Early Life
Liebknecht was born in Leipzig, the son of Wilhelm Martin Philipp Christian Ludwig Liebknecht and his second wife Natalie (née Reh), who also came from a family with a strong political background; her father, Karl, was a member of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. Liebknecht's parents were second cousins; his maternal great-grandmother was the sister of one of his paternal great-grandfathers.
His father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, was a co-founder with August Bebel of the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Karl Liebknecht became an exponent of Marxist ideas during his study of law and political economy in Leipzig and Humboldt University of Berlin. After serving with the Imperial Pioneer Guards in Potsdam from 1893 to 1894 and internships in Arnsberg and Paderborn from 1894 to 1898, he earned his doctorate at Würzburg in 1897 and moved to Berlin in 1899, where he opened a lawyer's office with his brother, Theodor. Liebknecht married Julia Paradies on 8 May 1900; the couple had two sons and a daughter before Liebknecht's wife died in 1911.
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