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Rosa Luxemburg: life of the week
00:51:54
Mark Jones discusses the revolutionary life of Rosa Luxemburg – the socialist firebrand whose convictions put her on a collision course with the jingoism of her age
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Mark Jones
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Ryan Seacrest
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Danny Byrd
Fif@mintmobile.com hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. While the suffragettes were fighting to win the votes over in Germany, Rosa Luxembourg was focused on overthrowing the entire system. A committed Marxist revolutionary and a fervent advocate of internationalism, Luxembourg believed that true freedom lay beyond bourgeois democracy. Her sharp intellect and uncompromising stance making her a formidable force in the politics of early 20th century Europe. In this Life of the Week episode, Mark Jones speaks to Danny Byrd about Luxembourg's extraordinary biography, from her rebellious youth to her brutal assassination in 1919.
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Mark Jones
Today we're diving into the life and legacy of one of the most fascinating revolutionaries of the 20th century, Rosa Luxembourg. She was a brilliant thinker, a fierce critic of capitalism and a firebrand. Mark let's start with her origins. Where and when was she born? What do we know about her childhood and the world she grew up in?
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Ryan Seacrest
It's generally agreed that she's born in 1871, although there's a little bit of, if you go really deep into it, there's a little bit of uncertainty as to the exact date of her birth. But biographers agree that it's 1871. And she's born in Zamos in Poland, which at that time, there's no state of Poland, there's no independent Poland. What becomes Poland in the 20th century is part of the Russian Empire. And her family then are what we would call assimilated Jews today. Her parents would be, I think it's fair to describe them as educated middle class or even educated upper middle class. They're a family that really values education. And this plays a role in Rosa Luxembourg's childhood. She's in a house filled with books, and she thrives in that world of learning and household that encourages learning. And so as a child, she's already got this fascination for learning. She's learning several languages. And when she's a toddler, her family moves from Zermash to Warsaw, so they're moving to a bigger city. And I think a lot about her childhood is unique. But probably one of the most unique things is that when she's five, she's misdiagnosed as having tuberculos when she has a problem with her hip, which later results in a lifelong limp as she walks. But at the age of five, she's then given the medical advice to rest in bed for an entire year. And so as a child, she occupies herself in this year of forced bed rest by reading and by teaching herself. And so she's, as a child, you know, biographer, you can always see, or thinking about biography, you can always kind of see patterns in an earlier period that become important in later life. As a child, she's reading different European languages. By the time she's nine, she's translating German, German poetry into Polish. She's very, very, very gifted academically, intellectually, and that feeds into her life in school. By the time she finishes school when she's 18, she's the star pupil in her school. But she isn't given a medal because the medal for the school, for the best pupil. The school leadership refused to give it to her, possibly a little bit because she's Jewish and outsider, but also because of her very clear, rebellious attitude. I think you always don't want to read back too much into a person's life. But I think in, in Rosa Luxembourg's case, everything suggests that she was very much committed to changing the world because of the injustices that she saw in it from the very youngest age. And I think that's a remarkable characteristic of hers. It's partially informed by. She sees the czarist Russian state's oppression of the political left in Poland, the nationalist left in Poland at a very young age. And this casts a huge impression upon her.
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Mark Jones
By her teenage years she was already involved in revolutionary circles. What pushed her into politics at such a young age and what kind of trouble did that get her into?
- [05:42]
Ryan Seacrest
I think she saw the injustice facing Poles Poland as a result of its place in the tsarist state. And then she also saw the antisemitism, you know, in 1880 there's a wave of pogrom across the tsarist empire. And she sees that that's very much part of her household, it's part of her family experience of that time. And that pushes her towards socialist politics in Poland. And I think then what gets her into trouble is that she won't kind of keep the head down. She's always looking for a fight, you know, so she's not afraid to make her views known. And that gets her into trouble. As I said, she's marked in school, her card is marked by the time she is coming to the age to leave school. And really at that point in time she's getting close to the point where she may be arrested. And so she has to get out of Poland, which she does when she's 19. She hides in a cart and she gets taken over the border with the help of a Catholic priest. And she goes to Zurich and just.
- [06:46]
Mark Jones
Focusing on that big move she makes where she flees Poland and ultimately settles in Switzerland. What drove her there and how did those years shape her intellectually?
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Ryan Seacrest
That's a great question. I think one of the things we need to remember is she's intellectually brilliant. And Zurich is a choice of place, the home of many exiles from the European socialist revolutionary left, including a social democrat from Germany called Karl Lubeck. And he has a property in Zurich and he actually lets her live in his house for her years in Zurich. So it's not the kind of conservative Switzerland that we might imagine today. Switzerland at this point in time is a center point for liberal exiles from different countries. And when she's there she goes to university. And that's important to say she's chosen Zurich as well because it's the only university in the German speaking world at this time that will admit women. And so she's exposed in this environment to the learning of university where she studies philosophy, maths, economics, and she eventually does a German PhD thesis there on the Polish economy. And in this world, she's focusing on Poland, the country of her origins, while mixing with other European socialist exiles, learning a great deal from her host family. Lubeck has been expelled from Germany in 1872 for being a socialist. He's resettled in Switzerland. His party has spent all of the 1880s being banned in Germany. The socialist laws in Germany have been withdrawn in 1890. And so this world is an exciting moment in the European socialist left in terms of thinking about what the socialist left can achieve, what Marx's writings should mean, what programs of action should be carried out, what is the right steps for the socialist left. And so she's been exposed to that intellectual world in one of the best places to debate it, because you can debate it with people from different European countries. While very proximate to Germany, which is the industrial economy, the largest industrial economy in Europe, soon to be the largest socialist movement in Europe, and where many people expect if a socialist revolution is to take place, that it will take place there. And I should just add to this, while she's there, she forms a relationship which is really important to her future life. She forms a relationship with a man called Leo Jogikiz, who is also an exile. He's from Lithuania, today's Lithuania, and he's in exile in Zurich as well. He's a little bit older than Rosa Luxembourg and he is one of the two main loves of her life. Their relationship continues into the early 20th century. It eventually breaks down when she leaves Zurich and goes to Berlin searching for a bigger stage. And her star starts to rise in the socialist left in Germany.
- [09:29]
Mark Jones
Luxembourg had this fearless, no nonsense approach to socialism. And I was just wondering what shaped her ideas and what compelled her to Marxism in particular.
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Ryan Seacrest
I think we want to start by thinking that her original motivation to Marxism and to socialism is injustice. She sees the injustice and she wants to change the world. She dreams of a better world. She's a contradictory figure. She's a woman in a time dominated by men. She's a pacifist in a time dominated by war. She's an internationalist in a time dominated by nationalism. And for her, all those problems can be fixed by the potential of the international socialist movement, by changing the political and economic structures of the world in which we live by a revolution in the sense of Marx, by the proletariat taking power. That classic understanding of the purpose of Marxism. The point in time when she comes of age, though, is not a time when this classic revolutionary program is in the ascendancy in the European Socialist Left. The European Socialist left in the 1890s and 19 zeros is facing up to the question of nationalism and is facing up to the question what is the role of revolution in the Marxist movement? And so in Germany, the country which she's concentrated on living in for the first two decades of the 20th century, the social Democratic Party of Germany has largely solved these questions through what's called the Erfurter Program. So a program agreed by the Social Democratic Party in Erfurt in 1891, which is to call for reform, and it says, you know, the future of the working class revolution is something that is a theoretical possibility, but it's not something that we should be striving for in the immediate period ahead of us. What we should be striving for is success through reform and success through building our political movement by winning seats and elections, by campaigning for an expansion of the franchise, and by bringing the working class and representatives of the working class into positions of influence within the state as it exists, whereby they can then make the lot of the workers a better one. And this is all summed up as being the reformist program of the Social Democrats. And Luxembourg is against this. And she is struggling then, in the decade before the First World War, she's struggling to convince the Socialist Left to adopt more radical program, to adopt a program that aims at achieving proletarian revolution. And this creates lots of personal animosity towards her because, remember, she's in the German Social Democratic Party. She is a woman, she's a Jew, she's an outsider. She's seen as being a Polish Jew for some of them, and she's arguing that their program is wrong, and she's upsetting people in the party. Figures of influence, newspaper editors, leading political figures, the greats of the German Social Democratic Party, people like Edward Bernstein, they're getting attacked by Luxembourg. And her polemic is brilliant, both in writing and in spoken form. And that's pushing and developing an animosity towards her, which really becomes a feature of her political biography. For the rest of her political life, she's an outsider within the spd, trying to steer that party in a way that's different to the way that the majority of its reformist male leaders want it to go.
- [12:44]
Mark Jones
And that's what's fascinating about her, really, that she isn't just another radical. She's playing this key role in German politics at the start of the 20th century. And as you were touching on there, as an outsider, I would like to know, how does she go from being this young Polish revolutionary to becoming one of the leading voices in Marxism and German politics.
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Ryan Seacrest
Essentially it's an amazing story because her political opponents are trying to keep her down. She keeps rising. So the first thing she does within the Social Democratic Party in Germany is she develops a kind of reputation for being an expert on Poland. The province of Saxony in eastern Germany stretches into territories which have now become part of Poland. These are regions where there are Polish workers, where there's Polish migrant workers and where the majority of people tend to vote for the Catholic Centre Party. And Luxembourg can go there and give speeches in Polish to these workers and bring them on board to the Social Democratic Party program. And that gives her credibility and it helps her to rise as the Poland expert in the Social Democratic Party. And through that role she gets to speak at the conferences of the Socialist International which are taking place frequently in the two decades before the First World War. For those not familiar with the Socialist International, these are international congresses where the leading socialist thinkers, party representatives from the different European countries come together to discuss what should be the program for socialism. And someone like Luxembourg wants to use those conferences to advance the proletarian revolution across Europe as a whole. She's arguing strongly that but it can only be successful if it happens in each European country simultaneously. And that's what gets her voice known within European socialism. And that then reinforces a little bit her position within the German party as she's becoming an internationally recognized figure of importance. She's centering on debates about what the future of Polish social democracy should be and whether or not the aim of the Polish socialists should be a kind of national revolution that removes Russia's rule from Poland. Or whether that can happen on its own, or whether it's necessary for Polish socialists to delay or wait for their uprising against the Russians to take place only as the socialist revolution takes place in Germany and France and elsewhere. That brings us back to her studies and her PhD research, which was about the Polish economy. And she's arguing this time the Polish economy is too embedded within the Russian economy and within the German economy for that revolution to be possible without revolutions taking place in the neighboring countries at the same. Always an internationalist. I think that's really important and makes her become a figurehead for other like minded thinkers, more internationally orientated socialists who want to still see the party and the German party, the spd, move back in the direction of revolution as being its core program. She then also obtains a position writing newspaper articles. And she's an editor of a regional socialist newspaper. But she has editorial position taken away from her because she's pushing that paper in too much of a radical direction and printing too many critical articles on the leadership of the party. But then she ends in a position in the party school in Berlin, where at this time the German Social Democratic Party had what we describe as kind of a training school for future members of the SPD leadership. And she gets a position there where she teaches Marxist theory, which again, maybe doesn't convince everybody to follow her ideas, but convinces those who are still supportive of them to be in the Luxembourg camp, which in the 1910s becomes more visible because 1914 means that the time is to choose for the socialist left between internationalism and nationalism. She's really, really hard working. She's really intellectually gifted. She's multiple European languages that she can work with. And that makes her kind of a figurehead against the more cautious leaderships within the Social Democratic Party. And I think I would, if push comes to shove, I would suggest that part of that split is between those who are intellectuals and visionaries like Luxembourg, who are also possibly best described as dreamers, who are dreaming of an entirely new world order. And against them you have the likes of Friedrich Ebert, who becomes her main adversary in the Social Democratic Party in the First World War and after the First World War. And Ebert is not an intellectual, he's an organizer. He's a practical man. He's the person who will spend a long time thinking about what the structure of the meeting should be, rather than what the contents of the meeting should be.
- [17:22]
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- [18:10]
Mark Jones
And as you alluded to there, a huge moment in her life was the outbreak of World War I in 1914. She became one of the loudest voices against it, even when her own party, the spd, backed the War. And I was wondering, why did she take such a risky stand and what did it cost her?
- [18:26]
Ryan Seacrest
I've said already, and I repeat it, you know, she's an internationalist in an age of nationalism, and already she can see which way the winds are blowing in Europe. You know, this is an age of militarism. It's an age when military service is considered to be very honorable. And she stands outside that camp already and is speaking against the cult of militarism in the Europe of the belle epoch. And her first sentence to prison is in 1904 for Magista, for insulting the honor of the King, where she's sentenced to three months in prison. And it's because Kaiser Wilhelm gives a speech where he says he understands the needs of German workers more than any member of the Social Democratic Party. And she mocks that and she gets this prison sentence for that. And she's not afraid to speak publicly again and again against the culture of militarism. And then in 1913, she speaks at Frankfurt, where she says, the Socialist left will not fight if war breaks out. The Socialist left will not fight. We will not fight. We will not murder our foreign brothers. And for that, in February 1914, she's sentenced to 14 months imprisonment, because this is considered to be an act of sedition. It's treasonous almost to be calling out the men of your country to not fight against the men of another country. So in the summer of 1914, when the war starts, the justice system in Germany is relatively quick in giving her a custodial sentence for the Frankfurt speech. But she doesn't actually have to start serving it until 1915. On the 4th of August 1914, it's the day of terror for an international socialist like Luxembourg, because on that day the Social Democratic Party in Germany votes to support war credits in the German Reichstag. And because of the nature of the political system in the German Kaiserreich, the Social Democrats in the parliament can't vote over whether Germany should go to war or not, but they can vote over the financing of the war, and they choose to vote for financing the war. And so the dream of the internationalists is dead on that day. The dream that the proletarian organized socialist movements of France and Germany in particular would stop a war between those countries by refusing to fight in it. It ends in that moment because the German Social Democratic Party has chosen the colours of the German Empire over the colors of the international proletariat. That's the way Luxembourg sees it. And she is on the outside of something that's called the Burgfrieden, which is a German term which roughly translates as the peace of the castle, which is declared by the Kaiser at the start of the war in a famous speech where he says, for the duration of the war I will see no parties more, I will only see Germans. And by that he means that much as in a castle in medieval times, there should be no political division or no rivalry within it when it is under siege. That's the statement he makes. And that creates this culture of the Burgfrieden, which means that any criticism of the national leadership for the duration of the war is to betray the necessity of national unity in wartime. And it's already clear to Luxembourg what that means. On the 4th of August, it is a devastating day for her. She personally thinks, she contemplates suicide at that moment in time, because everything that she's fought for and argued for in the previous two decades and everything that her life is about, she's an internationalist, she's a pacifist, she's a socialist. All of those beliefs have all come shattering down now. I think it's wrong to suggest that the populations of all of the belligerent countries in Europe are willingly rushing to the front. That older view that maybe comes across in older literature on this period, I think all of the historical research now shows that the European population, there's a great deal more ambiguity about what the war means for them. But even saying that, there's still enough jingoism around for Luxembourg to understand what is at stake. And she, I think from that moment of devastating disappointment, she then turns to activism and activity. The next day, a small group of like minded members of the Social Democratic Party form a group which they of course call the group International. The international ideas have failed, but they're still going to try and resurrect them and to try to find some kind of possibility for international solidarity in it age of brutal national war. And so she does that up until she has to go into prison to serve her sentence. February 1915, when she serves that, she's in prison for a year and when she's released, she is only out of prison for a short period of time, until in July 1916, she's rearrested on what we would understand today as being like a state security measure, that this person is too dangerous to be allowed to be free for the remainder of the war and she must remain in prison. And so in total, during the First World War, she spends over three years in prison. Her conditions in prison are reasonably good. She's a political prisoner, she can write, she has access to books. But it means that she's outside of the activist world. The group that becomes later the independent Socialist Democratic Party that breaks away from the spd, that challenges this nationalist term within the spd. She's very much observing those developments from within her prison cell.
- [23:58]
Mark Jones
One of Luxembourg's most famous ideas was her theory of spontaneity, that revolutions shouldn't be top down, but should erupt from the working class itself. How did this idea challenge the more rigid party led approach of somebody like Lenin for example? And how do we see echoes of it in today's modern movements?
- [24:16]
Ryan Seacrest
It's a great question. I think spontaneity of the masses kind of brings us to the heart of the, the maybe paradox of Luxembourg as a thinker, theorist and the practice of her politics as a political leader. Because one of the conundrums of Luxembourg is she can be quite realistic in her thinking about the chances of any revolutionary situation being successful for the working class. And she can be quite clear. And this is particularly the case in the winter of 1918-19 in Germany where as the, the Communist Party is founded in the final days of December 1918. She's very clear we don't have the support of the masses that will bring us to lead a revolution successfully. And so we should not be advocating for revolution right now because we won't be successful in it. That is her kind of private thought, but her public writing is the exact opposite for that. Publicly she's calling for people to come out, demonstrate, she's calling for radical revolution, she's calling for Germans to stay on the streets. And that's what brings us back to this concept of the spontaneity of the masses. Because it's very difficult to understand that paradox between those two versions of Luxembourg without being able to link them together in this idea that the masses cannot be controlled from above and that when a revolutionary situation occurs, the mass will take on a life of its own. And that this moment, in this moment, the leaders of the revolution cannot control it. And that's what's so central to that concept in her thinking. And it's what makes her different to Lenin's thinking. His argument is that we don't need to wait to have mass support. We don't need the legitimacy of mass support when a small number of avant garde revolutionaries can lead the revolution and can establish the communist era through that control of the state. Whereas Luxembourg is saying, saying no, we should wait for the masses to want the revolution. But even when it takes part, we cannot control or lead them because they will operate according to their own spontaneity. And that means that her version of how revolution takes place has a great deal more theoretical possibility for freedom to remain, whereas Lenin's practice and theory reduces the freedom to be different very, very quickly. And that's what gives Luxembourg her really famous sentence, where freedom is the freedom to think different. That's where that comes from. It's her reaction to Lenin's successes in 1917 in Russia, which, as I said, she's in prison during the First World War. She's following the Russian revolutions of 1917 from within her prison cell, which is different to 1904 and 1905 and 1905 she actually goes under a pseudonymous with Jogika's from Berlin to Warsaw to watch the 1905 Revolution, to participate in it. She gets arrested there and she faces a serious trial, but she manages to get off and then moves from Warsaw to St. Petersburg, where she actually meets with Russian revolutionary leaders, including Lenin. So her experiences of the 1905 revolutions in Russia and that of 1917 are very different. Was her criticism of Lenin something that she retained during the winter of 1918-19 during the so called Spartacus Uprising in January, which takes place just before she dies? But in this case, did she remain true to that idea as revolutionary violence took place on the streets of Berlin? And to an extent she did. And that has often then been used by her biographers to think about what her legacy might have been had she not been murdered in January 1919, because her version of, of communism, it was a version which allowed for much greater freedom than that which was established by Lenin. And this has often led people to argue that, well, had Luxembourg survived in the 1920s, she might have been a force within the German Communist left that would have broken from Moscow earlier and then as a result could potentially have found ways to cooperate with their arch opponents in the Social Democratic Party of Germany to prevent the rise of fascism within Germany.
- [28:32]
Mark Jones
It's a very fascinating what if. And of course you have mentioned there the fact that Rose Luxembourg was ultimately murdered in January 1919, but you've also mentioned the Spartacus Uprising that occurred in the winter of 1918-19. And I was just wondering, how did Rosa Luxembourg come to be murdered and what impact did that have?
- [28:52]
Ryan Seacrest
Yeah, it's difficult to understate the importance of the final months of Rosa Luxembourg's life for Rosa Luxembourg's legacy. I suppose the starting point is to think about November 1918, actually, and to think Luxembourg is in prison in Breslau. And in contrast to the despair of the 4th of August, November 1918 is the first few days of November 19th are a tremendously optimistic moment for the socialist revolutionary left, for thinkers like Luxembourg, because in a way, possibly an example of her spontaneity of the masses theory in practice. Starting in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven on the 3rd and 4th of November, sailors rebel. And that movement starts with only a couple of hundred people involved in it. And it quickly Snowballs that by the 9th of November there are massive revolutionary crowds in the center of Berlin demanding the abdication of the Kaiser and demanding a republic and demanding an end to the war. So it's a little bit after the action has taken place, and she immediately then starts to work feverishly as a journalist with Karl Liebnich, her most important political partner in the international group. And so they then in November, their immediate call, their message is to the German proletariat to stay on the streets and to push the revolution further to the left. Luxembourg argues that what's happened in November has only been a bourgeois revolution. And against this, her old rival from the decade before 1914, Friedrich Ebert, is calling on people to clear the streets and to organize calm. Luxembourg's and Liebnik's fear is if the working class don't stay out on the streets, men like Ebert will destroy the chance for a real proletarian revolution to take place in November, when the political order is breaking down, when the Kaiser is fleeing to Holland, a lot of his officers, commanders, are fleeing too, and that creates a power vacuum. And the soldiers who are leading the rebellion fill that power vacuum by creating councils whereby men are elected to rule over themselves. This happens then in the army first and happens then in industry too, where shop stewards and the labour movement can quickly repurpose their existing structures to create councils. It then gets copied by peasants create peasants councils, artists create artists councils. And all these councils are able to fill the vacuum of power caused by the crisis of the state leadership from above. And for a lot of people looking on, that is a terrifying prospect, particularly if you're bourgeois and you're scared that the German councils are going to be the same as the Soviet councils. The middle of December, the councils groups meet in Berlin for a national congress which will give an indication of what they think the future of Germany should be. And Luxembourg and Liebknecht are really, really desperate to get a mandate to be inside the building and to lead the speeches and to push those councils in the direction of moving the revolution further to the left, Left. And this is then a major failure for them because they don't get a mandate, they're outside. And the actual members of the council speaking on behalf of their members. The democracy from below, in other words, when it meets in Berlin at this time, is actually much more in support of Ebert's position that within the Social Democratic Party, the majority Social Democratic Party, which has supported the war and which has been Luxembourg's opponent throughout the war years, that happens in mid December. So that is a moment of deflation, moment of defeat. And for the next two weeks the question is what to do next. And that's what pushes Liebnicht and Luxembourg towards organizing their Spartacus League into the German Communist Party, which is found at the end of December, and to declaring what its revolutionary program will be. And then events overtake Luxembourg and Lebnik. And as part of this reversing the revolution and restoring the traditional centres of power around the parliament and the government, the SPD leadership goes after the head of the police in Berlin, who is a man on the left of the Social Democratic movement. He's a member of the Independent Socialists, he's close to Liebnichten Luxembourg. And at the start of January the SPD in Berlin tried to push him out. The first thing they do is they launch a smear campaign against him in the press. They say he's stealing money, they say he's using his position as head of police to profit from crime. And then they announce that he's been dismissed, missed. And for the first time since November, as a result of this, there are massive working class crowds that protest in the centre of Berlin, because evidently the working class won't protest in December for the goals of the Spartacus leaders, but they will protest at the start of January to keep a socialist in charge of the police. This is the moment where Luxembourg argues this is the spontaneity of the masses. Now is the time for the second revolution to take place. And in this moment a smaller group, maybe around 1,000 strong, armed individuals occupy buildings in the newspaper district of Berlin, including the Vorwarts newspapers, the main newspaper, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Some of them are really angry about what it's been writing with the working class, which is one of the reasons why they're going after the newspapers. Others are going after the newspapers because they recognize control, the means of the message, which will be really important for pushing revolution to the left. Others see this as being a fully fledged revolutionary Moment. And they want to take control of the train stations, the railways, et cetera, to lock down the city. But they don't have the armed support to do that. And that's the start of what becomes called the January Uprising or the Spartacus Uprising. The government of Eiberth in Berlin. It uses divisions of soldiers who have come back from the front, many of whom are led by officers who are extremely opposed to the end of the monarchy and the creation of the Republic. It uses them to suppress the uprising which takes place on the 11th and 12th of January. And these are acts of really performative violence. So that the main newspaper building, the Four Arts building, is assaulted by soldiers using the tactics of the Western Front. They first day fire upon the building with artillery, then they storm it with Ernst Junger's Storm Soldatin, the same kind of idea of Sturman that will later be idealized by the Nazis in the name of the term sa. They use those guys to storm in and to retake control of the building. The 11th and 12th of January. This is when Luxembourg writes her last really powerful article where she talks about how the generals who failed in Flanders have succeeded in Berlin against the working class. On that point, she goes into hiding along with Liebnicht, that they are in hiding separately. And they get caught and brought on the night of the 15th of January to a hotel near the Zoologischegarten in the western part of the center of Berlin, where they're brought before a man called Valdemar Pabst, who interrogates Luxembourg and then hands her over to a group of men who've been tasked with her murder. And Pabstin is the person who creates the story that as she's leaving the hotel, she gets attacked by a mob who then carry off her body, so her body is missing. One of the groups that carries out the murders of Liebnichten Luxembourg is led by two brothers. Their names are the Fluch Harting brothers, and they describe their squadron as being the squadron Flucharting. And they have the documentation that survives, says its purpose is to weaken the enemy by getting rid of its opponents. And it says very clearly its purpose is not to engage in ordinary military activities. They train, train separately in the suburbs of Berlin. And they are, in my opinion, a hit squad really for Pabst. And they are looking to eliminate Luxembourg and Liebnicht on 11 January, when they go to assault the Vorwarts newspaper building, the first group of radical left fighters in the building that surrender, they come out with a white flag and there's seven of them and they want to surrender. And the Freikorps men, the German men, government soldiers who take them, they take them to a nearby barracks and they brutally kill them on the spot. And in that moment, a woman who's a nurse in the building is caught and they, the soldiers who get her start to beat her and they think that they've got Rosa Luxembourg, they want to kill her. And an officer intervenes to stop them killing her, which means that she gets to later testify about what happened to her. And she's very clear, she says, you know, they dragged me out, they shouted, it's Rosa, it's Rosa. You know, started hitting me. One of the reasons why they thought they had gotten Rosa was because there was a machine gun that was firing upon them before the revolutionary rebels surrendered, which was responsible for their casualties. So around five of them get killed and they thought that Rosa Luxembourg was firing the machine gun at them. And the reason they thought that is because at this point in time, Rosa Luxembourg has become almost disgusting, this diabolical figure in the imaginary of the world that opposes revolution in Germany. And they're terrified of her. She's like a witch that they think can cast a spell over Germany and push the revolution in a direction which will see proletarian seizure of power or Russian conditions is the term they use. They think this will be like Bolshevism in Germany. And I think that gives you an idea of the extent to which a woman calling for change upset dramatically the male dominated political movement of those times. And I think that's worth pointing out again and again that this aspect of fear of the female politician, political leadership from the left is still prevalent in the world today. What's more unclear is the question as to whether people like Ebert or Gustav Noske, who later describes himself as the bloodhound of the German revolution, is whether they approved of the murder of Liebnik and Luxembourg that night before it happened. That's a much harder question to answer. Some people say they ordered it, others say there's no evidence for that. And as with many historical questions, we can't answer them with certainty. What we can say with a degree of greater certainty is what happened next because Luxembourg's body isn't found until late May. So her funeral takes place in Berlin in June. That's a mass participation event. Lots of working class people and commentators at the time say this. Lots of working class SPD voters who don't support Luxembourg nevertheless come out to honor her in death because they respect her contribution. And so it comes in the end to a military trial where because the soldiers who are accused of murdering Luxembourg are serving officers and men, they are tried by their division's commanders in a military court, which means that the person writing character references for them is none other than Valdemir Pabst, who's ordered them to carry out the executions. And this comedy of justice, as the Rothana calls it, means they all get off, with the exception of two given custodial sentences. One serves his and the other is released from prison a day after his sentence begins. When a man called Wilhelm Canaris, later the head of the espionage of the Wehrmacht, turns up at the prison with papers demanding this man's release. And he then takes him to, leads him to flee across the border. So you can see a kind of a dark state, an operation looking after the killers. And most of this is quite visible to the SPD leadership. So by the end of 1919, even Friedrich Ebert votes in cabinet saying there should be a retrial, there should be a new trial. This was not justice, but he's outvoted by the majority of people in the cabinet. And so that's where the criminal proceedings end.
- [40:24]
Mark Jones
So this leads me on to a question which is how was Luxembourg remembered in the decades that followed her death? Death within Germany but also worldwide.
- [40:33]
Ryan Seacrest
Her murder. It's a small woman with the limp who's been active in politics, who's been murdered at the entrance to a hotel by a group of military aged men who have trying to find the right words to capture it without sensationalizing it or without reenacting it in spoken form over 100 years later. But they have brutally killed this woman and that triggers a reaction among multiple, for want of a better way of putting audiences, you know, and so her death and killing is immediately represented in art. It's represented in. Katie Kowitz represents the death of Liebniktu in one of her famous sculptures. And her, you know, I've said how Yoglik is himself before he too is murdered, you know, is very, very loyal to her and she's dead, but he won't let her legacy or her life be forgotten. That's the same with Mathilde Jakob, who identifies her body in 1919, although later there's questions as to whether it's really her body or not. And so her friends, really, I think her friends, her political allies are the first people to construct memories of Rosa Luxembourg. I think it's Paul Froehlich writes a biography of her, her in the 1920s, her and Liebnicht become the symbols for the Communist Party in Germany of why they can never trust a Social Democratic Party. They're buried in the city's cemetery in 1919. In 1927, Mies van der Rohe, a famous architect in the Weimar Republic, is commissioned to build a new grave. I won't say gravestone because it's bigger and more spectacular than that. Then in the 1930s, the Nazis actually come and they destroy that because they've always hated Luxembourg. Then, after 1945, with the establishment of East Germany, Luxembourg's remains are searched for. And whether or not they're ever found, the documentation suggests that nothing is found. But nonetheless, there is a reburial ceremony and there is a new grave created, which is still there. And for the duration of the East German Republic, that was one of the most important days, the anniversary of Luxembourg and Liebnik's murder. Major marches in Berlin and across East Germany to commemorate it. And since 1990, with the reunification of Germany, those marches have still taken place, albeit the numbers have gotten smaller. So I think Luxembourg becomes a martyr of socialism, as the term used to describe her, and she is remembered as a symbol for the Communist Party in the Weimar Republic, and then once again as a symbol of the East German state, which never lived up to Luxembourg's principles of freedom. When it collapses, she then becomes a symbol in the reunified Germany of what maybe those people who felt that reunification actually was a defeat for them. She becomes a symbol of the world they lost with the end of East Germany. I think in the German context, to sum up, you know, the hundred years between her murder in 1919 and 2019 at Santino Scenery. She's been the subject of several films, Margaret von Trothe's film in the 1980s, probably the best one. And that's always that kind of, you know, by the 1960s, she became an icon for the student left in Germany too. I think probably one thing we haven't spoken about is as the century, the distance moves on. If you're looking for a female icon in this time, you know, Luxembourg is probably one of the standout European political icons, you know, at the age of the suffragettes to. And Luxembourg herself was always about socialism more than about women's rights. But the fact that she was a woman meant that she could be remembered as a woman who fought for change and ultimately suffered a very misogynistic and violent death.
- [44:20]
Mark Jones
I think. Before we do wrap up, I wanted to ask you, do you think there are any misconceptions About Rosa Luxemburg, any myths that need to be exploded?
- [44:30]
Ryan Seacrest
I think there's probably two things. And the first one is because Luxembourg is often presented as the only female revolutionary in Germany in the early part of the 20th century. And I think that's important to say that she was the foremost female revolutionary on the political left, but she wasn't alone. And I think that it's worth remembering that. And the second point I would make is that the description of Luxembourg as a pacifist is right insofar as that she opposed international war, and she went to prison for her ideals of opposing war. But she was not opposed to using language that was calling for violence. The last articles of her life are very much calling for violence, calling for the death of others. They're calling for people to go out to the streets, take up arms, and to die in that process. She argues at the time when it's pointed out to her that the revolutionaries don't have much chance of success. She says, you know, a healthy child, when it is born, it screams. That's her argument. It's the need to scream. They need to shout. They need to get people mobilized. But that does make it problematic for us to say that this is someone who's pacifist and who's opposed to violence. And I think part of the reason why that idea is so prevalent is because Rose, Luxembourg's undoubtedly a heroine. She's undoubtedly a figure that many people will be inspired by. And I think often memory and political memory and icons. A lot of the time, people tend to like to have their icons as pure as possible. And so in an era where people don't want to remember that their icon was committed to violence at a certain point of their career, that's why it's largely been forgotten. And I think that's wrong. I think it's important that we remember that Luxembourg was someone who was deeply committed to rejecting many of the values of her times. But she also undoubtedly saw revolutionary violence as being necessary to achieving her goals. I think her defenders would say that the violence that she wanted was much less than the violence that was opposed by the capitalist system upon the world. And that's another question that people listening to the program can think about themselves.
- [46:44]
Danny Byrd
That was Mark Jones, assistant professor in Global history at University College Dublin and a specialist in the history of modern Germany and the Weimar Republic.