The Optimistic Last Years and Ultimate Demise of Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg

Polish/German longtime socialist Rosa Luxemburg with Karl Liebknecht founded the Marxist Spartacus League in Germany, forerunner of the German Communist Party,  in 1916. They promptly found themselves in the clink. Nevertheless, she saw the revolutionary tide of history on the rise.

She spent over two years incarcerated, during which her friends helped smuggle out her articles against the war and letters to her friends such as  Sophie Liebknecht, wife of  her colleague Karl. Arrested on 10 July 1916, Rosa was quickly generating articles and a series of uniformly cheerful notes to Sophie. Her spirit soared as news of the February Revolution in Russia arrived.  Through 1917, Rosa expressed increasing confidence in a soon-to-come world revolution by the proletariat.

The outbreak of the Russian Revolution has broken the stalemate in the historical situation created by the continuation of the world war and the simultaneous failure of the proletarian class struggle. For three years Europe has been like a musty room, almost suffocating those living in it. Now all at once, a window has been flung open, a fresh, invigorating gust of air is blowing in, and everyone in the room is breathing deeply and freely of it. . . the great historical law is making headway—like a mountain stream which has been diverted from its course and has plunged into the depths, it now reappears, sparkling and gurgling, in an unexpected place. (Article, Spartacus, May 1917)

Nothing but a further evolution, and a painful one, can change such things. At this hour we are living in the very chapter of the transition. . . (Letter, Wronke, 23 May 1917)

Do you know, Sonichka [Sophie], the longer it [the war] lasts, and the more the infamy and monstrosity of the daily happenings surpasses all bounds, the more tranquil and more confident becomes my personal outlook. I have the feeling that all this moral filth through which we are wading, this huge madhouse in which we live, may all of a sudden, between one day and the next, be transformed into its very opposite, as if by the stroke of a magician’s wand. (Letter, Breslau, November 1917)

Sonichka, the evenings are magical now, like those of spring. . . The sky shines with a clear blue light, and in it floats the silvery moon. (Letter, Breslau, 24 November 1917)

After her discharge from prison, Rosa's revolutionary optimism promptly collided with reality. Post-Armistice, she reluctantly agreed to support an uprising only to discover the paramilitary Freikorps thoroughly outgunned her Spartacists. The revolt was crushed in the first week of 1919. Rosa was again arrested and summarily executed a week later.