page_title: Rosa Luxemburg
section_title: During the war
hierarchical_section_title: Rosa Luxemburg / Life / Germany / During the war
caption_attribution_description: Title: Rosa Luxemburg&#160; People in the image: Luxemburg, Rosa: Führende Sozialdemokratin, Mitbegründerin der KPD, Polen (GND 118575503) For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description. Additionally errors can be reported at this page to inform the Bundesarchiv. Alemannisch&#160;| Boarisch&#160;| беларуская&#160;| беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎&#160;| català&#160;| čeština&#160;| Deutsch&#160;| English&#160;| Esperanto&#160;| español&#160;| suomi&#160;| français&#160;| हिन्दी&#160;| hrvatski&#160;| magyar&#160;| italiano&#160;| 한국어&#160;| македонски&#160;| Plattdüütsch&#160;| polski&#160;| português&#160;| română&#160;| русский&#160;| sicilianu&#160;| slovenčina&#160;| slovenščina&#160;| svenska&#160;| українська&#160;| 中文&#160;| 中文（简体）‎&#160;| 中文（繁體）‎&#160;| +/− Original historic description:&#160; ADN-ZB Rosa Luxemburg, führende linke Sozialdemokratin, Mitbegründerin der KPD, geb. 5.3.1871 in Zemosé ermordet am 15.1.1919 in Berlin
context_page_description: Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist, philosopher, economist, anti-war activist and revolutionary socialist who became a naturalized German citizen at the age of 28. Successively, she was a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany.
  After the SPD supported German involvement in World War I in 1915, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League which eventually became the KPD. During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne, the central organ of the Spartacist movement. Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported the attempted overthrow of the government and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution. Friedrich Ebert's majority SPD government crushed the revolt and the Spartakusbund by sending in the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of World War I veterans. Freikorps troops captured and summarily executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht during the rebellion.
context_section_description: In August 1914, Luxemburg, along with Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, founded the Die Internationale ("The International") group which became the Spartacus League in January 1916. They wrote illegal anti-war pamphlets pseudonymously signed Spartacus after the slave-liberating Thracian gladiator who opposed the Romans. Luxemburg's pseudonym was Junius, after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic. The Spartacus League vehemently rejected the SPD's support in the Reichstag for funding the war, and sought to lead Germany's proletariat towards an anti-war general strike. As a result, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were imprisoned in June 1916 for two and a half years. During imprisonment, Luxemburg was twice relocated, first to Posen (now Poznań), then to Breslau (now Wrocław).
  Friends smuggled out and illegally published her articles. Among them was The Russian Revolution, criticising the Bolsheviks, presciently warning of their dictatorship. Nonetheless, she continued to call for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", albeit not of the one party Bolshevik model. In that context, she wrote the words "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" ("Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently") and continues in the same chapter: "The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress". Another article written in April 1915 when in prison and published and distributed illegally in June 1916 originally under the pseudonym Junius was Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie (The Crisis of Social Democracy), also known as the Junius-Broschüre or The Junius Pamphlet.
  In 1917, the Spartacus League was affiliated with the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), founded by Hugo Haase and made up of anti-war former SPD members. In November 1918, the USPD and the SPD assumed power in the new republic upon the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II. This followed the German Revolution that began with the Kiel mutiny, when workers' and soldiers' councils seized most of Germany to put an end to World War I and to the monarchy. The USPD and most of the SPD members supported the councils while the SPD leaders feared this could lead to a Räterepublik (council republic) like the soviets of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
caption: Luxemburg in 1915
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