Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/108

98 David, Frank, Göhre, Liebknecht, Scheidemann, Südekum, Weill, and Wendel, and the minority counting Geyer, Ledebour, Rosa Luxemburg, Stadthagen, and Klara Zetkin.

The German Social Democrats, especially the radical minority, did their best to convince their foreign comrades that the action of the Jena Congress in approving the stand of the Reichstag group on the question of the military budget could not be construed as an endorsement of militarism. Karl Liebknecht's celebrated Krupp "revelations" of 1913 were continued and enlarged in May, 1914. The "Zabern affair" was repeatedly exploited in the Reichstag, Wendel going so far in May, 1914, as to conclude a speech with the words, Vive la France. Similarly exploited was the prosecution of Rosa Luxemburg on the charge of libelling the army. And when the Great War actually threatened, Vorwärts fairly fulminated against the impending disaster. In an extra edition published on July 25, 1914, a proclamation of the party executive in bold blackfaced type denounced "Austrian imperialism bringing death and destruction to all Europe". "However much we condemn the deeds of the Pan-Serb nationalists", it went on to say,

In the din of the clash of arms, the voice of protest, of "international brotherhood", was swiftly silenced. Indeed the party executive hardly awaited the outbreak of war to sound a different note in another proclamation in Vorwärts.