Die Rote Fahne


Die Rote Fahne was a German newspaper originally founded in 1876 by Socialist Worker's party leader Wilhelm Hasselmann, and which has been since published on and off, at times underground, by German Socialists and Communists. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg famously published it in 1918 as organ of the Spartacus League.
Following the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg during the chancellorship of the Social Democratic Party of Germany's Friedrich Ebert, the newspaper was published, with interruptions, by the Communist Party of Germany. Proscribed by the National Socialist Worker's Party government of Adolf Hitler after 1933, publication continued illegally, underground.

History

1876

of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany and member of the German Reichstag founded a short-lived, weekly newspaper called Die rote Fahne.

1918-1933

Using the newspaper's subtitle as indicator of its political allegiance, Die Rote Fahne was successively the central organ of:
Many prominent Germans and others worked on the newspaper:
Outlawed after the end of the Weimar Republic and the Reichstag fire in 1933, it was illegally distributed during the National Socialist government by underground groups close to the Communist Party until 1942. Wilhelm Guddorf was known to have been an editor of the newspaper in the late 1930s.

1970 and afterwards

Following the events of 1968, several projects of ideologically divergent groups of the so-called old and the new left arose in the Federal German Republic to build a new communist party. In addition to the German Communist Party, which is widely known as the West German KPD successor party and publishes the newspaper Unser Zeit as a party organ, various competing small communist parties, the so-called K groups, were founded, each of which was associated with different ideological concepts of communism. Out of these groupings, there were several newspaper projects in the 1970s called Rote Fahne.

External sources