Liebknecht,Wilhelm b. March 29, 1826; Giessen, Hesse d.August 7, 1900; Berlin, Prussia
German Social Democratic leader who influenced the development of the Socialist movement in the United States. Liebknecht participated in the Revolution of 1848. After its repression he ended up in exile in England from 1850 to 1862.
There he met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and accepted most of their understanding of class, history, and politics. He represented German labor at the First International(1868—1872) and with August Bebel founded the Eisenacher Sozialdemokrat- ische Arbeiterpartei (Eisenacher Social Democratic Labor Party), which later merged with the Allgemeine Deutsche Ar- beiterverein (General German Workers Association) and finally became the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, German Social Democratic Party). Liebknecht continuously sought to maintain labor unity and served as an editor of newspapers such as Volksstaat (People’s State) and Vorwarts (Forward). During the time of the anti-Socialist Laws (1878—1890), Liebknecht went into exile in Zurich and London. He advocated and advanced the Marxian materialist perspective, although he maintained his earlier idealistic outlook. By his commitment, popular sayings (“Knowledge is power— power is knowledge”), informed writings on history and contemporary problems, as well as his adroit tactics, he became known to social activists around the world. In that capacity the American Socialists invited him to visit.
Liebknecht, who spoke and wrote English fluently, visited the United States for three months during 1886 with Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx. He spoke to crowds of 25,000 in New York according to the New Haven Workmen’s Advocate of September 26, 1886. New Haven (in Germania Hall), Detroit, and Milwaukee saw similar receptions, accompanied by the playing of the “Marseillaise.” In Chicago, where the Haymarket massacre had placed the city in a state of siege, debates with the competing anarchists occurred.
At the end of his trip, when the Socialist Singing Society presented Heinrich Heine’s “Die Weber” (“The Weavers”) at the Cooper Union, Liebknecht commented (as reported in the Workmen’s Advocate of December 5), that in the United States he had found “a large, intelligent audience of Socialists.” He noted that bourgeois journalists had “at first misrepresented the moment; they confounded us with Anarchists, dynamiters, and goodness knows what. Toward the end of my visit I have noticed a marked improvement.” Liebknecht would write a booklet, Ein Blick in die Neue Welt (Views of the New World), about his American experiences. Published in 1887 and composed mainly of his letters and speeches, this work generally offered a very positive view of the United States. Liebknecht’s booklet helped many German Socialists see the New World as a land of opportunities, and he often thought of emigrating there.Already earlier Liebknecht had fostered international Socialist relations. One of the historians of the U.S. Socialist and labor movement, Philip S. Foner, has edited Liebknecht’s lengthy letters and commentaries that appeared in the Chicago Workingman’s Advocate from November 1870 to December 1871. Through those letters, workers in Chicago could learn about the fundamental principles of the German labor movement as well as its stance on the Franco-Prussian War. Liebknecht continued to write for various radical American newspapers during the 1880s and he helped to disseminate an understanding of European labor and politics.
Dieter K. Buse
See also Anarchists; Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law; Haymarket
References and Further Reading
Foner, Philip S., ed. Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Letters to the Chicago Workingman’s Advocate, November 26, 1870—December 2, 1871. New York: Holmes, 1983.
Pelz, William A., ed. Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.
Shore, Eliott, et al., eds. The German- American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850—1940. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1992.