1918 saw the formation of
the Communist Party (KPD) with Liebknecht and Luxemburg being seen as
its main public leaders.This new communist organization was quick to exploit the
chaos that had swept Germany with defeat on the western front. They
escalated demonstrations, with Liebknecht provocatively declaring on
January 6th that the SPD government was no longer legitimate, and by January
12th the protests had reached such a size that the government called in
the army to quell them and the revolt was soon
bloodily suppressed by Friedrich Ebert;s
Freikorps a far-right grouping of demobilised German soldiers (.Many future members and leaders of the Nazi party served in the Freikorps) and the revolt was defeated with some ease on Jan. 13, 1919.
Two days later, Liebknecht and
Luxemburg were arrested, interrogated and tortured. Liebknecht was put
in a car and killed by a shot from behind. Luxemburg was beaten with
rifle butts before she was shot. Her corpse was dumped in a Berlin
canal.
At a memorial meeting in Petrograd a few days later, Leon Trotsky, one
of the central leaders of the October Revolution, drew parallels with
1917 and spoke of how the German "
bourgeoisie and military have learnt
from our July and October experience" and acted to try to behead the
revolution.
Their murders decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which
then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its
existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the
revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place.
Both Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were true revolutionary
heroes, and their ideas and legacy will be remembered down the ages,
against militarism, oppression, exploitation and privilege and .nothing can destroy the heritage of Liebknecht's revolutionary struggle against capitalism and war
"
Memorial for Karl Liebknecht" by
Käthe Kollwitz, 1921.
