Constructed in 1912 as a factory, the building was purchased by the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) in 1926. It became the seat of its Central Committee and was named in honor of Karl Liebknecht, the KPD leader who was murdered by a paramilitary unit in January 1919. After Adolf Hitler was appointed as German chancellor, the Berlin police raided the headquarters, and by March 1, the Nazi swastika flag was flying over the building. Renamed the Horst Wessel House, the building at first served as a district police station and detention center in which Jews and political opponents were tortured. In 1935, the finance department of the state of Prussia moved into the building.
Severely damaged during World War II, the building was repaired in 1948, and the name "Karl Liebknecht House" restored. It housed the East German Institute for Marxism-Leninism after 1950.
The building became the headquarters for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reformed successor of East Germany's former ruling party, in May 1990. In 2005, the PDS was renamed "The Left Party PDS" in preparation for its merger with the Party of Social Justice-Electoral Alternative (WASG). The building continues to serve as the headquarters of the new party, which is called simply "The Left" (Die Linke) after the merger was completed in June 2007.
The Party of Democratic Socialism was a democratic socialist political party in Germany active between 1989 and 2007. It was the legal successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which ruled the German Democratic Republic as a state party until 1990. From 1990 through to 2005, the PDS had been seen as the left-wing "party of the East". While it achieved minimal support in western Germany, it regularly won 15% to 25% of the vote in the eastern new states of Germany, entering coalition governments in the federal states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin.
Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, orthodox Marxist, and anti-war activist. She became a key figure of the revolutionary socialist movements of Poland and Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century.
The Communist Party of Germany was a major far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany during the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was a German communist politician, and leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933.
Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold Pieck was a German communist politician who served as the chairman of the Socialist Unity Party from 1946 to 1950 and as president of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1960.
Schloßplatz is a square located on Museum Island (Museumsinsel) in Berlin, Germany. It measures about 225 m by 175 m, with its long side oriented on an axis approximately southwest/northeast. At its west corner is the Schlossbrücke, from which Unter den Linden leads west to the Brandenburg Gate. From the same corner, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße runs northeast alongside the square and on to Alexanderplatz. Until the early 20th century, only the square south of the palace was so named, the square north of it being the Lustgarten.
Friedrich "Fritz" Ebert Jr. was a German socialist and later Communist politician, the son of Germany's first president Friedrich Ebert.
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße is a major street in the central Mitte district of the German capital Berlin. It is named after Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany. The street connects the Unter den Linden boulevard with the Prenzlauer Allee arterial road leading to the northern city limits. Although part of the street dates back to medieval times, most of the buildings at its side were built in the 1960s, when East Berlin's centre was redesigned as the capital of East Germany.
Die Rote Fahne was a German newspaper originally founded in 1876 by Socialist Worker's Party leader Wilhelm Hasselmann, and which has been since published on and off, at times underground, by German Socialists and Communists. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg famously published it in 1918 as organ of the Spartacus League.
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, formerly the Bülowplatz, is a square in Berlin-Mitte, Germany.
The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus is a building in Berlin that, at the time of its construction, was the largest office building in Europe. It was constructed between February 1935 and August 1936 to house the German Ministry of Aviation, headed by Hermann Göring, a leading Nazi.
The Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany was an organization of artists who were members of the Communist Party of Germany. Known primarily by its shortened name, "Asso", it was founded in March 1928. The organization produced posters, placards, propaganda graphics for Communist organizations.
During the First World War (1914–1918), the Revolutionary Stewards were shop stewards who were independent from the official unions and freely chosen by workers in various German industries. They rejected the war policies of the German Empire and the support which parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gave to these policies. They also played a role during the German Revolution of 1918–19.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) merged to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on 21 April 1946 in the territory of the Soviet occupation zone. It is considered a forced merger. In the course of the merger, about 5,000 Social Democrats who opposed it were detained and sent to labour camps and jails.
Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a German socialist and anti-militarist. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) beginning in 1900, he was one of its deputies in the Reichstag from 1912 to 1916, where he represented the left-revolutionary wing of the party. In 1916 he was expelled from the SPD's parliamentary group for his opposition to the political truce between all parties in the Reichstag while the war lasted. He twice spent time in prison, first for writing an anti-militarism pamphlet in 1907 and then for his role in a 1916 antiwar demonstration. He was released from the second under a general amnesty three weeks before the end of the First World War.
The Spartacist uprising, also known as the January uprising, was an armed uprising that took place in Berlin from 5 to 12 January 1919. It occurred in connection with the November Revolution that broke out following Germany's defeat in World War I. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, which favored a social democracy, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which wanted to set up a council republic similar to the one established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1914 Liebknecht and Luxemburg had founded the Marxist Spartacus League, which gave the uprising its popular name.
Johann Knief was a German communist newspaper editor, teacher and politician from Bremen.
The Spartacus League was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I. It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction. During the November Revolution of 1918 that broke out across Germany at the end of the war, the Spartacus Group re-established itself as a nationwide, non-party organization called the "Spartacus League" with the goal of instituting a soviet republic that would include all of Germany. It became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) when it was formed on 1 January 1919 and at that point ceased to exist as a separate entity.
Georg Ledebour was a German socialist politician and journalist.
The November Revolution Monument was a memorial erected in 1926 at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin, in memory of the KPD leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and of other militants, who were murdered in 1919 and 1920 during the repression of the leftist riots through paramilitary troops loyal to the government. The building was demolished by the Nazis in 1935 to its foundations and was not restored after the end of the Second World War.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
