Letter from Daniela Klette to the Rosa Luxemburg Congress, January 11, 2025

Dear attendees of the Rosa Luxemburg Conference –

Dear comrades,

I greet you today from the prison in Vechta. Almost a year ago, after decades of living underground, I was arrested. Before me lie several years of trials, in which I am accused of participating in armed expropriations. Additionally, the judiciary is pursuing another trial against me, in which I am to be accused of participating in urban guerrilla actions against capitalism and imperialism.

I was 17 when the Vietnamese liberation struggle defeated U.S.-led imperialism. That incredible victory was achieved with global solidarity – despite napalm, despite the massive military machine that stood against the liberation movement, and despite the massacres of the Vietnamese population committed by the U.S. military with the assistance and complicity of the West, especially Germany.

I was 16 when I learned of the murder of a man in custody, who was on hunger strike against the torture of isolation detention. This was Holger Meins, who had taken a stand against the system and was killed in prison through deliberate malnutrition and the denial of medical care during state-ordered force feeding.[1]

It was a time of attempts at liberation and anti-colonial struggles in many countries: for example, the Black Panthers against racist oppression and for revolution in the U.S., the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or the FSLN in Nicaragua against the dictatorship there. I began to understand what humanity can expect from capitalism and imperialism. Yes, I saw myself as part of the global movements fighting for liberation from exploitation and oppression, against capitalism and patriarchy, and against war and militarism.

The legal system is now deliberating as to my guilt in a legal sense. For me, it is not a question of guilt but of what has mobilized and continues to mobilize millions of people: How do we overcome the global conditions that produce war, displacement, exploitation, patriarchal and racist oppression, poverty, and total ecological destruction?

The powerful are preparing for the great war to preserve their power. Society is marked by growing poverty, militarization, and a drift to the right. Capitalism is heading toward ecological disaster. The state of the world today makes it unmistakably clear that the questions about how to overcome these conditions were justified and remain necessary. These questions are for all of us, and we can only answer them collectively and through large-scale movements. I wish I could be with you to work on these questions together. But repression and the state’s determination to condemn the history of fundamental opposition prevent such a thing.

No one who is imprisoned as part of the liberatory and revolutionary left is incarcerated simply because of their alleged or actual deeds. We are all imprisoned due to the state’s intent to delegitimize the history of revolutionary struggles and to deter future struggles by condemning us to years of suffering in prison. This applies to me as much as it does to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier in the U.S., the imprisoned anarchists in Greece – Marianna, Dimitri, Nikos, Dimitra – and many other political prisoners worldwide.

In this sense, the trial against me is a trial against an emancipatory, radical left, and anti-capitalist opposition.

I would greatly appreciate it if those who are able would attend my trial, which will begin soon – to show that this is not just a trial against me, but on another level, is a trial against everyone who engages with the question of overcoming capitalism. I would deeply appreciate any solidarity!

I wish you much success and, yes, I also hope you have much joy at this year’s Rosa Luxemburg Conference!

With solidarity, a fighting spirit, and warm regards to you all,
D. K.

[1] Holger Meins was the first of a number of captured Red Army Faction members to die in prison. He died on November 9, 1974, as Klette describes, as a direct result of medical malfeasance in an effort to break a hunger strike of prisoners from the RAF.