The Freedom of Those Who Think Differently

In the autumn of 1918, in prison in Breslau, Rosa Luxemburg wrote a critique of the Russian Revolution. It was published in 1922. She wrote that freedom only for the supporters of the government, or only for the members of one party, is no freedom. In a note in the margin stands her best-known sentence: Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden. Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently. The sentence circulates in several variants. This is the wording of her collected works. On 17 January 1988, civil rights activists and people who wanted to leave East Germany tried to join the state’s yearly march in honor of Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in East Berlin, with their own placards. More than 100 were arrested before they reached it.

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