45 Facts About Karl Liebknecht

1.

Karl Liebknecht twice spent time in prison, first for writing an anti-militarism pamphlet in 1907 and then for his role in a 1916 antiwar demonstration.

2.

Karl Liebknecht was released from the second under a general amnesty three weeks before the end of the First World War.

3.

Karl Liebknecht was born in Leipzig in 1871, the second of the five sons of Wilhelm Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie.

4.

Karl Liebknecht's godparents included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were not present at the baptism but had written declarations of their godparenthood.

5.

Karl Liebknecht studied there with jurist Bernhard Windscheid, jurist and theologian Rudolph Sohm, economist Lujo Brentano, psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and art historian Anton Springer.

6.

Karl Liebknecht then did his military service as a one-year volunteer with the Guard Pioneer Battalion, a unit of the Prussian Army, in Berlin in 1893 and 1894.

7.

Karl Liebknecht joined the Social Democratic Party in 1900 and in 1904, along with his colleague Hugo Haase, he became known abroad as a political lawyer when he defended nine Social Democrats, among them the Pole Franciszek Trabalski, in the Konigsberg Secret Society trial.

8.

From 1907 to 1910 Karl Liebknecht was president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, where he frequently spoke out against militarism.

9.

Karl Liebknecht characterized the spirit of militarism with a reference to a remark by the Prussian Minister of War at the time, General Karl von Einem, according to whom a soldier loyal to the king who shoots badly is preferable to one who shoots well but whose political convictions are questionable.

10.

The treason trial against Karl Liebknecht took place before the Reich Court of Justice, presided over by Judge Ludwig Treplin, on 9,10 and 12 October 1907, with a large public presence.

11.

In 1908 Karl Liebknecht became a member of the Prussian House of Representatives even though he had not yet been released from prison in Silesia.

12.

Karl Liebknecht was one of the first eight Social Democrats to become a member of the Prussian state parliament, despite the Prussian three-class franchise that gave more weight to higher-income voters.

13.

Karl Liebknecht remained a member of the state parliament until 1916.

14.

Karl Liebknecht was able to prove that the Krupp company, a large steel and armaments firm, had illegally obtained economically important information by bribing employees of the War Ministry.

15.

Hugo Haase, who like Karl Liebknecht had opposed the loan in the parliamentary group, agreed for similar reasons to read the statement of the parliamentary group majority, which was received with jubilation by the bourgeois parties.

16.

Karl Liebknecht saw them as a catastrophic political and personal watershed.

17.

Karl Liebknecht expressly did not endorse a statement by Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring, in which they threatened to leave the party because of its conduct.

18.

Karl Liebknecht contacted other European workers' parties to show them that not all German Social Democrats were in favor of the war.

19.

Karl Liebknecht was in the end the only deputy not to stand when Reichstag President Johannes Kaempf called on the House to approve the supplementary budget by rising from their seats.

20.

Karl Liebknecht was not able to participate in the venture.

21.

Karl Liebknecht was therefore subject to the military laws that forbade any political activity outside his duties in the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag.

22.

Karl Liebknecht went through the war on the Western and Eastern fronts as non-combatant soldier who was given leaves of absence for sessions of the Reichstag and Landtag.

23.

Karl Liebknecht nevertheless succeeded in expanding the International Group and organizing the SPD's staunchest opponents of the war throughout the Reich.

24.

Contrary to customary practice, the Reichstag president did not record in the official minutes the statement that Karl Liebknecht had submitted in writing explaining his vote against the second war loan bill on 2 December 1914.

25.

One member snatched Karl Liebknecht's written notes from him and threw the sheets into the hall, and another had to be prevented by members of the Social Democratic Working Group from physically attacking him.

26.

At the Easter Youth Conference in Jena, Karl Liebknecht spoke to 60 young people on anti-militarism and the changing of social conditions in Germany.

27.

On 23 August 1916 Karl Liebknecht was sentenced to four years and one month in prison, which he served at Luckau, Brandenburg from mid-November 1916 until his release under an amnesty on 23 October 1918.

28.

Karl Liebknecht was released from prison on 23 October 1918 as part of a general amnesty that the Reich government hoped would act as a relief valve for the pre-revolutionary mood in the country.

29.

The hope proved illusory, since in Berlin, where Karl Liebknecht went immediately, he was greeted by a cheering crowd at the Anhalter Station.

30.

Karl Liebknecht set about reorganizing the Spartacus League, which then emerged as a political organization in its own right.

31.

Karl Liebknecht though was unable to win acceptance in his party for the plans.

32.

From Gate 4 of the Berlin Palace, standing at the large window of the second floor, Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the "Free Socialist Republic of Germany".

33.

Karl Liebknecht was doing this in accordance with the secret Ebert-Groener pact, under which Wilhelm Groener, Quartermaster General of the German Army, had assured Ebert of the army's loyalty, in return for which Ebert had promised among other things to take prompt action against leftist uprisings.

34.

Karl Liebknecht joined the strike leadership and, against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg, called for an armed insurrection to overthrow the Ebert government.

35.

Karl Liebknecht called the Reich Chancellery to discuss further action with Minister of Defense Gustav Noske.

36.

Lieutenant Rudolf Liepmann, who had not been informed by Pabst of the intention to murder Karl Liebknecht, drove the car to the nearby Tiergarten park.

37.

Karl Liebknecht was led away from the car and after a few meters shot from behind "at close range" by the shore of a lake.

38.

Karl Liebknecht found leisure and calm for his studies only during his time in prison.

39.

Karl Liebknecht's aim was to revise and further develop Karl Marx's theory of scientific socialism with a more constitutive-constructive theory.

40.

Karl Liebknecht considered Marx's philosophical and economic foundations to be wrong because they were limited to the materialistic concept of history.

41.

For Karl Liebknecht exploitation was purely a problem of distribution and not of production, as Marx had claimed.

42.

Karl Liebknecht saw human society as a unified organism following a higher instinct of development, with the goal of a new, all-encompassing humanism.

43.

Historian Klaus Gietinger did not think that Karl Liebknecht was a Marxist.

44.

The Russian warship Karl Liebknecht bore his name, as did several places in Russia.

45.

In East Germany, Karl Liebknecht was honored as a "mastermind of socialism".