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Karl Liebknecht, 1913
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Karl Liebknecht, 1913 (credit: Interfoto-Friedrich Rauch, Munich)
(born Aug. 13, 1871, Leipzig, Ger. — died Jan. 15, 1919, Berlin) German socialist leader. Son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, he became a lawyer and a Marxist. In 1912 he entered the Reichstag and led the opposition to Germany's pre-World War I policy. In 1916 he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for opposing its leadership and came into close alliance with Rosa Luxemburg, with whom he founded the Spartacists. He was imprisoned (1916 – 18) for advocating the overthrow of the government. In 1918 he played a leading role in forming the German Communist Party. A series of bloody clashes culminated in the January 1919 putsch in which Liebknecht resorted to force; he was shot on the pretext that he was attempting to escape arrest.

For more information on Karl Liebknecht, visit Britannica.com.

 
 

Liebknecht, Karl (Leipzig, 1871-1919, Berlin), son of the veteran socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht, qualified as a lawyer; he devoted himself to politics, and in 1912 became a Social Democrat (see SPD) deputy of the Reichstag. Imprisoned for treason (i.e. publicly opposing the 1914-18 War), he founded the Spartakus League (see Spartakusbund) on his release and sought unsuccessfully to establish a German Soviet Communist Republic. In an attempt to overthrow the new regime in January 1919 (Spartakusaufstand) he was arrested and shot, allegedly while attempting to escape. His numerous writings are propagandist. He and Rosa Luxemburg are figures in the novel Karl und Rosa (1950) by Alfred Döblin.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Liebknecht, Karl
(kärl lēp'kənĕkht) , 1871–1919, German socialist, leader of the Spartacus party; son of Wilhelm Liebknecht. His antimilitaristic writings caused his conviction (1907) for high treason. Released from prison, Liebknecht entered the Prussian lower house in 1908 and the Reichstag in 1912. As a member of the extreme left wing of the Social Democratic party, he refused to support the government during World War I. In 1915 he and Rosa Luxemburg formed the Internationale, a revolutionary, antiwar socialist group. This group later became the Spartacus party. Imprisoned again for his antiwar activities, Liebknecht was released just before the proclamation of the German republic in Nov., 1918. With Rosa Luxemburg he opposed the moderate government formed by the Social Democrats and advocated its violent overthrow. Shortly afterward, the Spartacists were reconstituted as the German Communist party. In Jan., 1919, Liebknecht led an uprising against the government. After its failure he was arrested and killed while being taken to prison.

Bibliography

See K. W. Meyer, Karl Liebknecht (1957).

 
Quotes By: Karl Liebknecht

Quotes:

"At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses."

 
Wikipedia: Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht.
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Karl Liebknecht.

Sound Karl Liebknecht? (August 13, 1871 - January 15, 1919) was a German socialist and a co-founder of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany.

Biography

Born in Leipzig, Karl Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. However, Karl Liebknecht was more radical than his father; he became an exponent of Marxist ideas during his study of law and political economy in Leipzig and Berlin, and after serving with the Imperial Pioneer Guards in Potsdam from 1893 to 1894 and internships in Arnsberg and Paderborn from 1894 to 1898, he earned his doctorate in 1897 and moved to Berlin in 1899 where he opened a lawyer's office with his brother, Theodor Liebknecht.

Liebknecht married Julia Paradies on May 8 1900; the couple had two sons and a daughter before Liebknecht's wife died in 1911.

As a lawyer, Karl Liebknecht often defended other left-wing socialists who were tried for offences such as smuggling socialist propaganda into Russia, a task in which he was involved himself as well. He became a member of the SPD in 1900 and was president of the Socialist Youth International from 1907 to 1910; Liebknecht also wrote extensively against militarism, and one of his papers, "Militarismus und Antimilitarismus" ("militarism and antimilitarism") led to his being arrested in 1907 and imprisoned for eighteen months in Glatz, Silesia. In the next year he was elected to the Prussian parliament, despite still being in prison.

Karl Liebknecht proclaims the German Free Socialist Republic, 9 November 1918 (Mural, Hochschule für Musik, Berlin: the mural is one of a series on socialist themes on this building surviving from the German Democratic Republic)
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Karl Liebknecht proclaims the German Free Socialist Republic, 9 November 1918 (Mural, Hochschule für Musik, Berlin: the mural is one of a series on socialist themes on this building surviving from the German Democratic Republic)

Karl Liebknecht was an active member of the Second International and a founder of the "Socialist Youth International". In 1912 Liebknecht was elected to the Reichstag as a Social-Democrat, a member of the SPD's left wing. He opposed Germany's participation in World War I, but following the party line he voted to authorise the necessary war loans on 4 August 1914. On 2 December 1914 he was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against the war, including 110 of his own Party members. He continued to be a major critic of the Social-Democratic leadership under Karl Kautsky and its decision to acquiesce in going to war. In October that year, he also married his second wife, art historian Sophie Ryss.

At the end of 1914, Liebknecht, together with Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi, Ernest Meyer, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin formed the so-called Spartacist League (Spartakusbund); the league publicized its views in a newspaper titled Spartakusbriefe ("Spartacus Letters") which was soon declared illegal. Liebknecht was arrested and sent to the eastern front during World War I for the group's echoing of Russian Bolsheviks' arguments for a Proletarian Revolution; refusing to fight, he served burying the dead, and due to his rapidly deteriorating health was allowed to return to Germany in October 1915.

Liebknecht was arrested again following a demonstration against the war in Berlin on May 1 1916 that was organized by the Spartacus League, and sentenced to two and a half years in jail for high treason, which was later increased to four years and one month. However, he was released again in October 1918, when Max von Baden granted an amnesty to all political prisoners. Following the outbreak of the German Revolution, Liebknecht carried on his activities in the Spartacist League; he resumed leadership of the group together with Rosa Luxemburg and published its party organ, the Rote Fahne ("red flag").

On November 9, Liebknecht declared the formation of a "freie sozialistische Republik" (free socialist republic) from a balcony of the Berliner Stadtschloss, two hours after Philipp Scheidemann's declaration of the Weimar Republic from a balcony of the Reichstag.

On December 31 1918 / January 1 1919, he was involved in the founding of the KPD. Together with Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and Clara Zetkin, Liebknecht was also instrumental in the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The uprising was brutally opposed by the new German government under Friedrich Ebert with the help of the remnants of the Imperial German Army and freelance right-wing militias called the Freikorps; by January 13, the uprising had been extinguished. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were abducted by Freikorps soldiers on January 15, 1919, and brought to the Eden Hotel in Berlin where they were tortured and interrogated for several hours. Following this, Luxemburg was battered to death with rifle butts and thrown into a nearby river while Liebknecht was shot in the back of the head then deposited as an unknown body in a nearby mortuary.

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Persondata
NAME Liebknecht, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION German socialist and a co-founder of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1919
PLACE OF DEATH Berlin

 
 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
German Literature Companion. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Karl Liebknecht" Read more

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