It’s difficult to imagine Rosa Luxemburg as anything other than “Red Rosa”, the impassioned revolutionary socialist, haranguing the crowds or pouring out political journalism. Yet there is another Rosa. Reading her letters, a different figure emerges. Yes, she’s dashing off polemical epistles to comrades every day, but then there are the domestic notes, principally to her lover, Leo Jogiches.
Indeed, many of them are more than domestic; love letters, even, and many deal with their regular tiffs, sometimes politically based, often just regret at not seeing each other as much as she would like. Early on, from Paris, she berates him for writing only about political issues and nothing about himself. “Tender little words aren’t enough for me”, she writes in a 4,000-word epistle almost entirely devoted to venting her anger. Poor Leo, having to wade through all that. Indeed, so many of her letters are so long and detailed you wonder she ever had time for anything else. In another letter, she pleads: “My Bobo! When will I see you? I miss you so much my soul is simply thirsting.”
Amid all the revolutionary analysis, there are always loving sentiments for Leo. But it’s largely a relationship conducted from distance – and one that was, inevitably, doomed.Born in Zamosc in Russian-controlled Poland in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg soon became active in left-wing politics and, while still a student, was forced to flee to avoid the anti-Semitism, pogroms and authoritarianism of the old regime there. She made initially for Zurich where she came into contact with some of the international socialists who would help shape her life. Then, courtesy of a marriage of convenience, she took German citizenship and settled in Berlin until her political activities forced her to move to Paris.
She travelled to London for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907, but does not talk fondly about it. Sitting alone one evening in a restaurant in Whitechapel she writes: “In a foul mood I travelled through the endless stations of the underground and emerged both depressed and lost in a strange and wild part of the city. It’s dark and dirty here.” Her stay at Goldhurst Terrace on the Finchley Road barely improves her mood: “Groups of drunken people stagger with wild noise and shouting down the middle of the street, newspaper boys are also shouting, flower girls on the street corners, looking frightfully ugly and even depraved… it is chaos and also wild and strange.”
In 1916, back in Berlin, along with Karl Liebknecht, she helped found the Spartacus League in opposition to German involvement in the Great War. She called for anti-government strikes, but was arrested and imprisoned for two and a half years. It never stopped her letter-writing. Released in November 1918, she returned to Berlin where revolution was challenging the established order. Within months, she had been arrested on the orders of the government, tortured and shot in the head before being thrown into the Landwehr canal. Liebknecht suffered a similar fate.
Many of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters have been lost over the years (it’s astonishing how many have survived), but here is a record of crucial political events as seen through the eyes of a leading protagonist. The correspondence covers the years just after she fled to Switzerland in 1891 to her death in 1919, written in a number of languages. Many are long, punctuated by polemical discourses and arguments about the direction of the revolution, but they make fascinating reading. She continually complains of being tired and weary – hardly surprising when she is dashing off 4,000-word letters to Leo, the Liebknechts or Paul Levi. But then there are the lighter moments – buying petticoats, shopping in Bon Marche and, of course, her seemingly eternal love for Leo. As Isaac Deutscher wrote: “In her assassination, Hohenzollern Germany celebrated its last triumph and Nazi Germany its first.”
