CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

On Rosa Luxemburg's Death Anniversary

         I posted this AM that I would blog on her death date (91 years ago today). After more than three hours of immediate research, in addition to the research already done for the novel I wish to write about her, I find: I know nothing! Well, not strictly accurate-but this woman is so complex!! Like another of my historical icons, Victoria Woodhull, Rosa is multilayered. Each time I learn a fact, I uncover tons more questions.








         Rosa Luxemburg was by birth a Polish Jew, by inclination a Socialist, a Marxian, and a political theorist. The Party she founded later became the Communist Party, but I think it a misnomer to call Rosa a Communist. She advocated workers' revolution, yet she was a pacifist.





         Rosa was an originator of the “think globally” attitude, and decried  nationalist beliefs and independence in favor of internationalism, rather startling considering her dates are 1871-1919.





         Rosa acquired a doctorate in law and political economy. She taught for seven years at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin. She wrote two nonfiction books, one in prison  under a pseudonym. She married to achieve German citizenship. She was imprisoned in Warsaw for her political beliefs. She diverged from Lenin, and was startled to discover that the world Socialist Revolution did not catch fire in Germany as she had expected, but in Russia.





         Rosa believed in mass workers' rebellion as the source of the Socialist achievement. This proved to be her downfall. She and Karl Liebknecht founded the Spartacist League, whose workers' rebellion of Jan. 12-19, 1919, was ended by the right-wing paramilitary. Rosa and Karl were taken to the Berlin Hotel Eden where they were interrogated and then executed. Karl's corpse was taken to the morgue. Rosa's was tossed into the Landwehr canal, where it remained-allegedly-for four months  before recovery  (June 1, 1919) following the spring thaw.





                   The uprising for which Karl and Rosa were executed by the Freikorps (right-wing militias comprised of German WWI veterans, defending the Weimar Republic) had been ordered by Karl without Rosa's knowledge. When she learned of it, she considered it a blunder, but then lent it her support anyway, support that led to her interrogation and execution.  Her corpse was treated with so much less respect than Karl's, tossed into a frozen canal. The body recovered later might not even have been hers, and the grave with her tombstone was violated by Nazis in 1935-bulldozed- and the remains disappeared. Possibly her skeleton was the one discovered in 2009 in the basement of a Berlin hospital.





There is at least one film and several biographies of this extraordinarily complex woman. I highly recommend Jonathan Rabb's 2005 novel Rosa.





Contact me if you'd like to examine the links I used in researching this entry.