Clara Zetkin: Comrade Liebknecht abandoned by the Reichstag

(May 1916)

[My own translation of the text in "Die Gleichheit, Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen", Stuttgart, 26 May 1916, reprinted in Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, Vol. I, pp. 718-723. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

The Reichstag recently had to deal with motions from the Social Democratic fraction and the Social Democratic Working Group. They were intended to preserve the immunity of deputies, which is the basis of the free exercise of the mandate as representatives of the people. The motions demanded the immediate lifting of the imprisonment in which comrade Liebknecht is known to have been since 1 May. The Reichstag had referred the motions to its Rules Commission.

From the report given to the Reichstag by the deputy Payer (Progressive People's Party), as reported by the "Schwäbischer Merkur", it can be seen that the facts taken from the files of the Royal Commandant's Court which led to the detention are as follows:

"On the evening of 1 May, after 8 o'clock, gatherings took place on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, to which about 200 persons, mostly of youthful age, including women, had turned up. According to the description of the police officers and non-commissioned officers who were questioned as witnesses, the gatherings were, as seems to be usual in such cases, pulled further along the pavements by the guards who were present, who also closed off part of the street from time to time. There was some noise and hooting, but in general, according to this account, the crowd behaved calmly. While the police were trying to clear the pavement in front of the 'Fürstenhof', a man shouted from a crowd in a loud voice: 'Down with the war! Down with the government!' Two guards grabbed the man and led him to the nearest police station. According to them, he resisted being led away by bending his upper body backwards, flailing his arms backwards and bracing his feet against the ground. The arrested man could only be taken to the police station by force. This arrested man was the MP Liebknecht, who was wearing a civilian suit at the time and was not immediately recognised by the guards. He was kept in custody. On 2 May, at the instigation of the criminal investigation department, because he was suspected of having initiated the street demonstrations, house searches were carried out at his home and office, and 120 small leaflets, invitations to the street demonstration on 1 May, and over 1,300 copies of a leaflet 'Auf zur Maifeier!' [Let's go to May Day] During his first interrogation before a police inspector on 2 May, the deputy Liebknecht immediately stated that he was familiar with the leaflets and flyers found in his apartment, that he had distributed them as far as he had had the opportunity to do so, and that he admitted that the copies found in his apartment had been intended for distribution. On the evening of 1 May, he had gone to Potsdamer Platz to take part in the May Day demonstration. He had shouted several times in the crowd: 'Down with the war! Down with the government!' In doing so, he wanted to publicly express his conviction that it was the government's duty to end the war and that it was the people's task to exert pressure on the government. He did not regard this public appearance of his as punishable, but rather as a duty towards the great mass of the German people as well as towards other belligerent states in which his political comrades were active in the same sense as he."

Two arrest warrants were issued against comrade Liebknecht on 3 May. In the first, he was declared to be urgently suspected of having incited disobedience against the authorities and of having been guilty of such disobedience himself by not obeying an official order (the well-known ban on social democratic activity as a soldier). He is also charged with physical resistance against an official. In the second arrest warrant, the investigation is ordered because he is strongly suspected of having deliberately aided and abetted an enemy power during a war that has broken out against the German Reich.

Mr. Payer refrained from reading out the May Day appeal, which Liebknecht is accused of spreading, because it would have to "give its contents the greatest conceivable dissemination to the outside world". However, he said: "Insofar as its content can be presented at all without damaging the Reich, the appeal takes the May Day celebrations as an opportunity to hold responsible for the war and the damage occurring in its wake, in the main, not our foreign enemies, but a number of domestic estates and branches of industry and the imperiousness of the government. Then it went on to call on the workers and women not to bear the hell of war and the crime of human slaughter any more; only the people could put an end to it; it must no longer forge is own chains. Everywhere in Germany and in the enemy countries the workers must take up the banner of the class struggle. The workers and women are once again called upon to make May Day a day of protest against imperialist slaughter. The hand of brotherhood is extended to the whole of humankind across the border barriers and battlefields, and the call is made to fight, to fight against our enemies, that is, not against our opponents in the war, but against the German Junkers, the German capitalists and their executive committee, the German government."

Mr. Payer believed he had to add that this call was made in "unusually passionate language and inciting tone."

"In a letter," Mr. Payer continued, "dated May 4, addressed to the Royal Court of Command in Berlin, the deputy Liebknecht, in longer remarks, interpreted his call: 'Down with the government!' to mean that he wanted to brand the overall policy of the government as pernicious for the mass of the population and that the most brutal class struggle against the government was the duty of every representative of proletarian interests, and he then added that the propaganda for the unity of the workers of all countries against their fratricidal national comrades, especially during the war is a doubly sacred duty of a socialist."

In the committee, the majority had assumed that the charges against Liebknecht were well-founded, not a mere sham. The question had been examined "whether really the House, and therefore the general public, had so great an interest in the co-operation of the member in question. The consequences of such demonstrations, as Liebknecht had wanted, could not be overlooked, especially in large cities. One must also consider the effect of similar demonstrations abroad. If Liebknecht was deprived from his judge, he would be artificially given the opportunity to repeat his misdemeanours at the next available opportunity. Therefore, the commission moves that the motions be rejected."

In vain, the Social-Democratic fraction and the Social-Democratic Working Group tried to show at least to bourgeois liberalism the folly of the beginning, according to the principle: What affects me today can affect you tomorrow. They warned in vain against the terrible impression that a surrender of parliamentary immunity in this particular case would create in wide circles with democratic sensibilities. They also warned against giving rise to the suspicion that the bourgeois parties had let themselves be carried away into an act of revenge out of a feeling of nervousness and weakness. In vain. After the Social Democratic fraction had so often disavowed Liebknecht and exposed him to the laughter of his opponents; after individual fraction members had demonstratively taken the side of the bourgeoisie against their former fraction colleague, the right to complain was forfeited when, at the same time as the man, the parliamentary institution went hopelessly overboard. In fact, once the principle is recognised that what matters is whether the House has "so great an interest in the co-operation of the member in question" - and this principle is recognised by the vote - this also puts every other minority in the hands of the majority.

In their speeches, both comrade Landsberg and comrade Haase pointed to historical situations in which liberal and centre leaders also had the misfortune to be met with a similarly heavy indictment. At that time, parliaments placed their basic parliamentary right, the inviolability of members, higher than all other considerations. There was a good reason for this. Back then, the bourgeoisie itself was still partly a fighting and resisting class. Today it provides saturated government parties. The latter consider it impossible that their MPs will ever again find themselves in such a difficult position. That the bourgeois parties did not even think it worth the trouble to refute the reasons of the social democrats is not surprising. Bourgeois papers have openly declared that the Social-Democratic fraction introduced the motion only for the sake of its prestige, for decency`s sake. They let it be known that they did not really mean it. This assumption cannot be held against the bourgeois, in view of comrade Landsberg's anxious distancing himself from the person of the accused, in view of the openly hostile manifestations of some Social Democratic deputies and newspapers, not only against the person, but also against socialism, as unreservedly and consequently represented by Liebknecht. The Social Democratic Working Group, too, would be in a different position today if it had left no doubt earlier on that it agreed in terms of content with Liebknecht and especially also with his minor interpellations.