Rosa Luxemburg

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Rosa Luxemburg

1871-1919

Revolutionary

Brilliant Youth. Born in the Rus-sian part of Poland, Rozalia (Rosa) Luxemburg grew up in an anti-Semitic world. She spent her earliest years in a village where her father owned a timber business. In 1873, with the business in decline, the family moved to Warsaw, where her parents believed their children could receive a better education than in the village. The Luxemburgs were more secular than religious and desired integration into the non-Jewish Polish population. Integration was impossible to achieve in a Poland that still considered Jews to be the killers of Christ and whose population periodically engaged in attacks on Jews that resulted in suffering and death. Luxemburg was further isolated by a childhood illness that left her with a permanent limp. A brilliant child, she was one of few Jewish children to be admitted to a Russian Gymnasium for Girls. By 1888, when she graduated from secondary school, she was fluent in four languages— Polish, Yiddish, German, and Russian. She also had been introduced to the radical political philosophies of Marxism and socialism. Aware of the hardships and discrimination to which Jews and workers were subjected, she was on her way to becoming the most famous female revolutionary of the early twentieth century. Aided by the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement in Poland, desirous of more education than was available there, and already wanted by the police for her political activities on behalf of striking workers, Luxemburg left Warsaw when she was eighteen and enrolled at the University of Zurich. The Polish Marxists’ judgment of her intelligence was well founded. She became one of the most authoritative spokespersons of German political philosopher Karl Marx’s ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and an outspoken critic of Vladimir Lenin’s ideas immediately after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and 1918.

Radical. Luxemburg loved animals and the study of botany, geography, and geology. In another time, she might have been a scientist, but the late nineteenth century was a time of revolution, and she lent her physical and intellectual efforts to the socialist/communist cause. In Zurich a group of radical students formed around her, listening to her ideas and debating them. In 1892 she and her lover, Lithuanian radical Leo Jogiches, founded the Social Democratic Party of Poland. In 1897 she received a doctorate of laws from the University of Zurich for a dissertation titled The Industrial Development of Poland. She then moved to Germany, where she worked in the German Social Democratic Party and the communist Second International. To provide her greater personal security and citizenship in Imperial Germany (a conservative state not sympathetic to socialism), she and her friends decided she should marry Gustav Lubeck, the son of Prussian radicals, Karl and Olympia Lubeck, although she was in love with Jogiches. Luxemburg and Lubeck parted immediately after the wedding (1895), and she obtained a divorce from him five years later. Her relationship with Jogiches continued until her death.

The Spartacus League. During World War I (1914–1918) Luxemburg was arrested for her left-wing organizing and writing, and she consequently spent most of the years of the war in prison. Released briefly in 1916, she and Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and Jogiches concluded that the leaders of the Social Democratic Party had begun to act in their own interests rather than in those of the masses. They broke with the party and founded their own organization, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League). When German liberals and socialists attempted to organize a new government to replace the defeated German Empire in 1919 some members of the Spartakusbund tried to push the leaders of the new government in a more radical direction by attempting to seize power in Berlin. Luxemburg and Liebknecht believed the attempt was misguided but supported the revolutionaries as they believed they should. Opting for solidarity had fatal consequences.

Execution. On 11 January 1919 the attempt failed, and four days later Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested. They were held briefly in police custody, and then taken separately into the streets where they were beaten ruthlessly by German soldiers. Liebknecht was then told to walk and was shot in the back “trying to escape.” Luxemburg was shot in a police car and her body dumped into a river. At the time of her death Rosa Luxemburg was a small, forty-eight-year-old, Jewish woman who walked with a limp. She also was an intellectual powerhouse. She had spent her adult life working for a better world for workers. She believed they were the revolutionary class, and she hoped for international revolution. Socialism, she believed, would bring true equality of people and nations and usher in a new peaceful era with no pogroms, no wars, and no prejudice.