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Rosa Luxemburg must have been extremely excited on January 5, 1919.
In any case, on the afternoon of this Sunday she wrote an editorial for the “Rote Fahne”, the newspaper of the recently founded KPD, in which she committed herself to actionism: “Act!
Act!
Brave, determined, consistent - that is the damned duty. ”She was aiming for a Bolshevik coup.
That doesn't fit well with the image of left-wing intellectuals, who supposedly stood for plurality: "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently," is the much better-known Luxemburg quote.
But in reality, Rosa Luxemburg was a ruthless revolutionary.
Born on March 5, 1871 in Zamość in the part of Poland that was then part of the Tsarist Empire, she came from a moderately well-to-do family and grew up as a Polish-Jewish educated citizen.
She became a socialist at the age of 16 and soon after had to flee as a politically persecuted person;
she found a new home in Zurich.
Even at that time she was always one of the radicals of the labor movement.
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In 1898 she moved to Germany and entered into a marriage of convenience.
In Berlin she joined the SPD and soon became the spokesperson for her left wing.
Intellectually and rhetorically, it was far superior to most of its contemporaries.
Yet she always remained a supporter of revolutionary Marxism;
all their thinking revolved around a violent takeover of power by the "party of the working class".
Luxemburg despised the part of the SPD that was oriented towards reforms and democratization.
At the end of September 1913, she called on her audience in Frankfurt to refuse military service and to refuse to obey orders - at the time that was a criminal offense for which she received 14 months' imprisonment;
He did not begin imprisonment until February 1915. After a year of early release, the next arrest soon followed, this time on the basis of martial law.
Burial of Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin 1919.
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
On the night of November 9, 1918, the eloquent Luxemburg was released and immediately traveled to the capital of the Reich.
Here, together with Karl Liebknecht, she intensified the polemics in the SPD and in mid-December created a manifesto for the division of the workers' movement.
In "What does the Spartakusbund want?" She called for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", even if this course would lead to civil war.
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Luxemburg's old SPD acquaintance Eduard Bernstein could not believe that “a person as intellectually gifted and scientifically educated as Rosa Luxemburg could have contributed to this confused and demagogically inflammatory work”.
In fact, she was the lead author.
After the failure of the uprising, which she had called for with her leading article written on January 5, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by right-wing extremists on January 15, 1919.
The SPD government wanted to bring her to justice, but the violent death made her a martyr on the left.
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