The government summarily disbanded the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Equipped with artillery, machine guns and grenades, they retook the police headquarters, the war ministry and other buildings the revolutionaries had captured, and shot hundreds of the demonstrators, including many who surrendered. Attempts to get army regiments in Berlin to join the revolt failed.īy January 11th, Liebknecht and Luxemburg had lost all control of events and Liebknecht could only say, fatalistically: ‘Ultimately one should accept history as it develops.’ The attempt at a left-wing revolution was put down by force on Ebert’s orders by the army and the Freikorps volunteer militias, which had been formed from soldiers home from the war and which the army had been quietly training. Some wanted to continue with the armed insurgency, others started discussions with Ebert. Calls for a general strike brought thousands of demonstrators into the centre of the city, but the Revolution Committee, which was supposed to be leading the uprising, could not agree what to do next. The Berlin police chief, a radical sympathiser who had just been dismissed, supplied weapons to protesters who erected barricades in the streets and seized the offices of an anti-Spartacist socialist newspaper.
Luxemburg initially opposed it, but joined in after it began and it was supported by the Red Flag.
This was almost immediately followed by an uprising in Berlin against Ebert’s regime, with encouragement from Soviet Russia. At the end of the year a conference of the Spartacist League, socialists and communists founded the Communist Party of Germany, with Liebknecht and Luxemburg as the leaders. She and Liebknecht were both released from prison in 1918 and started the Red Flag (Rote Fahne) newspaper. She did not share his approval of the Bolsheviks, but called for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Like Liebknecht, she was sent to prison for treason in 1916. In Spartacist publications she called herself Junius, after Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic around 500 BC. Rosa Luxemburg, the daughter of a Polish Jewish family, was active in Polish left-wing politics from her teens but spent most of her adult life in Germany, where she was imprisoned several times for opposing the war and campaigning for a general strike. He was soon allowed back to Berlin, where he was sentenced to prison for treason after a Spartacist demonstration in the city in 1916. The group’s pamphlets were quickly declared illegal and Liebknecht was sent to the eastern front where he refused to fight and spent his time burying dead soldiers. At the end of that year, with Rosa Luxemburg and others, he founded what became the Spartacist League, named after the gladiator Spartacus, leader of the slave rebellion that threatened the Roman government in the first century BC. Liebknecht, whose ambition was to be the German Lenin, was a left-wing lawyer, who in 1914 had been the only member of the Reichstag to vote against German involvement in the war. The situation was to the liking of the Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who believed that the revolution in Russia would inevitably spread to Germany and across Europe. Meanwhile there had been a naval mutiny at Kiel and the Baltic and North Sea ports were falling under the control of councils of sailors, soldiers and workers on the Russian model.
The Kaiser abdicated as emperor and on November 8th, 1918, a socialist republic was reluctantly proclaimed in Berlin by the moderate Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert, who confided to a friend that he ‘hated it like sin’, but proceeded to form a government. Defeated in the First World War, humiliated, desperately short of food and assailed by the influenza epidemic that swept Europe, Germany was in a critical state.
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