manifesto is passed among his fellow soldiers on the front before returning home. While he is away, Paul Schreiner, whose wedding Liebknecht attended earlier in the film, dies on the front. This leaves his wife Käthe to raise their newborn child alone and make Liebknecht's manifesto public. Liebknecht returns to Germany on furlough in 1916, and finds himself ejected from the Reichstag for disorderly conduct. Liebknecht meets with Rosa Luxemburg (Zofia Rysiówna), who was recently released from prison. The two plan to break away from the SPD and found the Spartacus League, in order to maintain revolutionary methods and resist the SPD leadership for supporting an "imperialist war." Liebknecht goes to Jena to raise some youth supporters for a May 1 demonstration in Berlin. On the day of the demonstration, Liebknecht speaks despite threats of arrest. He is quickly gagged and arrested, to be taken in for questioning away from the protesting crowds. Liebknecht is told he has a choice in his sentencing: He can receive a smaller charge with a minimum sentence of one day, or a larger charge of high treason with a minimum sentence of two and a half years. He is offered the smaller sentence in exchange for a promise not to distribute anti-war propaganda in the future, however, Liebknecht turns this down. He is taken to trial as the workers continue protesting in the streets. Liebknecht uses his trial to denounce the imprisonment of fellow revolutionaries and those speaking out against German militarism. At this point, the public is ejected from the trial, which is now to be held behind closed doors. The film concludes with a shots of Liebknecht being escorted to prison, overlaid with text: Production While there had been earlier films about other German socialist heroes such as Ernst Thälmann, Sohn seiner Klasse (1954) and Führer seiner Klasse (1955), the East German government told the DEFA to begin work a new large-scale project to further document the major personalities of the workers' movement in Germany. In the 1960s, Karl Liebknecht was chosen to be the subject of this new production. Initially, DEFA planned a two-part movie before it chose a two-hour view of the life of Liebknecht, focused not on making a memorial but "making a fellow human accessible." Slatan Dudow was originally slated to be the director until his death in 1963 resulted in the project being taken over by Günter