Disparate groups of the left claim a link to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht but not to each other, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin

THE SUN was high in the cold, blue sky as the crowd came crunching through the cemetery snow.

The procession of old women in fur coats and mohair hats, families in matching all-weather jackets and thin young men in thinner hooded tops had come to lay red carnations on the graves of German socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

The two were abducted on January 15th, 1919, by the Freikorps, the remnants of the German imperial army ordered by the new Social Democrat (SPD) government to put an end to months of upheaval since the end of the war.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht, leading figures in the rising, were interrogated and tortured. Luxemburg's life ended with a blow to the head and a bullet in the back. Her body was dumped in a canal and, when it finally reappeared five months later, it was placed in the empty coffin that had been buried next to Liebknecht. He was shot on the same evening as her and dumped anonymously in a morgue.

Their workers' revolution was crushed, clearing the stage for the Weimar Republic's 15-year run.

The crowds at the Friedrichsfelde graveyard yesterday are just one indication of the unbroken fascination surrounding Luxemburg, a Polish-born Jewish academic.

But it's an attention that has left the socialist leader as much hostage as heroine of the divided German left.

Outside the graveyard, which holds the biggest names of German socialism, dozens of stalls sell books, CDs, pamphlets and papers, sausages and hot drinks. The well-known Left Party has a stand, as does the lesser known German Communist Party. Even the obscure Spartacist League is here to claim its Luxemburg pedigree.

All groups are here to remember "their" Rosa and Karl, but no group wants to have anything to do with any other.

"All these acronyms and organisations calling for world revolution are just ridiculous," says Martin, in attendance with his wife and two adult children. "The left is too splintered to be taken seriously by anyone. Lenin said that left-wing radicalism was communism's childhood illness; it's still suffering."

The first to leave their carnations on the simple, flat gravestones are the people sometimes termed Germany's "Ewiggestrigen" - happy hostages to their private East German past. The men, identical pensioners in rectangular glasses and Russian fur hats, could be contestants in an Erich Honecker lookalike contest.

One would-be Honecker watches with distaste as press photographers jostle to get pictures of people adding their carnations to the graves.

"Back in the GDR, the press would be have properly controlled," he hisses, without a hint of irony.

Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, near the Polish city of Lublin in 1871, the daughter of a timber dealer. At the University of Zürich, one of the few at the time to admit women, she earned her doctorate before moving to Germany in 1898 to represent the Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

She cut her ties with the German SPD in 1914 when it supported the war and co-founded the Spartacist League, later the Communist Party (KP).

The SPD's rise to power after the kaiser's abdication in 1918 was, the socialist leader complained, merely a continuation of the same corrupt imperialist system that lead Germany to war.

In and out of prison most of her life, she welcomed the Soviet Revolution but warned soon after of Bolshevik dictatorial tendencies.

"Without general elections, a free press, freedom of assembly and freedom of opinion," she wrote in a pamphlet only published in 1922, "life in every public institution will die off, replaced by pseudo-life."

For decades Germany's Communist Party and later the Socialist Unity Party (SED) presented Luxemburg as a public martyr to its cause. In private, however, leaders were uneasy with the figure best remembered for saying that "freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently".

"For years many of her writings were taboo in the GDR because her calls for socialism and freedom were at odds with what was propagated," said Marion Schütrumpf of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

As the older generation began to leave the graveyard yesterday, a lively march of 8,000 young radicals arrived.

"Whether it's the banking crisis or the Gaza situation it's clear we need new alternatives; Luxemburg is more relevant than ever before," said 23-year-old Martina.

Nine decades on it seems that Rosa Luxemburg, untainted by the burden of ever holding power/office, or the rise of Stalin, is an exciting figure for the young German left; her violent death remains a great "what if" riddle of German history.

"It's impossible to say what would have happened had Luxemburg lived," says Philip (32). "All we can say for sure is that, with the double murder, the German socialist movement was lobotomised and brought into line with Moscow."