67 Facts About Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20th century.

Rosa Luxemburg helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania party in 1893, and in 1897 was awarded a Doctor of Law in political economy from the University of Zurich, becoming one of the first women in Europe to do so.

In 1898, Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany, and soon became a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned several times, including in Germany and in Congress Poland during the 1905 Revolution.

In January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg participated in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, an attempted communist overthrow of the SPD-ruled Weimar Republic.

Rosa Luxemburg argued against the reformist road to socialism advocated by Eduard Bernstein, defending the necessity of a socialist revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg criticised Vladimir Lenin's concept of a vanguard party, instead advocating spontaneous action by workers, particularly through the mass strike, which she viewed as the supreme form of revolutionary action.

Rosa Luxemburg saw the collapse of capitalism as inevitable after it had spread to all areas of the world through the process of imperialism.

The Rosa Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland.

Rosa Luxemburg was the fifth and youngest child of Edward Eliasz Luxemburg and Lina Lowenstein.

Rosa Luxemburg later stated that her father imparted an interest in liberal ideas to her while her mother was religious and well-read with books kept at home.

Rosa Luxemburg was considered intelligent early on, writing letters to her family and impressing her relatives with recitals of poetry, including the Polish classic Pan Tadeusz.

From her grandfather and father [Rosa Luxemburg] inherited the belief that she was a Pole first and a Jew second, with her emotional connection to the Polish language and culture and her passionate opposition to Tsarism being of central importance.

Rosa Luxemburg gained a lot more from her family than has previously been understood by her biographers.

Rosa Luxemburg's family was a closely knitted support network, even when its members were spread out across Europe.

Nonetheless, from 1886, Rosa Luxemburg belonged to the illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party which had been founded in 1882, anticipating the left-wing Russian parties by twenty years.

Rosa Luxemburg began political activities by organising a general strike, which ended with four of the Proletariat Party leaders being put to death and the party being disbanded, though the remaining members, including Luxemburg, kept meeting in secret.

Rosa Luxemburg attended the University of Zurich, where she studied philosophy, history, politics, economics, zoology and mathematics.

Rosa Luxemburg specialised in, economic and stock exchange crises, and the Middle Ages.

In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski, Rosa Luxemburg founded the newspaper which opposed the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party.

Rosa Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland could arise and exist only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.

Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the struggle should be against capitalism, not just for Polish independence.

Rosa Luxemburg remained sentimental towards Polish culture, her favourite poet was Adam Mickiewicz, and she vehemently opposed the Germanisation of Poles in the Prussian Partition; in 1900 she published a brochure against this in Poznan.

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first writers to notice the 1905 revolution's potential for democratisation within the Russian Empire.

Rosa Luxemburg continued to write for the SDKPiL in secret while in custody, with her works smuggled out of the compound.

Rosa Luxemburg wanted to move to Germany to be at the centre of the party struggle, but she had no way of obtaining permission to remain there indefinitely.

Rosa Luxemburg returned briefly to Paris, then moved permanently to Berlin to support Eduard Bernstein's constitutional reform movement.

Rosa Luxemburg disliked the middle-class culture of Berlin, which she considered stifling to revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg further disliked Prussian men and resented what she saw as the grip of urban capitalism on social democracy.

Rosa Luxemburg was a member of the uncompromising left wing of the SPD.

Gammel notes that for Luxemburg "the revolution was a way of life" but that the letters challenge the stereotype of "Red Rosa" as a ruthless fighter.

Rosa Luxemburg continued to identify as Polish and disliked living in Germany, which she saw as a political necessity, making various negative comments about German culture during the German Empire in her private correspondence written in Polish.

When Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany in May 1898, she had settled in Berlin.

Rosa Luxemburg was active there in the left wing of the SPD in which she sharply defined the border between the views of her faction and the revisionism theory of Eduard Bernstein.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that the critical difference between capital and labour could only be countered if the proletariat assumed power and effected revolutionary changes in methods of production.

From 1900, Rosa Luxemburg published analyses of contemporary European socio-economic problems in newspapers.

Rosa Luxemburg wanted a general strike to rouse the workers to solidarity and prevent the coming war.

Rosa Luxemburg taught Marxism and economics at the SPD's Berlin training centre.

In 1912, Rosa Luxemburg was the SPD representative at the European Socialists' congresses.

Rosa Luxemburg's pseudonym was Junius, after Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic.

Rosa Luxemburg continued to write and friends secretly smuggled out and illegally published her articles.

Rosa Luxemburg was freed from prison in Breslau on 8 November 1918, three days before the armistice of 11 November 1918.

Rosa Luxemburg accused both Lenin and the Bolsheviks of having police state aspirations.

Rosa Luxemburg further expressed shame that her former colleague and friend, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had agreed to head the Cheka, the then Soviet security agency, and asked Radek to convey her opinions about all these matters to the Politburo in Moscow.

Rosa Luxemburg spoke at the founding conference of the German Communist Party on 31 December 1918:.

Rosa Luxemburg was first knocked down with a rifle butt by Private Otto Runge, then shot once, in the back of the head, either by Lieutenant Kurt Vogel or by Lieutenant Hermann Souchon.

Rosa Luxemburg's last known words written on the evening of her execution were about her belief in the masses and what she saw as the inevitability of a triumphant revolution:.

In later years, Trotsky frequently defended Rosa Luxemburg, claiming that Joseph Stalin had vilified her.

Rosa Luxemburg initially professed a commitment to democracy and the necessity of revolution.

Early on, Rosa Luxemburg attacked the totalitarian tendencies present in the Russian Revolution claiming that without democratic institutions and protections, "life dies out in every public institution" and further claimed that such a lack of freedoms would lead to a "dictatorship of a handful of politicians".

However, in several works, including an essay written from jail and published posthumously by her last companion Paul Levi, titled The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg sharply criticised some Bolshevik policies such as their suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 following the October Revolution and their policy of supporting the purported right of all national peoples to self-determination.

Bolshevik theorists such as Lenin and Trotsky responded to this criticism by arguing that Rosa Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to Russia of 1917.

Rosa Luxemburg herself clarified her position on democracy in her writings regarding the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.

The Accumulation of Capital was the only work Rosa Luxemburg officially published on economics during her lifetime.

The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation was the central feature of Rosa Luxemburg's political philosophy, wherein spontaneity is a grassroots approach to organising a class struggle, and organisation is a top-down or vanguardist approach to organising a class struggle.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that spontaneity and organisation are not separable or separate activities, but different moments of one political process as one does not exist without the other.

Rosa Luxemburg developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation under the influence of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Rosa Luxemburg collected plant specimens from 1913 up to her death.

Rosa Luxemburg had a lifelong interest in botany and the natural world.

Red Rosa Luxemburg now has vanished too, And where she lies is hid from view.

Rosa Luxemburg told the poor what life's about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.

The commission came about through the offices of Eduard Fuchs, who showed a proposal featuring Doric columns and medallions of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, prompting Mies' laughter and the comment "That would be a good monument for a banker".

In 1951, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were honoured with symbolic graves at the Memorial to the Socialists in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

On 29 May 2009, Spiegel Online, the internet branch of the news magazine Der Spiegel, reported the recently considered possibility that someone else's remains had mistakenly been identified as Rosa Luxemburg's and buried as hers.

Rosa Luxemburg found the corpse's autopsy report suspicious and decided to perform a CT scan on the remains.

Rosa Luxemburg donated strands of her hair for DNA comparison.

In particular, DNA extracted from the hair of Rosa Luxemburg's niece did not match that belonging to the cadaver.