The Marxist activist falls victim to a far-right militia in Berlin
15 JANUARY 1919
Three days before the armistice formalising the end of hostilities of the First World War on 11 November 1918, Polish-born Marxist Rosa Luxemburg left her prison cell in Breslau (present-day Wrocław). Her immediate aim was to instigate a socialist revolution in Germany; yet instead she would fall victim to a far-right backlash that ended in her assassination just weeks later.
Luxemburg’s release from prison coincided with Germany being plunged into chaos by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication and the proclamation of a republic from the windows of the Reichstag in Berlin by her erstwhile comrades in the Social Democratic Party. (Back in 1914, she had been dismayed by the party’s support for Germany’s entry into the war, which she attacked as a betrayal of socialist values.)
Alongside Karl Liebknecht and other revolutionary socialists, Luxemburg founded the Spartacus League – named in honour of the slave who had led an uprising against Rome in the first century BC. Their anti-war pamphlets and calls for mass unrest led to their imprisonment in 1916.
In late 1918, inspired by events in Bolshevik Russia, Luxemburg and Liebknecht called for the transfer of power to workers and soldiers’ soviets (councils). To help make this a reality, the pair founded the Communist Party of Germany.
In January 1919, thousands of striking workers brought Berlin to a standstill. The German communists seized control of the situation, occupying important government and communications buildings. Through editorials in the communist newspaper, The Red Flag, Luxemburg called for a violent takeover by the working class. Meanwhile, the republic’s officials, decamped in Weimar, mobilised Freikorps, paramilitary groups of disgruntled ex-soldiers with a visceral revulsion to leftwing politics, to
