Norman Lebrecht Shi Xichen/Translation
An hour before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg, confronted by the interrogators, pulled needle and thread from her handbag and meticulously mended the hem of her skirt that she had torn when she was kidnapped and arrested. Then she took a copy of Goethe's Faust from her bag and began to read it. The diminutive, disabled woman, considered so dangerous that the German government rewarded her head and sent the Freedom Corps to hunt her down, was calm and serene.
A century later, Rosa Luxemburg is still a household name, though not many remember why she died. Letters and documents discovered and declassified in recent years show that Rosa is not a violent insurgent in official history, but an introverted pacifist who would rather preach on paper than take to the streets to demonstrate. She had a cat named Mimi, named after the heroine of the opera Bohemian. In the love life, she is far more liberated than in her time.
From today's perspective, it is not unreasonable to think – as this biography puts it – that she is a potential role model for an awakened generation, an icon of rebellion in terms of climate, equality, feminism and anti-colonialism. Rosa Luxemburg is still alive, and she's speaking at a street rally near you.
She is from Zamorsk, a Jewish cultural center in Poland, where she speaks Yiddish at home, Russian at school, Polish in markets, and German in the cultural sphere (later she learned English and French). Because of the failure of treatment for a leg disease, she learned to walk with her hands on the arms of others, which easily created intimate relationships with others. In the late 1880s, at the age of 16, she saw four friends executed for attempting to oppose the Tsar, then fled to Switzerland in a carriage hiding under a pile of hay, where she soon earned her doctorate in law at the University of Zurich.
Funded by her wealthy parents, her first lover, Leo Jokis, she had her own socialist newspaper and a stable life, with no shortage of domestic servants. She moved to Berlin to get a German passport and briefly married a man named Gustav Lübeck, but her heart was still with Leo, who wrote when they were separated: "I must try to get pregnant next time." When Leo showed a desire for control beyond her tolerance, she threw him out. He kept the key to the front door, paid the rent, and threatened to kill her unless she let him stay in her life.
At the age of 35, she came together with the son of her best female friend, Clara Zeitkin. Kostya Zeitkin, 14 years younger than her, was her student in social economics, an area in which Rosa proved herself to be the most logical and coherent debater since Karl Marx. She was never a dogmatist, rejecting dictatorship, advocating the pluralism of knowledge, and denouncing totalitarianism. She declared: "'Only the freedom of party members' is not freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissidents. ”
Rosa Luxemburg (right) with Clara Zeitkin, 1910
She was first imprisoned for insulting the Kaiser in 1904, then to Russia to participate in the late movement of the 1905 Revolution, and in 1907 to London to attend the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, where she attracted Stalin's attention. She was a member of the German Social Democratic Party of Wilhelm Liebknecht, and in August 1914 she, along with Clara Zeitkin and Liebknecht's son Karl, left the party for its support for World War I.
She was imprisoned again shortly after, relying on drawing birds, wasps and rats to pass the time. "Being born with a crippled leg may be the cause of many conflicts, but [it] itself is beyond human intervention," she wrote. It's a rare clue to explore the roots of her physical and mental independence.
She formed the "Spartacus League" with Clara Zeitkin, Carl Liebknecht, and her loyal lawyer Paul Levy (also her lover), named after the gladiator who led the slave rebellion against Rome. Her most strident work, The Theory of Capital Accumulation, was written in prison. The book expands Marx's analysis of the entrepreneurial spirit that capitalism will always seek foreign markets, thus toward imperialism, and inevitably lead to war. Revolutions occur when the working class recognizes this connection and tries to abolish the "rule of capital".
The violent side of the Russian Revolution, such as the revolutionaries' pushing and killing class enemies from the roofs of public buildings, brought her back to believing— perhaps naively, that social change could be achieved through general strikes and peaceful street demonstrations.
After her release from prison on 8 November 1918, she founded a newspaper, The Red Flag, which refused to recognize the postwar German government led by Albert, a former ally of the SpDS. In the chaos of the post-war period, as mutinous soldiers roamed the streets of Berlin, Rosa called for the abolition of the death penalty. On January 1, 1919, together with Liebknecht, she was also the leader of the German Communist Party, and she evoked a revolution. A few days later she wrote: "Ah, how German, how sober, how pedantic this revolution is! ”
Horrified, Albert ordered the Fascist Archetype of the Freedom Corps to suppress the revolution and capture its leaders. On the night of 15 January, the betrayed Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured from their hiding house in the Eden Hotel, interrogated by Captain Pabst, and then taken out through a group of mocking thugs. Both were hit in the face by rifle butts. Rosa fell backwards, losing a shoe and handbag. Covered in blood, she was thrown into a car and then taken to Cornelius Bridge, where, a few minutes before midnight, she was shot in the head and thrown into the canal at the age of 47.
Liebknecht's body was dumped in the street. The killer went unpunished. Leo Jokis was killed in prison while investigating the state-directed murder. Paul Levy also collapsed with their deaths. The Social Democrats planted the roots of Hitler's Nazi state in 1919.
As the author of this empathetic biography, Dana Mills acknowledges that Rosa Luxemburg "inspired my family of social activists to fight tirelessly to prevent us from falling into barbarism at the moment". Mills saw "Rosa Luxemburg's energy, perseverance and humanitarianism being re-emerged as a counterweight force" to confront our time. Still, Rosa deserves better treatment than past classification judgments. She is a unique revolutionary, self-shaping, self-critical, seductive and sweet in her humanity. You will have the privilege of reading the real Rosa here.
Critital Lives: Rosa Luxemburg，By Dana Mills
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Yu Chengjun