{"id":16401,"date":"2019-01-15T07:46:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T11:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=16401"},"modified":"2019-01-16T15:30:39","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T19:30:39","slug":"rosa-luxemburg-karl-liebknecht-murdered-100-years-ago-today-paul-celans-poem-you-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/rosa-luxemburg-karl-liebknecht-murdered-100-years-ago-today-paul-celans-poem-you-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht: Murdered 100 Years Ago Today \u2014 & Paul Celan’s Poem “You Lie.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Her corpse was found only 4 months after her assassination, in the Landwehrkanal in Berlin where her murderers had thrown her on January 15 1919. The place is memorialized by a sculpture (you’ll see at the end of the video below). She was shot together with Karl Liebknecht (whose body was delivered anonymously to a morgue) \u2014 the two being socialists (& the founders of the\u00a0Spartacus League<\/a>) during the revolutionary days that followed the end of WWI in Berlin. On the night of January 6, a revolutionary council under Liebknecht’s direction declared the government of social-democrat Friedrich Ebert as deposed. A few days before the elections of 19 January, the mass demonstrations in the capital escalated to open civil war, which was bloodily suppressed by the government & the military under the leadership of Gustav Noske (“someone has to be the bloodhound” he’s supposed to have said) as\u00a0Ebert ordered the Freikorps<\/a> \u2014 former soldiers still had weapons and military equipment from World War I, which gave them a formidable advantage \u2014 to attack the spartacists. They quickly re-conquered the blocked streets and buildings and many of the insurgents surrendered. 156 insurgents and 17 Freikorps<\/i> soldiers died during the fighting. On the evening of 15 January, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who has tried to go into hiding after the repression, were discovered in a Berlin-Wilmersdorf apartment, arrested and handed over to the largest Freikorps unit, the heavily armed Garde-Kavallerie-Sch\u00fctzen-Division (which the Nazis later merged\u00a0into the SA<\/a>.) Their commander, Captain Waldemar Pabst, had them questioned. That same night, both prisoners were beaten unconscious with rifle butts and shot in the head.<\/p>\n

In 1967 Paul Celan wrote a poem, “Du liegst | You lie” commemorating Luxemburg’s fate; in 2003, poet & Celan-scholar Michael Speier & I tracked Celan’s 1967 walk to & into the Tiergarten on the traces of Rosa Luxemburg. Nicole Peyrafitte videoed our walk & added my reading of the translation of “You lie” as soundtrack. The poem & my commentary (as found in Breathturn Into Timestead<\/a>) are reprinted below the video:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n