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Charisma and logic … Rosa Luxemburg.
Charisma and logic … Rosa Luxemburg. Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy
Charisma and logic … Rosa Luxemburg. Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy

The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg review – tragedy and farce

This article is more than 5 years old

Klaus Gietinger’s investigation into the socialist revolutionary’s death, 100 years on, captures the absurdity of the trials that followed. But why is she significant?

“Here is a world in disorder,” the chorus chant in an unfinished play that Bertolt Brecht started in 1926, “Who is then ready / To put it in order?” The answer was Rosa Luxemburg, but she wasn’t given a chance to do so. She and fellow Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered in January 1919, just when their moment seemed to have come.

Germany had surrendered, 40,000 German sailors had mutinied in Kiel and the kaiser had fled, leaving the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to take control in what they branded a revolution. But for the Spartacist League (breakaway communist members of the SPD) this wasn’t enough. Germany needed to follow Russia in a full-scale transformation. The SPD had betrayed the workers by voting for war in 1914 (Liebknecht was the only Reichstag member to vote against it) and remained hamstrung by combinations of conservatism, indecision and outright panic. On 4 January the government dismissed the communist-sympathising chief of police, sparking a widespread general strike. This became violent when the government instructed the GKSD (an elite paramilitary unit) to suppress the communists, prompting the Spartacists to urge armed revolt. On 15 January the GKSD captured Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Berlin; they were dead within a few hours.

Who killed them? At the time, the GKSD claimed that it was an angry throng. It quickly became clear that it was the GKSD who had carried out the murders, but the identity of the killers remained uncertain. In 1993 Klaus Gietinger published a book in Germany identifying the particular soldiers responsible for giving the orders and pressing the trigger. Now it has been published in English to coincide with the centenary of the murders, translated by Loren Balhorn.

Luxemberg’s killer is identified as Hermann Souchon, a GKSD officer. As Luxemburg was getting into the car transporting her to prison, Otto Runge struck her on the head with his rifle butt and Souchon then leapt on to the left footboard, placed a pistol against her left temple and shot her. She died instantly and her body was thrown into the canal by the transport officer Kurt Vogel. The murder had been ordered by Waldemar Pabst, first general staff officer of the GKSD, who claimed responsibility for the killings in a series of notorious 1960s interviews, stating that “times of civil war have their own laws” and that the Germans should thank both him and Gustav Noske, the SPD defence minister, “on their knees for it, build monuments to us and name streets and public squares after us!”

History repeats itself “first as tragedy and then as farce”, as Marx said, and Gietinger is good at bringing out the absurdity of the farce that followed the murder. There was a series of trials in which the SPD leaders colluded with the killers, appointing their collaborators as judges. In May 1919, the court decided that Runge had attempted to kill Luxemburg and Vogel had shot her, but only gave them two-year sentences as they couldn’t know who’d caused the death. When Vogel escaped to the Netherlands, the authorities failed to extradite him, frightened he’d expose the identity of his accomplices. Shockingly, even in 1960s West Germany when Pabst revealed that he’d ordered the killing, the government issued a communique labelling the double homicide a “legitimate execution”. At this point, Pabst outed Souchon as the killer, but Souchon took the audacious step of suing for libel. The court assigned to judge the case relied on the wholly inaccurate records from the 1919 trial, so he won. This book therefore provides an important coda to these years in proving, with the aid of diagrams and documents, that Souchon was the culprit.

Gietinger is less adept at exploring the significance of the murders, which he seems to think we can take as read. Although there’s a new preface, Verso haven’t thought through how to make the book relevant to British readers or to 2019, sidestepping the important question of what her death might mean to us now. Gietinger tells us that these killings were “one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century”. But why? What could Luxemburg and Liebknecht have achieved had they been allowed to live?

In 1919, the revolution they dreamed of doesn’t appear to have been as imminent as the SPD feared. For one thing, the Spartacist leaders were divided on how to bring it about. Luxemburg still favoured parliamentary democracy, wanting to participate in elections and win majority support, while Liebknecht favoured direct action, wishing to take to the streets. They didn’t have a clear model to follow. She thought that the revolution in Russia was flawed by Lenin’s centralising of power and suppression of the opposition. “Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only … is no freedom at all,” she wrote in The Russian Revolution in 1918. She saw Lenin and Trotsky as mistaken in thinking that socialist transformation could follow a “ready-made formula” when in fact the formula for economic, social and juridical change lay “hidden in the mists of the future”. If Germany was going to emulate Russia, if communism was going to be the international phenomenon she believed it had to be, it was going to take time, and the general strike in Germany could only be a tentative first step.

Would the Spartacists have given her this time, even if the SPD had been prepared to do so? It seems unlikely. Nonetheless, Gietinger is right to call their deaths a tragedy. This was a moment when the “Sozial” in the SPD name meant something, in a way that the “sozialismus” in National Socialism did not. Many of the key players in the Luxemburg murder went on to become allies of Hitler, who described Noske as “an oak among these Social Democrat plants”. But in a more mixed political setting, their nationalist and authoritarian tendencies might have been restrained and their socialist tendencies given greater ascendancy. What if Germany had splintered apart into its former states, allowing a selection of political systems to jostle against each other? What if the allies had been less harsh in their peace terms? What if the vision of an internationalist world ushered into being by the League of Nations had been more compelling? What if Luxemburg had returned to Russia, the land of her birth, and tried to influence events there?

It’s easy still to feel Luxemburg’s presence as a spectre haunting Europe. There are many alternative worlds where she could have made a difference, with her combination of charisma, articulacy and logic, her willingness to learn from the past and remain optimistic about the future, her dual commitment to the local and the international. Gietinger writes that when the SPD sank Luxemburg’s body in the Landwehr Canal, they were “sinking the Weimar Republic along with it”. He doesn’t explain why this is the case, but this is one of several moments of mourning in this book – welcome intrusions in the forensic scrupulousness. And certainly, alongside Luxemburg, we can mourn a world in which the radical left had a role to play in democratic government and in which internationalist, pacifist principles remained more important than national self-determination.

Lara Feigel’s Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing is published by Bloomsbury.

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