ローザ・ルクセンブルクの「異論の自由」の意味と衝撃

―1988年1月17日東独でのローザ・デモ事件に関連して―

抄録

This paper studies the significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous words “Freedom for people who think differently” in her manuscript “The Russian Revolution” (1918) as a background of the event of January 17, 1988 in East Berlin.

On 17 January 1988, a group tried to join the “fighting demonstration in honor of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg” in East Berlin with their own banners. The banners carried Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “Freedom is always the freedom for people who think differently” etc. quoted from her manuscript.

The MfS (East German security forces, so-called “Stasi”) arrested more than 100 people on the day. The Stasi named this operation “Troublemakers”. Hundreds, or thousands of people protested against this operation in churches every night. Western media reported the event every day. East German authorities showed some mysterious actions for the control of the event.

As for the initiator of the event there have been often misunderstandings since then. There has been a controversy also on the manuscript for a long time.

The president of the East German PEN Club H. Kamnitzer (he was also an IM (spy) of the Stasi) contributed an article to the party organ “Neues Deutschland” of January 28, 1988. He emphasized that the group had taken the quotation out of context for their banners and that Rosa Luxemburg canceled these words right before her death (January 15, 1919). This idea is a rehash.

For the first time Clara Zetkin’s book (1922) affirmed that Rosa Luxemburg canceled the contents of the manuscript. During the same period, Georg Lukács criticized Rosa Luxemburg theoretically. Since then there has been a heated controversy on the manuscript “The Russian Revolution”.

In this paper, after having explained the event briefly, I will show who was the real initiator of the event. Then I will examine the criticism of Rosa Luxemburg by Zetkin and Lukács, and I will show the influences of the event on the fate of East Germany.

My main conclusions are as follows: 1) the initiator of the event of January 17, 1988 in East Berlin was not a group of human rights activists, but the applicants for exit from the GDR, especially the working group “GDR Nationality Law”, 2) Rosa Luxemburg did not cancel her theory about and belief in the freedom, 3) Lukács studied Rosa Luxemburg’s theory about the freedom academically and understood it very well, though he attacked her, 4) Rosa Luxemburg thought that “Freedom for people who think differently” was essential not only for the socialist revolution, but also for the social development in general, and 5) the event of January 17, 1988 became the beginning of the last stage of the exit movement.