Rosa Luxemburg — revolutionary / thinker with roots in the Russian Empire
She was born Rozalia Luksenburg at Zamosc, in the Congress Kingdom of Poland under Russian rule, the fifth and youngest child of the timber merchant Eliasz Luxemburg and Line Lowenstein. The family was secular, Jewish, comfortable and bookish; Polish, German and Yiddish were spoken at home and she added Russian later. The date is usually given as 5 March 1871, which is what she wrote on her university papers, though her school certificate implies 1870. They moved to Warsaw when she was three, and she attended the Second Women's Gymnasium there from 1880, taking excellent marks in a school intended largely for the daughters of Russian officials. A growth defect left her with a limp for life.
She was drawn into the Polish underground left as a teenager, and in 1889, at eighteen and facing arrest, she left for Switzerland. The University of Zurich was one of the few in Europe that admitted women on equal terms. She read natural sciences, then political economy, and took her doctorate in 1897 with a thesis on the industrial development of Poland - the only woman among the sons of landowners and manufacturers.
In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski, she founded a paper opposing the nationalism of the Polish Socialist Party, and from it the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Her position was that Polish independence was the wrong objective and international class struggle the right one, which made her an isolated figure among Polish socialists for the rest of her life. To move to Germany legally she obtained citizenship in 1897 through a marriage of convenience to a family friend.
In Berlin she became one of the principal theorists of the German Social Democratic Party. Social Reform or Revolution appeared in 1899, The Mass Strike in 1906 after the Russian revolution of 1905 had convinced her that the decisive upheaval would begin in Russia, and The Accumulation of Capital in 1913. She was imprisoned in Warsaw for agitation during the 1905 events and taught and wrote in Berlin from 1907.
The war divided her from her party. She regarded the SPD's support for the German war effort as a betrayal, helped form the anti-war group that became the Spartacus League, and was held for much of the conflict in what the authorities termed protective custody - detention without charge, on the grounds that she was a danger to the Reich. She was released on 9 November 1918.
She edited Die Rote Fahne through the German November revolution and, with Karl Liebknecht, founded the Communist Party of Germany at the turn of the year. She also wrote, in prison in 1918, a critique of the Bolsheviks that was published posthumously: it attacked Lenin's party over land policy, national self-determination, and what she called its dictatorial and terrorist methods, and defended political democracy against democratic centralism. It is the reason she occupies an awkward position in the history of the movement she helped make.
The Berlin rising of January 1919 is conventionally named after the Spartacists, though they had little hand in directing it. On 15 January she and Liebknecht were seized and killed in Berlin by Freikorps officers. She was forty-seven.
"Left Russian Poland in 1889 for Zurich; German citizen from 1897"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Zamość (Poland)
Her posthumously published critique of the Bolsheviks, written in prison in 1918, opposed Lenin's party on land policy, national self-determination and its methods, and defended political democracy against democratic centralism.
Born Rozalia Luksenburg at Zamosc in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish timber-merchant family, and raised in Warsaw from the age of three. She fled the threat of arrest in 1889 for Switzerland, and took German citizenship in 1897 through a marriage of convenience.
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Zamość (Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently."