I do not know if this wonderfully affecting choral piece by Ernst Toller in honor of Liebknecht and Luxemburg was ever performed, I hope so. In any case, it is never too late.

‘’A Man and a Woman,’ Mass Recitation’ by Ernst Toller from the New Masses. Vol. 14 No. 3. January 15, 1935.

FULL CHOIR:
When the swinging hammers rest
And the sweeping scythes,
When the evening falls
On the ripening fields
And the flags, the red assailing flags
Float in a quiet wind
In the stony canyons of the city streets,
Then we think of them
The fighters of the Revolution fallen un-
known.

CHRONICLER:
In the years
Nineteen hundred and fourteen to nineteen
hundred and eighteen
Trampled the fields of Europe–
War.
Where once the peasant
Drove the ploughshare
Where once his hand
Strewed seed for corn
The Generals sowed Bombs
Grenades
Hate.
And the harvest ripened
And the harvest was gathered in
And the barns were filled
With ten million
Cripples
Towns laid waste
Shattered villages
Hunger
Misery
Despair
Death.

CHRONICLER:
Then there arose
A man
Alone

CHOIR:
Karl Liebknecht!

CHRONICLER:
And with a clear voice
Audible to all He cried

FULL CHOIR:
War on the war!

CHRONICLER:
First was a silence
More terrible
Than drums at the front.
And all men
Lay waiting Then
Came no answer.
The voice was still.
And the tyrants’ bullies Buried the voice
In the stone grave
Of prison.

CHOIR OF WOMEN:
One man’s voice
Drives
Like the falling leaf
In the storm of September.
It cries and is lost.

CHOIR OF MEN:
One man’s voice
Is mightier
Than Heaven’s thunder
And the Earth’s.
Time’s rust
Shall not corrode it
Nor the dissolution
Of Death.
A thousand years
Shall re-echo it.

FULL CHOIR:
For the voice of truth
Is invincible.

CHOIR OF MEN:
And the voice
Woke
The sleepers of Germany.

CHRONICLER:
In the grey streets
Of the city Berlin
There fought
From Wedding to Friedrichshaven
Neukölln to Lichtenberg
Old hardened men
And youths, boys almost
Fought there.

FULL CHOIR:
For a Germany
Of working hands
For a Germany
Of justice.

CHRONICLER:
Ever
Stood with them
A man.

CHOIR OF MEN:
Karl Liebknecht.

CHRONICLER:
He shared
The burden of time
The bread of poverty
The salt of persecution
And their faith.

CHOIR (alternately):
Kill him!
Shrieked
The profiteers, the traitors of the people
Kill him!
Cracked the whips
Of the robbers of the poor
Kill him!
Ordered the generals
If he is dead
The Revolution is dead
And we shall live
Again.

CHRONICLER:
Upon his head they set
A price. Who shall catch him
Shall have his reward
Of money, orders and honor.
The same shall be paid
To whoever brings
The woman whose word
Brings life to the people
In battle.

CHOIR OF WOMEN:
Rosa Luxemburg.

CHOIR:
Who catches Karl Liebknecht?
Who catches Rosa Luxemburg?
A hundred thousand marks
In ready cash
In ready cash
Are his.

CHOIR (alternately):
D’you know, man, what’s the good of cash?
Money is bread and good meat hash
Money is warmth and ease inside
Money is sleep whatever betide
Money is time and time is yours
Money is might and bursts all doors
Money is luck, money makes cash
Now’s the time, now–or smash!

CHRONICLER:
And one
Of all the millions, one
Betrayed
The leader
Of the struggling people
Of Berlin.

VOICE:
I will tell you
Where they sleep
At night
Hidden like criminals.

CHRONICLER:
And led the soldiers
To the house wherein
Liebknecht and Luxemburg
Slept the uneasy sleep
Of the hunted.

CHOIR OF WOMEN:
For the hunted
Has no rest
Day is his foe
Night shields him not
Only the breath of friends
Lamenting, defenceless guard.

MEN:
Are you Karl Liebknecht?

VOICE:
I am Karl Liebknecht.

MEN:
Are you Rosa Luxemburg?

VOICE:
I am Rosa Luxemburg.

CHOIR:
I say to you, whoever strike
These ones dead, does good
And the mighty
Will reward it
The judges will not
Sentence him
The world
Will hold out its arms to him
And the people
Will praise him
The Saviour.

CHRONICLER:
They insulted the prisoners
And asked, mocking:

CHOIR (alternately):
Where now are your comrades?
Where is your Heaven on Earth.

CHRONICLER:
And spat in their faces
And struck with clubs
The defenceless
And secretly they killed
Rosa Luxemburg
And threw her tortured body
In the Landwehr Canal.
And in the darkness of the quiet Zoo
They murdered
Karl Liebknecht.

CHOIR:
The generals shouted
Bravo!
The traitors of the people yelled
Bravo!
Through the night
From the Eden Hotel
Throbbed the wires
Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

CHRONICLER:
The murderers
Brought his body
To the mortuary.

MEN:
Here we bring a strange
Unknown man.

CHRONICLER:
But the people of Berlin
Demanded:

FULL CHOIR:
Where are our leaders?

CHRONICLER:
Then the murderers lied.

MEN:
We had captured them
It was our intent to lead them
In good custody to safe keeping
But they tried to flee
And we were obliged
As they fled
As they fled
To shoot them.

CHRONICLER:
The people of Berlin
Answered:

FULL CHOIR:
You lie!
You lie!
Our leaders
You have
Murdered.

SOLO VOICE:
The people of Berlin
Lamented
For the dead.

CHOIR:
Lower the flags
The flags of battle
Flags of freedom
Lower them to the Earth
To the lap of our Mother.

SOLO VOICE:
From the dying hand
Of one man falls
The blessed flag,
Thousands are waiting
Ready
And the flag of the dead
Flies again high.

FULL CHOIR:
Nations hear the signal:
Fights in the van
The International
For the just rights of man.

VOICE (speaks):
We commemorate the dead revolutionaries in Europe, America and Asia, in Africa and Australia, in all the five Continents of the World where the flag of the Revolution shines as an eternal hope for the oppressed and humble, we commemorate the dead pioneers of Soviet Russia, we commemorate Lenin, we commemorate Sacco and Vanzetti who died for us, we commemorate Eugene Leviné, Gustav Landauer, Matteoti and Erich Muehsam, we commemorate the innumerable sailors, soldiers, peasants, workers, writers, engineers, all the Nameless ones tortured, racked, hanged, shot and struck down on the battlefields of the Revolution.

CHOIR OF WOMEN:
When the swinging hammers rest
And the sweeping scythes
When the evening falls
On the ripening fields
And the flags, the red assailing flags
Float in a quiet wind
In the stony canyons of the city streets
Then we think of them
The fighters of the Revolution fallen un-
known.

FULL CHOIR:
For he honors the dead
Who serves the living.

SOLO VOICE:
Many yet will fall
In the crash of the times.

SOLO VOICE:
You perhaps!

SOLO VOICE:
Or you!

SOLO VOICE:
Or you!

CHOIR:
Or you!

FULL CHOIR:
But the world shall be ours!
The flag of the dead
Flies again high.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v14n03-jan-15-1935-NM.pdf