MIA > Archive > Wilhelm Liebknecht
Written: In German as political speeches, delivered from 1869 to 1895.
Appeared in print as contemporary newspaper articles and pamphlets.
Published in English: 1928.
Translated by: Unknown (name not provided). [Note]
Source: International Publishers, first edition, 1928, New York, USA. 96 pages.
Public Domain: This work is free of any copyright restrictions.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, November, 2022
[Note:] This is a 1928 English translation of a pamphlet that first appeared in its native German in 1925, under the heading Redner der Revolution (Revolutionary Speakers). It was one installment of a large series of pamphlets showcasing the most iconic speeches of various revolutionary leaders, compiled and published by the Communist Parties of Germany, the USA, and possibly France. All known installments of the English-language series, Voices of Revolt, are available as PDF scans here.
The name of the translator of these speeches, unfortunately, was not named. The first version of this editor’s note suggested Kurt Kersten as a possible translator, but as his preface first appeared with the 1925 German edition and there’s little evidence of him having known English at that time, this now seems unlikely. My intuition from reading the Voices of Revolt series is that a single translator completed both Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel’s volumes, while Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Liebknecht’s installments were translated by someone else. I likewise suspect that many of the titles of these speech excerpts are editorial creations, and therefore might not be the same titles that these speeches were originally published under in German, whatever those may be.
For this MIA online edition, the original editorial footnotes have been linked with numbers, while explanatory notes created for the glossary of this 1928 collection have been linked with letters. I have also added a few extra explanatory notes of my own, which will be identified as such in the text. Finally, I have added paragraph breaks to the long and sometimes extremely long paragraphs of the original text. While these long paragraphs were acceptable in the original small booklet, most of the speeches required new paragraph breaks for them to remain readable on a web page. The exceptions are the Introduction, The Eighteenth of March, and the short fragmentary speeches. —Bill Wright, July 2023.
Last updated on 23 September 2023