  When Luxemburg was released from prison in November 1918, Germany looked very different. The success of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 which led to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and Russia sparked mutiny at the border and a series of strikes and insurrections among the German workers who demanded a democratic republic. From prison, Luxemburg had greeted the Russian revolution as “an act of world-historical significance whose traces will be not be extinguished for aeons” (cited in Fröhlich 1940 [2010: 239]). But as her verdict makes clear, she was not hopeful that the victory would last, in no small part because she lacked confidence that German social democrats would support their Russian counterparts. While the Spartakus group continued to demand the creation of a socialist republic based on workers’ councils, the SPD greeted the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II by installing its leader, Friedrich Ebert as chancellor of the new liberal parliamentarian republic. From Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht published the first issue of Rote Fahne, the organ of the Spartakusbund, followed in December by the announcement of the programme. The contrast between alternatives could not have been starker: either the “traditional organs of bourgeois class rule, the federal councils, the parliaments, municipal councils etc.” or the proletariat’s own “class organs: Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils” in which they “occupy all public posts, superintend all public activity, and measure all the needs of the state by their own class interests and socialists tasks” (cited in Fröhlich 1940 [2010: 273]). A couple of weeks later the same programme was presented in the inaugural Congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) where Luxemburg argued in favour of participating in the upcoming January elections to the National Assembly. She was outvoted. In the first days of January 1919, another wave of protests saw hundreds of thousands of workers descend into the streets and occupy train stations and newspapers. The Spartakists urged caution. Despite the anarchy in Berlin, Luxemburg, especially, did not think the German people were ready for a socialist revolution. The Spartakist uprising mobilised the far right, while, Gustav Noske, the social-democratic Interior minister ordered the police to crush the protests. With the help of the Freikorps, the far-right, anti-republican, proto-nazi paramilitary groups, many activists were arrested and murdered. The same fate would soon fall on Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On the 15th January 1919, they were discovered in their hiding place, arrested, knocked unconscious with rifle buts then shot. Luxemburg’s body was thrown into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, from where it washed ashore a few months after.