We’ve been catching the U bahn through Rosa Luxemburgplatz all week, but it took me a few days to look her up and realise what an interesting person she was.
Rosa Luxemburg was born in what is now Poland (then Russia), in Zamość in 1871. She was a finished high school in Warsaw (where her family moved) top of her year, but was denied the gold medal because of “an oppositional attitude toward the authorities”. She carried that attitude immediately into the rest of her life, immediately throwing herself into revolutionary politics.
At the age of 18, she moved to Zurich at the age of 18 to study (she specialised in the science of forms of state and completed her doctorate in 1898) and to escape the authoritarian Russian government who would probably have imprisoned her for her revolutionary activities if she hadn’t left. She and other exiled Russian and Polish revolutionaries formed a newspaper, the Sprawa Robotnicza (the “worker’s cause”) which was part of a continuing campaign that nationalism (an independent Poland) should come after the struggle against capitalism. In her view, fighting for independence for the various states that were subsumed into Russia at the time would lead to a weak newly created state that was at a disadvantage to the people there as the “bourgeoisie” would use this national weakness to their advantage to strengthen their hold over the workers.
She moved to Berlin in 1898, where she became a leading theorist in the German Social Democratic Labour Party. She published copiously, (a fairly complete archive of her work is here). One of her most important works at the time was “Reform or Revolution” in which she argued that ultimately revolution was necessary as governments would never reform as much as was necessary for the proletariat. She published numerous articles attacking German militarism and imperialism, arguing that War would harm the proletariat most of all. She argued strongly for mass strikes as the weapon of the proletariat, particularly as means of agitating against war.
When war broke out in 1914, she contemplated suicide, but instead co formed (with Karl Leibknecht) the Internationale Group that was to become the Spartacists (named after Spartacus, the Roman slave rebel). Their main party platform during the war was for German soldiers to turn their weapons against their officers and then against the government thus overthrowing it. She was imprisoned during most of WWI for her anti-war activities.
While in prison, she wrote her two most famous works, the Junius Pamphlet, which was the foundation of the Spartacists’ beliefs, and a book on the Russian Revolution, in which she presciently warned of the dictatorship powers of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
After the war, when she was released, she co-founded the German Communist Party, largely from the Spartacist membership. In January 1919, a revolutionary wave swept Berlin, and Germany. While Luxemburg was against a violent revolution, the Communist Party attempted to seize power, and the Social Democratic Leader ordered the Freikorps (paramilitaries made up of returned soldiers) to destroy the revolution. Luxemburg and her fellow leader Leibknecht were seized and murdered, their bodies thrown in the river.
The communist revolution sputtered on for another four months, with fighting all over Germany and the last holdout being the Munich Soviet Republic in May 1919.
Her most famous quote is from her writing on the Russian Revolution.
“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
Ironically, given the dictatorship the East German Government became, in complete contradiction of her call for freedom in a communist state, she was a hero in the old DDR, which published her collected works and named a major square after her.
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This is part of a serious of notable women from where we are as we travel the world. I’d love suggestions for future subjects – our itinerary is here.
[…] The fact that the stop before ours on the ubahn is named after Rosa Luxembourg is something she finds captivating. As is the fact that there are brass cobblestones outside our apartment commemorating a Jewish […]
[…] The fact that the stop before ours on the ubahn is named after Rosa Luxembourg is something she finds captivating. As is the fact that there are brass cobblestones outside our apartment commemorating a Jewish […]