Anti-Semitism,Denunciation,and the Frankfurt Trial against Rosa Luxemburg

Abstract

This paper examines the largely overlooked role of denunciation in initiating the Frankfurt trial of Rosa Luxemburg in early 1914 for inciting disobedience among German soldiers, and corrects errors that have entered the scholarly literature on the topic. This is then taken as the starting point for wider reflections on the connections between denunciation, anti-Semitism, and anti-socialism in Germany in the ‘long nineteenth century’. It will be argued that the practice of denunciation, directed both against the political Left and against Jews, long preceded the now well-documented salience of denunciation in the Nazi dictatorship. Denunciation was thus an asymmetrical political weapon – it could be invoked against the political Left by their right-wing and conservative opponents in nineteenth-century Germany, but was not available to the democratic Left, nor would it have been palatable to them. The capacity of German anti-Semites to resort to denunciation of Social Democrats also highlights the extent to which anti-Semites could count on being regarded as among the ‘state-supporting’ parties in Imperial Germany.