Communist Corpse Found in the Charite in Berlin

Der Spiegel is reporting that the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg has been found in the basement of the Charite in Berlin. Headless and handless the corpse displays all the appropriate characteristics after being submitted to a computer tomography test. The corpse had been water-logged, had congenital damage to a hip, and had one leg longer than the other. It once was a woman 40 to 50 years old at he time of her death.

After she was shot in the Tiergarten her body was weighted with stones at hands and feet and thrown into the Landwehr canal. As the corpse was not found until after the winter ice had melted it is assumed the extremities had been lost during the five-month submersion. The body of Karl Liebknecht, who was found, tortured and then murdered at the same time as Luxemburg was taken to the Charite. Autopsy reports from the period suggest that another corpse was substituted for that of Luxemburg. The graves of the two were emptied in the 1930s and the corpses never found, although they remain places of pilgrimage for revolutionary communists from all over the world.

During the nightmare years of the German Democratic Republic visitors to the GDR dictator Honecker would receive a persian carpet portraying Luxemburg and Liebknecht. When the Lives of Others was at last overthrown in 1989 these carpets became valued memorabilia of that horrid regime. An Angelic friend brought us one from Germany. It is designed with loops so that it hangs on the wall like a tapestry. No trampling the faces of the revolution by putting it on the floor.