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 by the Communist Party of Germany with some interruptions. Banned by the Nazi Party's 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:
The publication was proscribed from October 1923 to March 1924, as part of the ban on the German Communist Party. The newspaper continued in illegal production and distribution, sometimes renamed "Rote Sturmfahne" or "Die Fahne der Revolution". In 1926, the newspaper moved into the Karl Liebknecht House, to which it added in July 1928 a rotary press. On 23 February 1933, Nazi police occupied Karl-Liebknecht-Haus and closed it the following day, anticipating the Nazi ban on all communist and socialist press after the Reichstag fire a few days later.
Many prominent Germans and others worked on the newspaper:

1933–1942

Outlawed after the end of the Weimar Republic and the Reichstag fire in 1933, it was illegally distributed during the Nazi regime 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 new left arose in the Federal Republic of Germany with the aim to build a new communist party. While the German Communist Party, which is widely known as the West German KPD successor party, publishes the newspaper Unsere Zeit as its party organ; several of the various competing small communist parties and organisations, the so-called K groups, each with their own differing ideological concepts of communism, started their own newspaper projects under the Rote Fahne name.
Two current political parties publish a newspaper as their main party outlet named Die Rote Fahne: the Communist Party of Germany, a fringe party founded in 1990 by disgruntled members of the Socialist [Unity Party of Germany], and the Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany.
Another currently circulated publication of the same name is run by Stephan Steins as part of the KPD-initiative. This publication has been criticized for promoting conspiracy theories as well as anti-Zionism and criticizing mass migration.

External sources

Category:1918 establishments in Germany
Category:Communism in Germany
Category:Communist Party of Germany
Category:Communist newspapers
Category:Defunct newspapers published in Germany
Category:Newspapers published in Berlin
Category:German-language newspapers
Category:German-language communist newspapers
Category:Newspapers established in 1918
Category:Publications with year of disestablishment missing
Category:Daily newspapers published in Germany
Category:Defunct daily newspapers