X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Karl Liebknecht


City Palace, Berlin

In November 1918, the Spartacist leader, Karl Liebknecht, declared the German Socialist Republic from a balcony of the Stadtschloss, ending more than 400 years of royal occupation of the building.

Hotel Excelsior

It is believed that it was here, on the 11 November 1918, that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg’s leftist revolutionary group renamed themselves the Spartakusbund (The Spartacus League).

Jedermann sein eigner Fussball

In spite of its absurdist amusements, this singular issue was a work of impassioned radical opinion, published only a few weeks after the communist revolt in Berlin had been quashed by Gustav Noske's Free Corps, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered.

Karl Liebknecht

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 18 months in Glatz, Prussian Silesia.

Liebknecht Range

It was remapped by the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, 1960–61, and named after the German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht.

Stanisław Mendelson

Being a skilled organizer and publicist, Mendelson personally befriended many foremost European socialists - Friedrich Engels, Karl Liebknecht, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Paul Lafargue, Georgi Plekhanov and others.


Avram Gots

Theodor Liebknecht, brother of the assassinated German Spartacist leader Karl, acted as a lawyer for the defense; the venerable anarchist P.A. Kropotkin appealed personally to Vladimir Lenin to spare the lives of the defendants, Karl Kautsky wrote impassioned pamphlets about the trial and American trade unionists demonstrated for the release of the SRs.

Drums in the Night

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League—who were instrumental in the 'Spartacist uprising' in Berlin in January 1919—had only recently been abducted, tortured and killed by Freikorps soldiers (Rosa was battered to death with rifle butts and thrown into a nearby river while Karl was shot in the back of the head then deposited as an unknown body in a nearby mortuary), in that same month of 1919.

Kerstin Kaiser

Following her studies of Russian at the Leningrad University (now the Saint Petersburg State University), she worked as a teacher at the party school of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) (Parteischule beim ZK der SED "Karl Liebknecht").

Otto Rühle

Otto Rühle (23 October 1874 in Großschirma – 24 June 1943 in Mexico) was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring states, and also the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund in German) in 1916.

Paul Lafargue

In these late years, Lafargue had already distanced himself from any form of political activity, living on the outskirts of Paris in the village of Draveil, limiting his contributions to a number of articles and essays, as well as occasional contacts with some of the most outstanding socialist activists of the time, such as Karl Kautsky and Hjalmar Branting of the older generation, and Karl Liebknecht or Vladimir Lenin of the younger generation.


see also

Prenzlauer Allee

The arterial road connects the centre of former East Berlin at Alexanderplatz via Karl-Liebknecht-Straße with the far north-eastern districts and the orbital motorway Berliner Ring (BAB 10) via the Bundesautobahn 114.