Karl Liebknecht was the founder of the German Communist Party (KPD), and on his 80th birthday on August 13, 1951, East Berlin celebrated him with the laying of the cornerstone for a memorial at Potsdamer Platz.

Liebknecht himself had been assassinated in 1919 after a failed attempt at a socialist revolution. Now, however, a socialist government had come to power in the newly established East German republic, the GDR.

Potsdamer Platz was not a random choice of location for a memorial, because Karl Liebknecht, as a member of the German parliament, was the only one who opposed World War I, and in 1916 he organized a demonstration against the war right here.

It was East Berlin Mayor Friedrich Ebert who unveiled the stone. The Free German Youth organization laid wreaths as part of a ceremony for the “Third World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace” in protest against West Germany’s rearmament.

The plan was to complete the memorial later, but history had other plans.

The division of Berlin meant that the Karl Liebknecht cornerstone ended up right where the Berlin Wall border wall stood.

Instead, a new memorial to Karl Liebknecht was erected, a less prominent stone on Prenzlauer Allee, which still stands today.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the cornerstone still stood on a deserted Potsdamer Platz.

Potsdamer Platz was now an attractive location in the center of Berlin for development, and the cornerstone stone was removed and stored in an archive in 1995 due to new construction.

In 2002, however, politicians in the Mitte district decided to put the cornerstone back in place in memory of Germany’s socialist and anti-militarist traditions.

And there stands Karl Liebknecht’s unfinished memorial today, reminding us both of Karl Liebknecht, pacifism and the consequences of the division of Berlin.