Rosa Luxemburg: 90 years ago
“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden“
“Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently”
“Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently”
Ninety years ago Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht were assassinated in Berlin. While being transported to prison, she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January 1919 by German Freikorps soldiers. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehr canal in the Tiergarten and found in May. She had been rifle-butted, then shot in the head, and her cadaver flung into the canal; he, too, was so killed, then deposited in a mortuary as an anonymous cadaver. She was buried on June 13 in Friedrichsfeld cemetery.
Paul Celan, staying at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, close to the Tiergarten, commemorates their death in the following poem written in the night of 22 to 23 December 1967:
YOU LIE in the great listening
ambushed, snowed in.Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Sweden —Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Eden —The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for no one, for everyone —The Landwehrkanal will not roar
Nothing
stops.
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