The international life of the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg

Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 3:28 p.m., December 27, 2021

"On the stone of my tomb, we will read only two syllables: 'tsvi-tsvi'. It is the song of the great tits. Imagine that in this 'tsvi-tsvi', there has been a tiny chest note, and do you know what that means? It's the first slight movement of spring to come. Despite the snow, the cold and the loneliness, we believe, the chickadees and I, in the spring to come. "

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This woman who transmits, from the walls of her prison, her hope for a bright future, is Rosa Luxemburg.

In this winter of 1917, however, we had to fight to remain optimistic.

For nearly three years, Europe has been stuck in a war the horror of which has no precedent.

Rosa Luxemburg is 46 years old, and already has a long militant past which has led her several times behind bars.

A brilliant and rebellious student

Rosa was born on March 5, 1871, just a few days before the outbreak of the Paris Commune, with which she shares many ideals. However, she grew up far from Paris, in Zamosc, in the Polish part of the Russian Empire. Soon, Rosa's parents, assimilated and educated bourgeois Jews, moved to Warsaw. A chance for the young girl, who can integrate there, at the beginning of the 1880s, a high-level high school. However, on this occasion, she made a cruel first encounter with injustice: the Jews had to comply with a quota system and with stronger demands than for others.

A brilliant student, she takes up the challenge.

She completes her studies with honors and a maximum mark in all subjects.

Rosa speaks Russian, Polish, German, English and French.

But, "because of her ideas", she was refused the gold medal which was to crown her academic success.

At 16, she joined the underground "Proletariat" party, whose leader had just been hanged by the Tsar's secret police. 

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Two years later, Rosa left for Switzerland, to join the only German-speaking university accepting women. The story, too good to be true, tells that she crosses the border camouflaged in a hay cart, helped by a priest to whom she tells to want to convert while hiding from her parents. You can't believe it. Arriving in Zurich, Rosa meets her first love, Léo Jogiches, from the Jewish bourgeoisie of Lithuania and member of a revolutionary action group. He got used to sleeping on the floor to get used to the prison, which he had already known twice.

To finance her studies, Rosa Luxemburg works as a journalist, notably in Paris, where she frequents Jean Jaurès.

His pen, alert and purified of the heaviness of the militant press, hits the mark.

At 26, the student defended her thesis and became a doctor of economics.

Immediately afterwards, she gets married.

Not with Leo, no, but with the son of a couple of friends who have the advantage of having Prussian nationality.

This white marriage allows Rosa to enter Germany, and to become fully active there without risking deportation. 

"I go up to the podium as quietly as if I had been doing it for at least 20 years"

At that time, Berlin was then the capital of socialist thought, at the heart of a very capitalist country, but where the workers' movement was already powerful and well organized.

Upon her arrival in 1898, Rosa joined the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, which proclaimed her revolutionary vocation.

The activist began her career as a speaker with Polish workers in Upper Silesia during an election campaign.

On the platform, his head barely protrudes.

Rosa is very small.

So we help him to enhance himself, and his talent acts.

"I go up to the podium as quietly as if I had been doing it for at least 20 years," she wrote.

"I don't have the slightest jitters."

Its aura is such that we are already talking about "luxemburgists" to designate its supporters.

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In 1903, Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned for the first time: a sentence of three months for insulting Kaiser Guillaume II.

It doesn't stop him.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 saw it rush to Poland, which also experienced an insurrectionary movement.

She is 35 years old.

This moment is foundational in her thought: she develops the concept of revolutionary spontaneity of the masses, the idea that the movement must start from the people, and not from an organized political party.

This criticism of the bureaucracy is not to everyone's liking, in Germany as well as in Russia with Lenin. 

In Poland, she is arrested again, at the same time as Léo, while they are both circulating under a false identity.

Imprisoned, she goes on a hunger strike.

Summary executions are numerous.

One day we come to pick her up, tie a blindfold over her eyes.

But Rosa escapes death: she is released on bail.

Meanwhile, tensions are growing on the old continent, especially around the colonial question.

Contrary to those who praise progress and take pride in the peace that has been preserved for decades, Rosa has a feeling that this world is headed for disaster. 

The hope of the Russian Revolution

In 1914, when war broke out, she remained fiercely pacifist. But the disillusionment is terrible. The International is collapsing. In France, Jean Jaurès is assassinated and the Socialists enter the Sacred Union, which seals the rapprochement of all political families. In Germany, the Social Democratic deputies vote for war credits. Only a tiny part of the working class resists the patriotic euphoria. Rosa is so affected that she thinks of suicide.

She is excluded from the SPD, at the same time as the son of the founder of the party, the deputy Karl Liebknecht.

Together, they founded the Spartacist League, in reference to Spartacus, the rebellious slave.

Three times during the war, Rosa is locked up for taking a stand against the conflict.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, and the end of the war the following year, however, gave rise to new hope in Rosa's heart.

The dream of a new world is allowed.

She will seize the opportunity, in defiance of the danger.

A poorly concealed political assassination

In November 1918, Rosa was released from prison with a general amnesty. Germany lost the war. The empire, defeated, collapsed. Now is the perfect time to try and import the revolution into Germany. In December, Rosa founded, as an extension of her Spartacist movement, the German Communist Party. But in Berlin, great confusion reigns. The Republic is proclaimed by both the Social Democrats and the Communists. While the latter struggle to coordinate, the former benefit from the support of the general staff, with a single goal: to avoid revolution at all costs. 

An attempted workers' insurrection is severely repressed.

Rosa, who supported her in her articles, was arrested on January 15, 1919, and brutally questioned by soldiers.

In the lobby of the hotel where she was taken, Frankish corps charged by the government with restoring order brutalize her.

They knock out Rosa with a rifle butt, and throw her into a car. 

On board, while she is still unconscious, they kill her with a bullet in the head, before dumping her body in the Landwehrkanal.

His comrade in the fight, Karl Liebknecht, was assassinated the same day. 

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Rosa Luxemburg is an important political figure in Germany. So the soldiers first try to hide, without much success, the conditions of his death. Leo, his first love, who participated in the creation of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party, investigates his death. He in turn was killed, two months after Rosa. 

The soldiers responsible for his death are finally tried, and lightly condemned.

They will later be compensated by the Nazi regime.

By killing Rosa, however, they never succeeded in erasing her memory.

On the contrary.

The activist, wrongly described as bloody by her detractors, she who has always opposed Soviet terror, has become "Rosa the red rose", a martyr figure of the revolutionary cause.

In May 1968, during the German demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, his face was still enthroned on the students' signs, next to that of a certain Che Guevara.