21 Facts About Paul Levi

Paul Levi was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.

Paul Levi was born on 11 March 1883 in Hechingen in Hohenzollern Province to a well-to-do Jewish merchant family.

Paul Levi started work as a lawyer in Frankfurt in 1906 and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany the same year.

Paul Levi was one of the twelve delegates to the meeting in March 1915 which led to the formation of the Gruppe Internationale which became the Spartacist League.

Paul Levi was one of the signatories to a declaration approving of Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries actions in travelling through Germany in a sealed train.

Paul Levi returned to Germany after the October Revolution and from March 1918 lived mostly in Berlin where he was one of the three editors of the Spartakusbriefe.

Paul Levi was amongst the majority on the KPD Zentrale who opposed the initiatives of Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck who had supported a Revolutionary Committee with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Revolutionary Stewards to lead what became known as the Spartacist Uprising in January 1919.

At the KPD's second congress in October 1919, Paul Levi expelled the party's Council Communist ultra-left, around half the membership many of whom formed the Communist Workers' Party of Germany.

Paul Levi headed the German delegation to the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1920, where he threatened that the KPD delegation would leave due to the presence of representatives of the KAPD.

Paul Levi led the party away from the policy of immediate revolution, orientating it to wider layers of workers.

Paul Levi attended the 1921 Livorno Congress of the Italian Socialist Party which had joined the Comintern, where Paul Levi had supported Giacinto Serrati against the faction around Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga who went on to form the Italian Communist Party supported by Comintern representatives Matyas Rakosi and Khristo Kabakchiev.

Paul Levi first observed this phenomenon in the failed revolutionary experiences in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919.

Paul Levi cited both Engels and Marx on insurrection, showing how other Party members of the KPD had overlooked the careful preparatory work of the Bolsheviks leading up to the October 1917 Revolution.

Paul Levi simultaneously criticized Comintern representatives such as Bela Kun, Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek for their encouragement of these accelerationist policies both in Germany and Italy.

Lenin sent him a private letter through his friend Clara Zetkin, in which he asked Paul Levi to accept the expulsion for "breach of discipline" and then adopt a friendly approach towards the KPD and cooperate with it in the class struggle in a loyal manner.

Paul Levi did not accept this proposal and continued to criticize the party sharply and condemn its leaders.

Paul Levi responded by attacking prominent Nazis, such as Adolf Hitler, Ernst Rohm, Alfred Rosenberg, and Wilhelm Frick in left-wing publications.

In 1924, Paul Levi was re-elected to the Reichstag in Zwickau for the SPD, where he held meetings in remote village, conducted some legal cases and held education classes.

Paul Levi began to specialise in defending writers and newspapers that disclosed government secrets, but took up other civil liberties cases, including those of KPD members such as Willi Munzenberg.

Paul Levi died on 9 February 1930 in Berlin after succumbing to injuries suffered when he fell from the window of his fifth floor attic flat.

Paul Levi had been taken to bed with pneumonia during a trial, where he had become feverish and delirious.