Remembering the Dead
Annotation
Professor Dr. Heinz Kamnitzer was the head of the East German writers group, PEN. In response to the counter-demonstration at the 1988 Liebknecht-Luxemburg parade, Kamnitzer wrote this op-ed essay, entitled “Remembering the Dead” as a way of distancing the East German Communist Party (SED) from the actions of the demonstrators. In this newspaper article, Kamnitzer accuses the demonstrators of blasphemy and compares the protesters to hooligans.
This source is a part of the Memory in East Germany teaching module.
Text
Remembering the Dead
I
The funeral march for the murdered national heroes of our state was purposely disturbed; the memorial
service for the martyrs of the Communist party was to be wantonly desecrated. They did not intend to
participate in the demonstration out of reverence, but rather in order to draw attention to themselves.
What happened here is just as reprehensible as blasphemy. No church would tolerate it if someone were to
degrade a commemoration procession honoring a Catholic cardinal or a Protestant bishop. In the same
manner, one cannot ask that we tolerate it when someone disturbs and defiles the memory of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Should one like an even closer analogy, one needs only imagine what would happen if the funeral
procession to Olof Palme’s last resting place were disrupted by protests, regardless of what kind.
Incidentally, there are laws in every civilized country that forbid someone to insult the memory of the
dead.
II
It is even more outrageous when the General Secretary of the CDU in Berlin (West), Mr. Landowsky,
calls on those involved to exercise selfcriticism and ask themselves “if the arrests helped contribute to
the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.” He also made it quit clear in the Schöneberg House
of Representatives what he understood to be the nature of this legacy: “I mean, that the deaths of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were an objective, albeit undesired, contribution that made the Weimar
Republic even possible.”
Today, whoever justifies this assassination supports terrorism in our time as well, if he likes it or not.
III
One should not invoke Rosa Luxemburg, to whom the phrase “freedom isthe freedom to think
differently” is attributed. In truth, this phrase is found in a manuscript that she worked on while in prison
in early 1918. If one wants to quote her here, one should not keep silent the fact that she later refused to
publish these notes, because the German November Revolution taught her what the Russian Bolsheviks
already knew.
She made it quite clear before her death what her legacy is: “The historical question that has made its way
to the agenda of today is – bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy. Dictatorship of the proletariat is
democracy in the socialist sense.”
“It is not where wageslaves sit next to the capitalists and the peasant proletariat sits next to the Junker in
equality for a parliamentary debate on the questions of life. Only there, where the millions who comprise
the proletarian masses grab hold of the entire power of the state with its calloused fist in order, like the
god Thor uses his hammer, smashes the ruling class on the head. There alone we find a democracy that
does not cheat the people.”
One can agree or disagree with her. However, he who misappropriates her last cognitions is either
unrighteous or ignorant.
Source: Heinz Kamnitzer, opinion article, “Die Toten Mahnen,” trans. Jon Berndt Olsen, Neues
Deutschland, January 28, 1988.
Credits
Heinz Kamnitzer, opinion article, “Die Toten Mahnen,” trans. Jon Berndt Olsen, Neues Deutschland, January 28, 1988.