Rosa Luxemburg, Róża Luksemburg or Rozalia Luksenburg (5 March 1871-15 January 1919) was a Polish Marxist, philosopher, economist, anti-war activist and revolutionary socialist who became a naturalized German citizen at the age of 28.
Successively, she was a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After the SPD supported German involvement in World War I in 1915, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) which eventually became the KPD.
During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne, the central organ of the Spartacist movement. Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported the attempted overthrow of the government and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution.
Friedrich Ebert's majority SPD government crushed the revolt and the Spartakusbund by sending in the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of World War I veterans. Freikorps troops captured and summarily executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht during the rebellion.
Due to her pointed criticism of both the Leninist and the more moderate social democratic schools of socialism, Luxemburg has had a somewhat ambivalent reception among scholars and theorists of the political left.
More information: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Nonetheless, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were extensively idolized as communist martyrs by the East German communist regime. The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution asserts that idolization of Luxemburg and Liebknecht is an important tradition of the German far-left.
Luxemburg was born on 5 March 1871 in Zamość. The Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in Russian-controlled Poland. She was the fifth and youngest child of Eliasz Luxemburg, a timber trader, and his wife, Line Löwenstein.
Luxemburg later stated that her father imparted an interest in liberal ideas in her while her mother was religious and well-read with books kept at home. The family spoke Polish and German, and Luxemburg also learned Russian. The family moved to Warsaw in 1873. After being bed bound with a hip problem at the age of five, she was left with a permanent limp.
From 1886, Luxemburg belonged to the Polish left-wing Proletariat Party (founded in 1882, anticipating the Russian parties by twenty years). She began political activities by organizing a general strike; as a result, four of the Proletariat Party leaders were put to death and the party was disbanded, though the remaining members, including Luxemburg, kept meeting in secret. In 1887, she passed her Matura (secondary school graduation) examinations.
After fleeing to Switzerland to
escape detention in 1889, she attended the University of Zurich as did
the socialists Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches, where she studied
philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics. She
specialized in Staatswissenschaft (political science), economic and stock exchange crises, and the Middle Ages.
More information: The Guardian
Luxemburg wanted to move to Germany to be at the centre of the party struggle, but she had no way of obtaining permission to remain there indefinitely. In April 1897 she married the son of an old friend, Gustav Lübeck, in order to gain a German citizenship. They never lived together, and they formally divorced five years later.
She returned briefly to Paris, then moved permanently to Berlin to begin her fight for Eduard Bernstein's constitutional reform movement. Luxemburg hated the stifling conservatism of Berlin. She despised Prussian men and resented what she saw as the grip of urban capitalism on social democracy.
When Luxemburg moved to Germany in May 1898, she settled in Berlin. She was active there in the left- wing of the SPD in which she sharply defined the border between the views of her faction and the revisionism theory of Eduard Bernstein. She attacked him in her brochure Social Reform or Revolution?, released in September 1898.
Luxemburg organized anti-war demonstrations in Frankfurt, calling for conscientious objection to military conscription and the refusal to obey orders. On that account, she was imprisoned for a year for inciting to disobedience against the authorities' law and order.
In August 1914, Luxemburg, along with Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, founded the Die Internationale group which became the Spartacus League in January 1916.
They wrote illegal anti-war pamphlets pseudonymously signed Spartacus after the slave-liberating Thracian gladiator who opposed the Romans.
Luxemburg was freed from prison in Breslau on 8 November 1918, three days before the armistice of 11 November 1918. One day later, Karl Liebknecht, who had also been freed from prison, proclaimed the Freie Sozialistische Republik in Berlin. He and Luxemburg reorganized the Spartacus League and founded Die Rote Fahne newspaper, demanding amnesty for all political prisoners and the abolition of capital punishment in the essay Against Capital Punishment.
On 14 December 1918, they published the new programme of the Spartacus League.
On 8 January, Luxemburg's Red Flag printed a public statement by her, in which she called for revolutionary violence and no negotiations with the revolution's mortal enemies, the Friedrich Ebert-Philipp Scheidemann government.
In response to the uprising, German
Chancellor and SPD leader Friedrich Ebert ordered the Freikorps to
destroy the left-wing revolution, which was crushed by 11 January 1919. Luxemburg's Red Flag falsely claimed that the rebellion was spreading across Germany.
More information: Socialist Worker
On 10 January, Luxemburg called for the murder of Scheidemann's supporters and said they had earned their fate. The uprising was small-scale, had limited support and consisted of the occupation of a few newspaper buildings and the construction of street barricades.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured in Berlin on 15 January 1919 by the Rifle Division of the Cavalry Guards of the Freikorps (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision). Its commander Captain Waldemar Pabst, with Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, questioned them under torture and then gave the order to summarily execute them.
Luxemburg was knocked down with a rifle butt by the soldier Otto Runge, then shot in the head, either by Lieutenant Kurt Vogel or by Lieutenant Hermann Souchon. Her body was flung into Berlin's Landwehr Canal. In the Tiergarten, Liebknecht was shot and his body, without a name, brought to a morgue.
More than four months after the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, on 1 June 1919, Luxemburg's corpse was found and identified after an autopsy at the Charité hospital in Berlin.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht were buried at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin.
More information: ExBerliner
for the one who thinks differently.
Rosa Luxemburg
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