Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg (Polish: Róża Luksemburg, [ˈruʐa ˈluksɛmburk] ; German: [ˈʁoːza ˈlʊksm̩bʊʁk] ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, orthodox Marxist, and anti-War activist during the First World War. She became a key figure of the revolutionary socialist movements of Poland and Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the Spartacist uprising.
Rosa Luxemburg | |
|---|---|
Luxemburg, c. 1895–1905 | |
| Born | Rozalia Luksenburg 5 March 1871 Zamość, Congress Poland, Russian Empire |
| Died | 15 January 1919 (aged 47) |
| Cause of death | Execution by shooting |
| Alma mater | University of Zurich (Dr. jur., 1897) |
| Occupations |
|
| Political party |
|
| Spouse | Gustav Lübeck (m. 1897, divorced) |
| Partners | |
| Parent(s) | Edward Eliasz Luksenburg Lina Lewensztejn |
| Relatives | de:Nathan Löwenstein von Opoka (cousin) |
| Signature | |
 | |
Born and raised in a secular Jewish family in Congress Poland, she became a German citizen in 1897. The same year, she was awarded a Doctor of Law in political economy from the University of Zurich, becoming one of the first women in Europe to do so. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), 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 which eventually became the KPD. During the November Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the Spartacist movement. Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder,[1] but supported the attempted overthrow of the SPD-ruled Weimar Republic and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution. Friedrich Ebert's SPD Cabinet crushed the revolt and the Spartakusbund by sending in the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of battle-hardened World War I veterans of the Imperial German Army. Freikorps troops captured, tortured and executed[2] Luxemburg and Liebknecht during the rebellion.[3]
Due to her pointed criticism of both the Leninist and the more moderate social democratic schools of Marxism, Luxemburg has always had a somewhat ambivalent reception among scholars and theorists of the political left.[4] Nonetheless, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were extensively idolised as communist martyrs by the East German communist government.[5] The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BVS) asserts that idolization of Luxemburg and Liebknecht is an important tradition of the 21st-century German far-left.[5] Despite her own Polish nationality and strong ties to Polish culture, opposition from the Polish Socialist Party due to her stance against the 1918 independence of the Second Polish Republic and later criticism from Stalinists have made her a controversial historical figure in the present-day political discourse of the Third Polish Republic.[6][7][8]
Life
Little is known about Rozalia's great-grandparents, Elisza and Szayndla, but according to historical evidence it is likely they lived in Warsaw.[9] Their son, Rosa's grandfather, Abraham Luxemburg probably lived in Warsaw before marrying Chana Szlam (Rosa's grandmother) and moving to Zamość.[9] Abraham built a successful timber business there, based in Zamość and Warsaw but with links as far away as Danzig, Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg; although coming from humble origins, he became a wealthy businessman with transnational connections who could afford to provide for his children an education abroad in the German Empire.[8][9] He supported the Jewish Reform movement, becoming a prominent member of the Zamość Maskilim.[9] He was committed to Jewish emancipation, spoke Polish and Yiddish, and ensured that his children spoke these tongues too; it is unclear whether he took part in the November Uprising (1830–31) or not.[9]
Abraham's son Edward was Róża's father.[9] He was born in Zamość on 17 December 1830, the eldest of ten siblings and heir to his father's timber business.[9][8] Edward Eliasz Luxenburg lost his mother at the age of 18. He met his wife Lina Löwenstein through his stepmother Amalia, who was Lina's older sister.[9] Lina and Amalia were daughters of the Rabbi of Meseritz, Isaak Ozer Löwenstein, and their brother was the reform Rabbi Isachar Dov Berish (Bernhard) Löwenstein of Lemberg.[9] Lina and Edward married around 1853 and lived together in Zamość, where Edward worked with his father.[9] Like his father, Edward was a leading member of the Reform Jewish community in the city.[9] When the January Uprising broke out, Edward delivered weapons to Polish partisans and organised fundraisers for the insurrection.[8] After the fall of the uprising he became a target of the tsarist police and was forced into hiding in Warsaw, leaving his family behind in Zamość.[9] During the 1860s and 1870s, Edward moved frequently and experienced financial difficulties; eventually the rest of the family, including two-year-old Rosa, joined him in Warsaw in 1873.[9][10]
Origins
editRóża Luksemburg, actual birth name Rozalia Luksenburg, was born on 5 March 1871 at 45 Ogrodowa Street (now 7a Kościuszko Street)[9] in Zamość.[11][12] The Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland, after the country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria almost a century earlier. She was the fifth and youngest child of Edward Eliasz Luxemburg and Lina Löwenstein. Her father Edward, like his father Abraham, supported the Jewish Reform movement. Luxemburg later stated that her father imparted an interest in liberal ideas to her while her mother was religious and well-read with books kept at home.[13] The family moved to Warsaw in 1873.[10] Polish and German were spoken at home; Luxemburg also learned Russian.[13] After being bed-bound with a hip problem at the age of five, she was left with a permanent limp.[14] Although over time she became fluent in Russian and French, Polish remained Róża's first language with German also spoken at a native level.[15][7][16] Rosa was considered intelligent early on, writing letters to her family and impressing her relatives with recitals of poetry, including the Polish classic Pan Tadeusz.[9]
Rory Castle writes: "From her grandfather and father [Rosa] inherited the belief that she was a Pole first and a Jew second, her passionate opposition to Tsarism and her emotional connection to Polish language and culture. Although her parents were religious, they did not consider themselves to be Jewish by nationality, rather 'Poles of the Mosaic persuasion'".[9] He also points out that more recent research into the Luxemburg family and her early years show that "Rosa Luxemburg gained a lot more from her family than has previously been understood by her biographers. Not only in terms of her education, financial support and assistance during her frequent incarcerations, but also in terms of her identity and politics. Her family was a closely knitted support network, even when its members were spread out across Europe. This solid foundation, which supported and encouraged her at every step, gave Luxemburg the intellectual and personal confidence to go out and attempt to change the world".[9] It is especially from Luxemburg's private correspondence that it can be seen she in fact remained very close with her family throughout the years, despite being separated by borders and spread out across countries.[9]
Education and activism
Portrait of Rosa Luxemburg at age 12, c. 1883
In 1884, she enrolled at an all-girls' gymnasium (secondary school) in Warsaw, which she attended until 1887.[17] The Second Women's Gymnasium was a school that only rarely accepted Polish applicants and acceptance of Jewish children was even more exceptional. The children were only permitted to speak Russian.[18] At this school, Róża attended in secret circles studying the works of Polish poets and writers; officially this was forbidden due to the policy of Russification against Poles that was pursued in the Russian Empire at the time.[19] From 1886, Luxemburg belonged to the illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party (founded in 1882, anticipating the Russian parties by twenty years). She began political activities by organising 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 examinations).
Róża became wanted by the tsarist police due to her activity in Proletariat; she hid in the countryside, working as private tutor at a dworek.[20] In order to escape detention, she fled to Switzerland through the "green border" in 1889.[21] She attended the University of Zurich (as did the socialists Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches), where she studied philosophy, history, politics, economics, zoology[22][23] and mathematics.[24] She specialised in Staatswissenschaft (political science), economic and stock exchange crises, and the Middle Ages. Her doctoral dissertation "The Industrial Development of Poland" (Die Industrielle Entwicklung Polens) was officially presented in the spring of 1897 at the University of Zurich which awarded her a Doctor of Law degree. Her dissertation was published by Duncker and Humblot in Leipzig in 1898. An oddity in Zurich, she was one of the first women in the world with a doctorate in political economy[21] and the first Polish woman to achieve this.[7]
In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski (alias Julius Karski), Luxemburg founded the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause) which opposed the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland could arise and exist only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. She maintained that the struggle should be against capitalism, not just for Polish independence. Her position of denying a national right of self-determination provoked a philosophic disagreement with Vladimir Lenin. She and Leo Jogiches co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, after merging Congress Poland's and Lithuania's social democratic organisations. Despite living in Germany for most of her adult life, Luxemburg was the principal theoretician of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP, later the SDKPiL) and led the party in a partnership with Jogiches, its principal organiser.[21] She remained sentimental towards Polish culture, her favourite poet was Adam Mickiewicz, and she vehemently opposed the Germanisation of Poles in the Prussian Partition; in 1900 she published a brochure against this in Poznań.[15] Earlier, in 1893, she also wrote against the Russification of Poles by the Russian Empire's absolutist government.[16]
The 1905 revolution
editAfter the 1905 revolution broke out, against the advice of her Polish and German comrades, Luxemburg left for Warsaw. If she were to be recognised, tsarist authorities would imprison her, but the October/November political strike, part of the upheaval in Russia with particularly active elements in Congress Poland, convinced Róża that she was needed in Warsaw instead of Berlin.[25] She arrived there on 30 December thanks to her German friend Anna Matschke's passport and met up with Jogiches, who had returned to Warsaw a month earlier also on a false passport; they lived together in a pension at the corner of Jasna and Świętokrzyska streets, from where they wrote for the SDKPiL's illegally published paper Czerwony Sztandar (The Red Banner).[26] Luxemburg was one of the first writers to notice the 1905 revolution's potential for democratisation within the Russian Empire. In the years 1905-1906 alone, she made in Polish and German over 100 articles, brochures, appeals, texts, and speeches about the revolution.[25] Although only the closest friends and comrades of Jogiches and Luxemburg knew of their return to the country, the Okhrana, thanks to a mole recruited by the tsarist authorities within the senior SDKPiL leadership, came to arrest them on 4 March 1906.[27]
They held her prisoner first at the ratusz jail, then at Pawiak prison and later at the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Luxemburg continued to write for the SDKPiL in secret while in custody, with her works smuggled out of the compound.[27] After two officers of the Okhrana were bribed by her relatives, a temporary release on bail was secured for her on 28 June 1906 for health reasons until the court trial;[7] in early August from Saint Petersburg, she left for Kuokkala, which was then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland (an autonomous part of the Russian Empire). From there, in the middle of September, she managed to secretly flee to Germany.[27]
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. Thus, in April 1897 she married the son of an old friend, Gustav Lübeck, in order to gain German citizenship. They never lived together, and they formally divorced five years later.[28] She returned briefly to Paris, then moved permanently to Berlin to support Eduard Bernstein's constitutional reform movement. Luxemburg disliked the middle-class culture of Berlin, which she considered stifling to revolution. She further disliked Prussian men and resented what she saw as the grip of urban capitalism on social democracy.[29] In the Social Democratic Party of Germany's women's section, she met Clara Zetkin, whom she made a lifelong friend. Between 1907 and his conscription in 1915, she was involved in a love affair with Clara's younger son, Kostja Zetkin, to which approximately 600 surviving letters (now mostly published) bear testimony.[30][31][32] Luxemburg was a member of the uncompromising left wing of the SPD. Their clear position was that the objectives of liberation for the industrial working class and all minorities could be achieved by revolution only.
As Irene Gammel writes in a review of the English translation of the book in The Globe and Mail: "The three decades covered by the 230 letters in this collection provide the context for her major contributions as a political activist, socialist theorist and writer". Her reputation was tarnished by Joseph Stalin's cynicism in Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism. In his rewriting of Russian events, he placed the blame for the theory of permanent revolution on Luxemburg's shoulders, with faint praise for her attacks on Karl Kautsky which she commenced in 1910.[33]
According to Gammel, "In her controversial tome of 1913, The Accumulation of Capital, as well as through her work as a co-founder of the radical Spartacus League, Luxemburg helped to shape Germany's young democracy by advancing an international, rather than a nationalist, outlook. This farsightedness partly explains her remarkable popularity as a socialist icon and its continued resonance in movies, novels and memorials dedicated to her life and oeuvre". Gammel also notes that for Luxemburg "the revolution was a way of life" and yet that the letters also challenge the stereotype of "Red Rosa" as a ruthless fighter.[34] However, The Accumulation of Capital sparked angry accusations from the Communist Party of Germany. In 1923, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow denounced the work as "errors", a derivative work of economic miscalculation known as "spontaneity".[35]
that European workers' parties should organise a general strike when war broke out. In 1913, she told a large meeting: "If they think we are going to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren, then we shall shout: 'We will not do it!'" However, when nationalist crises in the Balkans erupted into violence and then the war in 1914, there was no general strike and the SPD majority supported the war as did the French Socialists. The Reichstag unanimously agreed to finance the war. The SPD voted in favour of that and agreed to a truce (Burgfrieden) with the Imperial government and promised that SPD-controlled labour unions would refrain from strike action for the duration of the war. This led Luxemburg to contemplate suicide as the revisionism she had fought since 1899 had triumphed.[40]
In response, Luxemburg organised anti-war demonstrations in Frankfurt, calling for conscientious objection to military conscription and the refusal of soldiers to follow orders. On that account, she was imprisoned for a year for "inciting to disobedience against the authorities' law and order".
Rosa Luxemburg (centre) among attendees of the International Socialist Congress, Amsterdam 1904
Rosa Luxemburg (centre) among leaders at the International Socialist Congress, Amsterdam 1904
- Rosa Luxemburg and Luise Kautsky in 1909
- Rosa Luxemburg and Kostja Zetkin in 1909
- Portrait of Rosa Luxemburg in 1910
Leipzig in 1898. An oddity in Zurich, she was one of the first women in the world with a doctorate in political economy[21] and the first Polish woman to achieve this.[7]
In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski (alias Julius Karski), Luxemburg founded the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause) which opposed the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland could arise and exist only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. She maintained that the struggle should be against capitalism, not just for Polish independence. Her position of denying a national right of self-determination provoked a philosophic disagreement with Vladimir Lenin. She and Leo Jogiches co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, after merging Congress Poland's and Lithuania's social democratic organisations. Despite living in Germany for most of her adult life, Luxemburg was the principal theoretician of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP, later the SDKPiL) and led the party in a partnership with Jogiches, its principal organiser.[21] She remained sentimental towards Polish culture, her favourite poet was Adam Mickiewicz, and she vehemently opposed the Germanisation of Poles in the Prussian Partition; in 1900 she published a brochure against this in Poznań.[15] Earlier, in 1893, she also wrote against the Russification of Poles by the Russian Empire's absolutist government.[16]
.JPG){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
_-_Luxemburg.jpg){kind=link}
No comments:
Post a Comment