Rosa Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported the attempted overthrow of the SPD-ruled Weimar Republic and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution.
63 Facts About Rosa Luxemburg
2.
The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution asserts that idolization of Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht is an important tradition of the 21st-century German far-left.
3.
Rosa Luxemburg supported the Jewish Reform movement, becoming a prominent member of the Zamosc Maskilim.
4.
Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc on 17 December 1830, the eldest of ten siblings and heir to his father's timber business.
5.
Rosa Luxemburg met his wife Lina Lowenstein through his stepmother Amalia, who was Lina's older sister.
6.
The Rosa Luxemburg family were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland, after the country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria almost a century earlier.
7.
Rosa Luxemburg was the fifth and youngest child of Edward Eliasz Luxemburg and Lina Lowenstein.
8.
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.
9.
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.
10.
Rosa Luxemburg's family was a closely knitted support network, even when its members were spread out across Europe.
11.
From 1886, Rosa Luxemburg belonged to the illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party.
12.
Rosa Luxemburg began political activities by organising a general strike; as a result, four of the Proletariat Party leaders were put to death and the party was disbanded, though the remaining members, including Luxemburg, kept meeting in secret.
13.
Rosa Luxemburg attended the University of Zurich, where she studied philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics.
14.
Rosa Luxemburg specialised in, economic and stock exchange crises, and the Middle Ages.
15.
Rosa Luxemburg's dissertation was published by Duncker and Humblot in Leipzig in 1898.
16.
In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski, Rosa Luxemburg founded the newspaper which opposed the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party.
17.
Rosa Luxemburg believed that an independent Poland could arise and exist only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
18.
Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the struggle should be against capitalism, not just for Polish independence.
19.
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.
20.
Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first writers to notice the 1905 revolution's potential for democratisation within the Russian Empire.
21.
Rosa Luxemburg continued to write for the SDKPiL in secret while in custody, with her works smuggled out of the compound.
22.
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.
23.
Rosa Luxemburg returned briefly to Paris, then moved permanently to Berlin to support Eduard Bernstein's constitutional reform movement.
24.
Rosa Luxemburg disliked the middle-class culture of Berlin, which she considered stifling to revolution.
25.
Rosa Luxemburg further disliked Prussian men and resented what she saw as the grip of urban capitalism on social democracy.
26.
Rosa Luxemburg was a member of the uncompromising left wing of the SPD.
27.
Rosa Luxemburg's reputation was tarnished by Joseph Stalin's cynicism in Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism.
28.
Gammel notes that for Luxemburg "the revolution was a way of life" and yet that the letters challenge the stereotype of "Red Rosa" as a ruthless fighter.
29.
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 under the Second Reich in her private correspondence that was written in Polish; at the same time, she loved the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and showed an appreciation for German literature.
30.
When Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany in May 1898, she settled in Berlin.
31.
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.
32.
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.
33.
From 1900, Rosa Luxemburg published analyses of contemporary European socio-economic problems in newspapers.
34.
Rosa Luxemburg wanted a general strike to rouse the workers to solidarity and prevent the coming war.
35.
Rosa Luxemburg taught Marxism and economics at the SPD's Berlin training centre.
36.
In 1912, Rosa Luxemburg was the SPD representative at the European Socialists' congresses.
37.
Rosa Luxemburg's pseudonym was Junius, after Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic.
38.
Rosa Luxemburg continued to write and friends secretly smuggled out and illegally published her articles.
39.
Rosa Luxemburg was freed from prison in Breslau on 8 November 1918, three days before the armistice of 11 November 1918.
40.
Rosa Luxemburg accused both Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks of having police state aspirations.
41.
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.
42.
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.
43.
Rosa Luxemburg's body was then dumped in Berlin's Landwehr Canal.
44.
Rosa Luxemburg's last known words written on the evening of her murder were about her belief in the masses and what she saw as the inevitability of a triumphant revolution:.
45.
In later years, Trotsky frequently defended Rosa Luxemburg, claiming that Joseph Stalin had vilified her.
46.
Rosa Luxemburg initially professed a commitment to democracy and the necessity of revolution.
47.
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".
48.
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.
49.
Bolshevik theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon 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.
50.
Rosa Luxemburg herself clarified her position on democracy in her writings regarding the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.
51.
The Accumulation of Capital was the only work Rosa Luxemburg officially published on economics during her lifetime.
52.
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.
53.
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.
54.
Rosa Luxemburg developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation under the influence of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905.
55.
Red Rosa Luxemburg now has vanished too, And where she lies is hid from view.
56.
Rosa Luxemburg told the poor what life's about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.
57.
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".
58.
In 1951, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were honoured with symbolic graves at the Memorial to the Socialists in the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.
59.
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.
60.
Rosa Luxemburg found the corpse's autopsy report suspicious and decided to perform a CT scan on the remains.
61.
At the time of her murder, Rosa Luxemburg was 47 years old and suffering from a congenital dislocation of the hip that caused her legs to have different lengths.
62.
Rosa Luxemburg donated strands of her hair for DNA comparison.
63.
In particular, DNA extracted from the hair of Rosa Luxemburg's niece did not match that belonging to the cadaver.