Reinventing a Socialist Heroine: Commemorating Rosa Luxemburg after Unification

Abstract

On 18 September 1991, the representative assembly of the Berlin district of Friedrichshain voted to request from the Berlin Senate the removal of the statue of Lenin from Leninplatz (Lenin Square). The demolition started later the same year (Gamboni, 1997, p. 83). In January 1992, protesters participating in the annual commemoration march for two German communists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, carried some stones of the now demolished Lenin monument to the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Memorial of Socialists) in Berlin Friedrichsfelde and buried them next to the gravestones of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Ironically, even if most certainly not intended by the demonstrators, this act very much symbolizes the fate of the memorialization of these communist icons in unified Germany. Lenin monuments were demolished all over East Germany in the early 1990s and public commemoration ceremonies were no longer held in his honour. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, however, faced quite a different fate. Even today, more than 10,000 people visit the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten each year to commemorate the two communists (E. Schmid, 2010). And while the Lenin monument in Berlin was demolished in the early 1990s, the coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in the Berlin Senate agreed in 2002 to erect a monument for Rosa Luxemburg.