Rosa Luxemburg: “The Revolution Will ‘Raise Itself up Again Clashing,’ and to Your Horror It Will Proclaim to the Sound of Trumpets: I Was, I Am, I Shall Be”

The imperialist war and the SPD leadership�s support for it nearly broke Luxemburg. In Germany, conditions for workers and soldiers were grim. Working class families spent 52 percent of their income on food and 33 percent on necessities such as housing, heating, lights and clothing. Whatever was left went to school fees for the children, church, social and intellectual life, health, insurance, debt, and savings� (�Economic and Social Development,� Imperial Germany 1871-1918). [1] By May, 1916, Luxemburg received word that her friend and comrade, Karl Liebknecht, has been arrested:: �I tried with all the might of my fist to �free� him [when he was seized] and I pulled at him and at the policemen all the way to the police station, from which I was unceremoniously expelled� (Letter to Clara Zetkin, [Sudende,] May 12, 1916, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg). [2] By August 1916, she was on the verge of suicide (The Reader).

By the end of this meeting, Luxemburg and Liebknecht and others had formed the Die Gruppe Internationale and the Die Internationale journal. It was this crucial event that �helped galvanize antiwar sentiment and led a year later to the formation of Spartacus Group.� Luxemburg breaks from �the political legacy� of the SPD and the editors of Vorwarts and New Zeit. She and Karl Liebknecht, are arrested and imprisoned, but the Die Gruppe Internationale, now the Spartacus League, moves underground and continues to find creative ways in which to wage an �illegal campaign� against the war, distributing pamphlets, many of which were written by an imprisoned Luxemburg.