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In Our Time: History
Rosa Luxemburg
00:50:10
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionary.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
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Nadine Russell
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Melvin Bragg
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Melvin Bragg
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Nadine Russell
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Melvin Bragg
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Nadine Russell
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter bcinourtime. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Rosa Luxembourg argued for revolution in an age of revolutions. She was born in Poland in 1871, then part of the Russian Empire, yet is most remembered for her life and brutal death in Germany in 19. She was a pacifist even before the First World War, which put her at odds both with the main German party of the left, which backed the war, and with the government which imprisoned her. For much of it, she was released into a Germany in revolution and supported the even more radical spartacist uprising in January 1919, a step too far for her opponents. She was arrested, murdered and thrown into a canal, which for some extinguished her and for others made her a martyr while her ideas live on. With me to discuss the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg are Jacqueline Rose, co director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Mark Jones, Irish Research Council Fellow at University College, Dublin, Nadine Russell, senior lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Essex. Jacqueline Rose. What was Rosa Luxembourg's background in Poland?
- [02:57]
Jacqueline Rose
Well, Poland, as you said, was occupied by Tsarist Russia. So she was politicized very, very young. She was born in Zamos and the family moved to Warsaw when she was about 4 years old. And they were a Jewish family, but they did not live in the Jewish Quarter, as it were. They were, I think, what we would describe as assimilated Jews, although, in fact, her father was very involved in Reform Judaism. But she was politicized from an incredibly young age. One of her first memories will have been the pogrom of 1880, which involved rape and murder across the. Across Poland. And oddly enough, the Jews that were not in the Jewish quarter were in some ways the more vulnerable because they thought they would not be the targets of the hatred, and they were completely wrong. But she also was confronted with the idea of sedition from an incredibly young age, so that when she was 14, four socialists were actually hung, executed in front of the Warsaw Citadel. And when she was 15, two remarkable women, Maria Behovec and Rosalia Felsenhard, were tried for sedition for belonging to the Proletariat Committee and sent to Siberia and died on their way there. And this politicized her. She was offered. No, she wasn't. She was refused the gold medal for achievement as a schoolgirl on the grounds of her rebellious tendencies. So that was her sort of baptism by fire into the political and imminently revolutionary life of Poland.
- [04:35]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
She became a very substantial economist and an inspiring speaker and so on. What was her education, her young education you mentioned? She didn't get the medal, but she had a good. What was the education?
- [04:45]
Jacqueline Rose
Well, her education was a traditional education in Poland, but she was an autodidact. She was reading Marx from a very, very young age, and she was educating herself in the classics of Communism and became a fervent supporter of the communist ideal, revolutionary ideal, by the. I would say, by the time. Well, by the time she was 18, certainly. And she had to leave Poland because she was already under observation and at risk of arrest at the age of 19. And she got out in a cart pretending that she was a Jewish girl who wanted to marry a Catholic man. Her parents disapproved, so priests got her out under a straw bed in a cart. So she was incredibly imaginative, but she was politicized from a very, very young age. And she went towards what was then the classics of socialist thought. And she, as you say, Melvin, she not only read them, but she mastered them and she became one of the most brilliant commentators on them.
- [05:49]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
She had to get out of who.
- [05:50]
Jacqueline Rose
Was after the Polish government was after her.
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
Why?
- [05:54]
Jacqueline Rose
Because she was involved in underground revolutionary movements.
- [05:57]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
In what way? How does that show itself? Why did it threaten them?
- [06:00]
Jacqueline Rose
Why did it threaten them? Because this was tsarist Russia and any dissent was. I said the four of the revolutionary activists were hung in the public square, so there was no dissent. And there was also a quota on Jews in schools. It was a fervently anti Semitic country. And there was a Polish nationalist movement that was seen as very threatening to tsarist Russia. She never supported them. One of her geniuses was that she never believed in nationalism as the basis for any political identity. But she was involved in the revolutionary underground from the age of 18 onwards.
- [06:33]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
And what age did she get herself out on this?
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Jacqueline Rose
19.
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
She was 19. Mark Jones. She moved to Berlin in her late 20s. So what happened in the 10 years between 19 and late 20s?
- [06:47]
Melvin Bragg
Well, first of all, I think we should say that she's also a woman, which means she can't study at university in tsarist Russia. So one of the other factors taking her out of Poland is that she wants to study, she wants to go to university. She's very, very, very smart. She's very intellectually gifted. So she goes then to Switzerland, which at that time is a very liberal country, one of the most liberal in Europe. It allows women to study, also allows women from other countries to study. And also in Zurich, where she goes to, there is an enclave of emigre socialist thinkers, people like Luxembourg who are fleeing arrest. And so she goes to Zurich where she begins to study and lives in this milieu of European socialist emigres in Zurich. One of the people there who she meets, who becomes very influential for the rest of her life is Leo Jogikiz, who is also an emigre from Vilnius. He, like Rosa Luxembourg, he's a little bit older than her. He's also very gifted intellectual. He's also wanted by the tsarist police and also decides to flee from, from the Russian state and goes to, to. To Zurich and they fall in love and they are then together as a pair for much of the next 10 years.
- [08:06]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Who's supporting her or how she supporting herself?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, her family doesn't have much money for her and so from the accounts that I've read, I think Jogik is better off than Rosa and so he's able to support her a little bit. And that frustrates her as well. But she's not particularly well off, but she's able to live on the money that comes into him.
- [08:32]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Does she get what is recognizable today as a good university education? Does she go on to teach? Is this time in Switzerland? It seems quite a long time. Your twenties are very important. What else does she get from that?
- [08:43]
Melvin Bragg
I think she gets an awareness of European socialism by mixing with different groups, mixing with French, with Germans, with Russians, like herself. She also travels a lot, so she goes to research in Berlin. I think her first trips to Berlin are research trips. She goes to Paris, she spends time in Paris. She gets to experience, I suppose, two different European worlds at this time. You know, the provincial university town of Zurich and then the metropolis of Paris, which is at first a little bit scary for her, but actually over time she comes to really love Paris. And this in turn creates difficulties with her relationship with Yogicas, because he is in Zurich and they're writing letters to each other and she is maybe beginning to see Zurich as being a little bit. As being a stage that's too small for her.
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
Is she consciously building up a web of relationships in the socialist, left wing, political part of Europe?
- [09:43]
Melvin Bragg
It's hard to say that with certainty. I think when we look back at her life, when we read things backwards into it, we could certainly say that she appears to be an excellent networker, creating alliances in different places with different socialist leaders. And so we could say she's consciously doing that. I think by the time she comes to move to Germany, it's clear that she has laid groundwork for, you know, when she's going to Germany, she knows whose doors she's going to call on when she arrives there. She's already attending the socialist conferences, the international conferences, and so she is building a reputation while she's still in Switzerland. So when she arrives in Germany, you know, she is young and female, but she's not unknown.
- [10:25]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
What lured her to Germany, do you think? Nadine?
- [10:32]
Nadine Russell
Her connections and her links to the left wing and socialist sort of movement certainly helped in bringing her to Germany. She was deeply connected to Karl Liebknecht, who was her sort of political partner for much of her time later on. And he belonged to the more radical part of the Social Democratic Party and, you know, her inspiration of sort of socialist ideas. The country to go to in the early 20th century to possibly test out some of those ideas probably would have been Imperial Germany.
- [11:20]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
So she saw Berlin and Germany as the best place for her to develop her own ideas. So she went with her own ideas there. She wasn't drawn There because of them. She went because of herself.
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Nadine Russell
It's probably a combination of both. She went with her own ideas, but she also was drawn to a quite active socialist political landscape. If you like.
- [11:41]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Could you tell us her views of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and how that changed? Can you not offer an answer to that? I know you're pointing at Jacqueline, but you can't. I'll come to Jacqueline later on this. So what she. How does. She must have some reaction that you would know about.
- [11:59]
Nadine Russell
She was quite, she was quite impressed by the Russian Revolution. She saw particularly when she later on compared it to what was happening in Germany as the sort of the right kind of revolution. The revolution that. Where the power was going to Soviet councils, which she believed was the right kind of political form of organization. Particular when we look at what she thought about what was happening in Germany in 1918, 1919, she felt that this was the revolution that was actually moving power to the right people rather than a revolution that only transformed the political system but actually didn't transform the life of the people.
- [12:48]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
She seems to, excuse me, she seems to become prominent in, in, let's call it extreme left wing politics. Quite soon what was there wasn't much franchise, you couldn't vote and so on. There weren't many women doing as well as she, if any, maybe one or two others. What, what distinguished her at that young. At that time.
- [13:10]
Nadine Russell
Yes. So you're right. She, she couldn't, she couldn't vote. Women couldn't vote in Germany at this point in time. Women only got the vote in 1819 and first voted in 1919. So actually only a few days after she was killed. So she didn't experience to actually vote in Germany and she couldn't stand for elections either. She couldn't stand for political office. So her power was through her writing, being a political activist, being a brilliant thinker and a distinguished journalist and publicist. And she worked within the Social Democrat, the radical part of the Social Democratic Party. So it was difficult to make her voice heard in that sense as she couldn't engage in the political decision making process as a woman. But also with her cooperation with quite prominent men in this particular party, she was able to make her voice heard.
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
Jacqueline Rhodes, can you give us some idea then? Thank you, Nadine. That we're in Berlin, she's working away. She is a revolutionary, she's with important men who are doing things which she has got no boat and she's a woman and we know enough about that to know that she would be Marked down because of that. How was she making her voice heard?
- [14:35]
Jacqueline Rose
This is the key, I think, first of all, just to stress the question of her being a woman is so important. She was not just a woman. She was a Polish Jewish woman with a limp.
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Nadine Russell
Right.
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Jacqueline Rose
And she was tiny, which puts me on her side immediately. And she had this incredible capacity for public speaking. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why Leo Jochi has stayed in, you know, constructing the Polish, Lithuanian, non Nationalist Socialist Party. And she. She was in Berlin and he. Well, Luxembourg's biographer says that he wielded her like a pen. But I think a better way of putting it is that he needed her. He needed her desperately because she could work her way through the echelons of the German Social Democratic Party. And she raised right to the top because of her capacity to enthuse the people she spoke with.
- [15:28]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
We've got the Social, excuse me, got the Social Democrats, and there's two sides. There's the evolutionists and the revolutionists, really. And she's one of the revolutionists. But there's still one party at the moment. But are they separating? Do they talk to each other? I'd just like to place her a little bit more in German politics at the time, at the time before the First World War.
- [15:49]
Jacqueline Rose
There's a big row. And some of her most important writing is against Edward Bernstein, who she accused of revisionism in the German Social Democratic Party. And she accused him of revisionism because he believes that capital would endlessly renew itself, on which she also partially agreed. Although she firmly believed in. In the dictatorship of the proletariat and the imminence and inevitability of revolution, she nonetheless never underestimated capital's ability to reignite itself. But she thought that the opposition. Reform or revolution? He was on the side of reform, she said, was like Hamlet's to be or not to be. As far as she was concerned, to be a reformist was not to be. So she really took him to task and that created a lot of enemies for her.
- [16:34]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
She had this idea, more than an idea theory, passionate belief about spontaneity in revolutions, which is fascinating and you pick out in your notes. Could you give us your summary of that, please?
- [16:47]
Jacqueline Rose
It's her most important idea. For me, it's misunderstood as anything can happen, whereas actually what it means is you cannot control what will happen. It's sourced from the heart in her writing. It is the notion of something ripening. And she says this in one of her letters to Leo Jochi here, something ripening within her, which ignores all rules and conventions. She believes you cannot dictate the outcome of a revolution, and if you try to dictate it, you will crush it. And this is.
- [17:16]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
And by dictating a revolution, you kill the revolution.
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Jacqueline Rose
You kill the revolution, Absolutely. And this was the basis of her fervent, passionate disagreement with Lenin. And she accused him of trying to create a night watchman state. And she said that he was playing schoolmaster with the revolution. And she used a vocabulary for spontaneity to do with a revolution. Billowing, flooding, gigantic networks of streams, which is almost identical to the vocabulary of somebody like Adaf Suef describing the revolution in Tahrir Square in 2011. So she's not saying you don't have to plan. She's not saying that anything can happen, but she's saying that if you suppress the spirit of spontaneity, you will destroy the true democratic spirit, spirit of revolution, which has to be unpredictable.
- [18:06]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Mark Jones, how is this idea of hers? Does she speak? Molly? Of course she would. She's that sort of person. And she speaks about this. How is it received among her fellows, even on the left?
- [18:16]
Melvin Bragg
Well, I think, you know, in the decade between before the First World War starts in 1914, she alienates a lot of her party from her both. There was always a divide between left and right in the. In the German Social Democratic Party at this time. But even those on the left of the party, she alienates them too, because she pushes the argument too far.
- [18:36]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Which argument?
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Melvin Bragg
Her argument that the party should be moving in a revolutionary direction and that it should do everything it can to bring German workers into a state where they will rise up against the state. So she's pushing for.
- [18:48]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
And can we develop what she wants the German workers to do? She wants them to own that.
- [18:52]
Melvin Bragg
She wants them to strike. She wants general strikes. She wants them to be prepared to walk out on strike if war is declared. She wants them to do things which the leadership of the party don't want them to do at that time. So the leadership of the party by the 1910s is focusing on the next election. So even though the electoral law in Germany is not equal, particularly in the state of Prussia, where workers votes count for less than the votes of owners of property, the party leadership still thinks it will become the largest party.
- [19:20]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
We're still with the Social Democrats.
- [19:21]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, the Social Democrats believe they'll become the largest party in 1912. And they don't want to do anything that will upset that party parliamentary struggle. And so their argument is we can move into a more aggressive form of revolutionary politics when we're the largest party, because that will be harder for the state to respond to and harder to the state to repress. And so Rosa wants to make arguments against this. And she writes newspaper articles. I mean this is one of the things she's doing at this time. She's teaching in the party school. She's teaching the new cadres of party leaders, but she's also writing newspaper articles. And the newspaper editors are more conservative than Rosa Luxemburg is. And so she starts to fight with them. And so she ends up having a massive fight with Karl Kautsky, who's been one of her most important supporters and allies before this. And they end up not talking to each other. From 1910 to 1914, Kautsky even suffers a nervous breakdown partially as a result of his public row with Rosa Luxembourg. So she's alienating the left. And perhaps the more important point to make when we think of the. The broader constellation is she's doing this all very publicly. And so those who are leading the party from the right, so the future leader Fritz Ebert, who plays a crucial role in 1918-19, they already hate Rosa Luxembourg before the First World wars even started.
- [20:34]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Well, let's come to this First World War because it was obviously a crucial thing. And I'll come over to you in a moment, Nadine, but just give us a quick headline and before we. What led to her arrest and trial? Just well at and just after arrest, just at and then trial just after the beginning of the post world war.
- [20:54]
Melvin Bragg
She'S teaching in the school, as I say, and that's not lively enough for her. So she goes on a speaker's tour.
- [21:00]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
But what led to her arrest?
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Melvin Bragg
She calls for workers to act against the state. So she commits an act of verbal sedition and she's arrested for that because.
- [21:10]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
What we have, Nadine, and as I understand it, a massive sweep of nationalism. The Kaiser calls in the German spirit. This is a great national war. It's an imperial war run by the. And the Social Democrats think they have to support him, otherwise they'll be accused of being anti patriotic. But she won't. Rosa Luxemburg takes against that. Could you tell me how she expresses her opposition to that very strong nationalist imperialist ancestor never had view.
- [21:41]
Nadine Russell
She is in a party that as you said, sort of supports the Kaiser in his war. She's not the only one who's against it. As Mark pointed out earlier, it's a party that's divided among those who sort of support that type of policy and among a small minority that doesn't from 1914 onwards. So we might need to be a bit careful about overstating that. By August 1914, everyone was for the war and everyone within the Social Democrats was for the war, but the great majority was. So her opposition to this makes Turnsor an outsider. She publicly declares that she's against it. She also, as we said earlier, links up with powerful men. Karliebknecht is one of them. He's a party delegate, he's a member of the parliament, and he repeatedly votes against the Social Democratic decision to support the Kaiser's war credits, which again, directly brings her, through her link with Karliebknecht, in an opposing position.
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Melvin Bragg (Host)
So how is she putting her view forward? She's fallen out with newspapers. She's a suspect figure. How is she speaking in public, or what's she doing to put this view forward?
- [23:05]
Jacqueline Rose
She's definitely speaking in public. She never stops speaking in public. She's absolutely remarkable. Not to speak of the flood of letters, which I know we're going to get onto in a minute, but I think we really have to give her credit for this opposition to the war. I mean, Clara Zetkin, who was another one of her closest friends, and again, it's crucial that she has so many crucial central women friends who she's writing to all the time and in dialogue with, one of whom is Louise Kautsky, of course, who is the wife of Karl Kautsk. But what she. I mean, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, the day that the party, the German Social Democratic Party, votes for the munitions bill to support the war, they both contemplate suicide. They think it is a catastrophe. And they think it's a catastrophe because it is a nationalist, imperialist war. And one of Luxembourg's most graphic sayings is taking Marx's workers of the world unite, but she adds, in time of war, slit each other's throats. Okay, so what she's concerned about is the fact that this is a war that is using as its cannon fodder workers across the world who are killing each other, who should see that their interests are identical against empire and against pseudo patriotism and nationalism.
- [24:17]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
And she's sent to prison. And as you mentioned, she writes an awful lot in prison. She had this enormous capacity to be solitary, even in a very crowded cell and get on with her writing. And can you just give us the beginnings of the drive of her writing in those years she had in prison?
- [24:35]
Jacqueline Rose
Well, she Never stopped writing. But it's absolutely true that when she was in prison, she wrote some of her most important, not just texts, but also her letters. And I think it's very, very important that we bring those in to the conversation because the way they were received when they started being published more than 20, 30 years ago was they show the human woman behind the steely revolutionary, which is nonsense because she was steely in her personal life and utterly human in her revolutionary thinking. So it's a false dichotomy. But what the letters do give you a sense of is the range of her thought and just how much her revolutionary commitment was fueled by her sense of how human beings enact interaction, love, hate and cooperate and go to war with each other. So the letters are flooded with remarks about the sea being like the latter, that's always on the move. They're flooded with statements about something growing in her which will ignore all rules and conventions. They're flooded with kind of moments of brilliant sarcasm. So Walker, a famous astrophysicist, said he had found a secret to the universe, and it was a kind of a ball. The universe was a ball. And she said, this is a petty bourgeois concept. Infinity is infinity. It's not some bomb glace. She wrote that to Louise Kautsky. So I think it's very important that in her letters you see sides of her which you don't necessarily get from the writing, but that you understand are fueling it. And it's the complexity of the human heart, which I think is sort of supporting and driving into her notions of spontaneity and her notions of what can and cannot and must not be controlled, both in a human life and also in a revolutionary situation.
- [26:27]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Mark Jones, just to continue the prison. That is the prison position for a little while, if she is her political position outside the prison, is it still flickering? Is it still alive? Is it being supported? Is indeed. As the war goes on and the Germans start to lose and the blockade means that there's no food, very little food coming in. Is it strengthening?
- [26:50]
Melvin Bragg
Well, I think two things are happening. First of all, I think, you know, let's not forget at the start of the First World War, Germany is invaded in its eastern provinces. And German refugees come from. They're invaded by the Russian armies. The Russian armies commit atrocities. The German armies also commit atrocities. The start of the First World War. But it's the refugees coming from Eastern Prussia who bring these atrocity tales into the cities and center lands of Germany. And this makes, you know, Luxembourg and Leibnizt and particularly Leibnizt actually it makes them into figures of hate among those who are rallying behind the cause to support the war. So in this sense she's figures of.
- [27:29]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Hate because they come from.
- [27:30]
Melvin Bragg
Because they oppose the national cause in a moment of national calling. And so in this sense her politics, you know, she is a political figure for that audience because she's disliked and Leibniz'd as well. They're both disliked for the entire duration of the war. So even though she's locked away, she's still a symbol of another Germany that must be opposed because it betrays the nation in a time of war among the intended audience for her political mobilization. So this is the working class of Germany and it's difficult to assess how much influence she has. She has an organization helping her to get her political writings out of prison, particularly Yogika's again is closely working with her. He becomes the organizer at this time. And Luxembourg is maybe writing intellectual texts against the war, but he's the one who's getting them printed and getting them circulated. For a whole body of writers on Rosa Luxembourg from the East German state or for those maybe in the 60s and 70s, very sympathetic to the idea of a proletarian being forced into war influenced by Marxism, these letters are having a really important influence upon the decline in support for the war among the German population. I'm a little bit skeptical about that view. I think it's difficult to find evidence of a direct influence of, you know, Rosa Luxembourg makes an argument it gets smuggled out from the prison and it affects soldiers willingness to fight, or it affects the urban workers willingness to endure the war for the next winter.
- [29:05]
Nadine Russell
Can I come in to this to support Mark's point? We see throughout the war a society and not just, you know, not just workers, but a society that's getting quite war weary throughout the end of the war. But they're getting interested in peace rather than in revolution. It's not a situation where because the war is going badly, because military defeat is obvious for some, or because food shortages are particularly obvious towards the end of the war, 1917, 1918, we find find demands for bread and peace among the German society and population, not demands for a revolution. The national conservatives in the Weimar Republic sort of famously point out that it's the revolution that caused the defeat in the First World War, while actually it's the other way around. It's the defeat, the militaristic defeat in the war and the war weariness of the society that allows the revolution to Happen.
- [30:20]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Mark, you want to come in?
- [30:21]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah. I just wanted to add there, the war is going badly for Imperial Germany, but it's also going well. Let's not forget the Eastern Front is a victory for the German Empire in 1917 and leading to the Russian withdrawal of the war in 1918. And one of the reasons it's a victory for the German army in the east is because of the Russian revolutions in 1917. And I think any discussion of Rosa Luxemburg in the First World War needs to bring this point into focus. Luxembourg herself is very critical of Lenin, critical of the Bolshevists. And this later becomes part of the myth of Rosa Luxembourg as an opponent of Bolshevism and Leninism, because Luxembourg criticizes the Bolshevist's use of terror as a means of establishing the Soviet power in Russia. But what's important is her message. Writing for revolution has to compete with this message coming from the Soviet, coming from the shatter zones left by the collapsing Russian Empire, which is that revolution brings chaos, it brings hunger, it brings starvation, and it brings terror. And at this point in time, in the course of 1918, the term Russian conditions in Germany comes to be synonymous with Armageddon.
- [31:40]
Jacqueline Rose
She's a fervent and passionate supporter of the 1917 revolution because she thinks it really exposes the nature of the imperialist nature of the war in Germany and she defends it fiercely. But she is critical of the way it has been conducted. I think it's very, very important to make the distinction between the spirit of revolution which she uses against the German Democratic, Social Democratic Party for presenting itself as the vanguard of proletarian struggle. She just says this blows them out of the water. So she is critical. I agree with you, Mark, that she thinks she's critical of Lenin, Night watchman state terrorist activity and so on. But the Russian Revolution also produces a model for an alternative to what's going on in Germany. So I agree with you, Nadine, about the desire for bread and peace. But as you also said, the soldiers who come back from the war are war weary, but they're also starting to be aware, are potentially aware. And this is where the educational aspect of Luxembourg's writings are so crucial. They're starting to be aware that they have been used and therefore they come back, I would say, almost with a split consciousness which will lead into what happens next. On the one hand, they know they've been used and they know it's been an imperialist war and they know the workers of the world should unite against that. So there are potential revolutionaries, but they're also nationalists. They haven't lost the nationalist fervor. And therefore I think it is one of the most tragic moments in European history that at that moment it could have gone either way. Right. So the people who murder Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 are people who within hours, days before, were supporting the Spartacist uprising. They believed in the possibility of a revolutionary moment of a very different kind. And so they're split down the middle. And Luxembourg famously said socialism or barbarity. And what we got was barbarity.
- [33:39]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Can I come to you, Nadine? Rosa Luxembourg was a co founder of the Spartacus League, later became the German Communist Party and they began a revolution in 1919. They start. Am I getting this wrong or are you worried about the question?
- [33:56]
Nadine Russell
No, no, no, no. I would suggest they. In 1919 they tried a Spartacus uprising.
- [34:03]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
An uprising, let's call it an uprising, not a revolution. What was the uprising about?
- [34:08]
Nadine Russell
So to go back a little bit, the Spartacus League was on the radical left wing. They were actually much smaller than we often think.
- [34:23]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
And she was co founder of it. That's right, I got that right.
- [34:29]
Nadine Russell
And they were founded already in 1916. And the Spartacus believed that what the Social Democrats were doing in November 1918 was a revolution that wasn't going far enough just to call for. To organize that the troops come home to sort of organize the end of the war, to call for national elections in January 1919, to then create a national assembly that would, so the Social Democrats hoped, create parliamentary democracy. We all think the Spartacus belief was to some extent actually betraying the real revol.
- [35:15]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
So what did the Spartacists want?
- [35:18]
Nadine Russell
So the real revolution would be in political terms, a system that was much more along the lines of Soviet style sort of councils, the powers, workers councils. The power shouldn't be in parliament, it should be with workers councils in terms of. So therefore elections for sort of a national assembly that was deciding on the constitution and on parliamentary democracy they felt were useless. Although Rosa Luxembourg changed her mind this in December 1918, but I think couldn't make her voice heard within the Spartacusbund. In terms of economic changes, they wanted a much more clear change of how the economic system worked, a much clearer change of redistribution of property. So that, you know, again suggesting that it's not a real revolution if the economic system essentially changes very little. The potential problem with that is I would argue that in November 1918, but also in January 1919, they have very, very little support for those type of ideas.
- [36:34]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
So that implies, Mike Jones, that they hadn't hope of achieving anything. Is there a sense in which Rosa Luxembourg, just recently out of jail, thought that they were going too soon and they had too shallow a support base?
- [36:51]
Melvin Bragg
Yes and no. I think the key point, that's the answer you like for Rosa Luxembourg in the revolutionary winter of 1918. 1919 is first of all when the revolution that topples the Kaiser and leads to the declaration of German Republic on the 9th of November takes place. She's in prison in Breslau, so she's a peripheral figure. And for the Spartacus League that are not in prison, including Karl Liebnicht, who's just been released, the outbreak of the revolution in Kiel and the German Navy comes to them as much as a surprise as it does to the Kaiser. They don't have people on the ground in Kiel. And the revolution then spreads from north Germany down through southern central Germany, eventually reaching Berlin on 9 November. Leibniz goes to the castle and proclaims Germany to be a socialist republic and says it's time for the workers to emulate the Bolshevists in Russia. And his message is very unsuccessful because at the same time, when Leipnish says workers stay on the streets, the revolution is only halfway complete. The new socialist government or the Kaiser's old socialists, the workers don't listen to his message to stay on the street, they listen to Friedrich Ebert's message and they go back to work. The council's movement, then that emerges in Germany that's a result of this revolution, also doesn't support the Spartacus group. So when there's a council, a congress of councils in Germany in mid December 1918, with 500, just over 500 delegates elected by council members, there's only 12 from the Spartacus League and Luxembourg and Leipnish don't get a mandate. So they're outside on the streets trying to mobilize support, but they're not successful in the institutions of the revolution. Now then, if I can just add one.
- [38:21]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Well, we have got to get a move on.
- [38:22]
Melvin Bragg
But this is the really crucial point about Rosa Luxembourg. In the winter, just before the Spartacus uprising, is at the founding congress of the party of the German Communist Party. She says Spartacus will never try to rule without the overwhelming support of the majority of Germans. And this is what makes her lays her claim to being a democratic socialist. But within a week's time, when the uprising starts, which she doesn't have very much control over, the decisions behind the uprising are taken in her absence, she throws her full weight behind the uprising. It has little chance of support unless it becomes a heroic gesture.
- [38:59]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Right, we have to move. She got murdered. Can you tell how? She and Liebnick were murdered on the same day, but not in the same place.
- [39:05]
Jacqueline Rose
Yes, they were murdered. They were both murdered. I think that's what we need to know. And I think we are in danger in the way we're talking about Luxembourg slightly of crushing her because, you know, she was the radicalized minority and radicalized minorities have something terribly important to say and the fact that they are then defeated, I think there's a danger of reading it back as therefore they were completely in error in their analysis of what was happening. And I really don't think that is true at all. I mean, Luxembourg's legacy is astounding. Her analysis of credit and the destruction of credit leads straight to 2008. I mean, she really knew that the endless expansion of consumerism within capitalism. So I agree with Nadine, unless there was an economic transformation, this was not going to be a revolution, even though it looked as if it was in the first stages of revolution in Germany. So I think on that her internationalism, I think we really have to hold onto that. Her critique of nationalism and her ecological sense of capital ransacking the globe and destroying the ecology of the land and impoverishing people by making areas of the world unlivable. And I'll just say one small anecdote. She is in prison and buffaloes that were war fodder were brought into the courtyard and she looks at how destroyed they're being and she says, I found myself weeping their tears. Not weeping for them, that would be crass sentimentalism. She identifies with the animals of the earth.
- [40:38]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
I have got to get to how she got murdered and who did it. Now, Mark, do you want to do that, please?
- [40:43]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah. I disagree with what Jacqueline's just said, but I'll stick to the question, which is so she. The revolution breaks out in the German navy and a group of naval officers conspire together to form a special unit which they want to create for the purpose of getting rid of their enemy's leaders. And she is arrested in hiding with Karl Liebnicht on the night of the 15th, 16th of January, just after the uprising has been crushed. On the 11th of January, Western Berlin, she's arrested by a group of men from a citizens militia. They realize they've got a very valuable prisoner on their hands and they bring her to an anti revolutionary lynchpin by the name of Vladimir Pabst, who is working closely with this special group. And that group is then charged with taking Luxembourg and Leipnich to Moabi Prison. And on the way they're planning to kill Luxembourg and Leibniz. They want to do it in separate transportation system. But unbeknownst to them, in the same hotel where they're doing the, where they're planning this operation, another officer goes about bribing men to just beat them to death as they're being brought out of the building. And so that's what happens. On the night of the 15th, 16th of January, Leibniz is brought through the hotel lobby. First he's set upon by a group of men, beaten, he's put in the back of the car. He's still alive at this point. He's taken into the Tiergarten park in central Berlin and he's given a chance to escape. And he's then shot and his body is handed in as an unidentified man to a nearby morgue. Luxembourg is beaten to death as she's been brought out of the hotel lobby. She's too weak to sustain to survive the blows that are inflicted upon her and her body is then dumped in the Landwehr Canal.
- [42:18]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Would it have been, thank you very much. Would it have been different had, had she survived?
- [42:22]
Nadine Russell
Nadine, now we get into speculative territory.
- [42:26]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
This has got to be brief, elliptical speculation.
- [42:31]
Nadine Russell
Possibly because the killing of both of them, not just her, created a bitterness within the political left that was very difficult to bridge for years to come. So if we, while the political left was divided anyway, this killing of those two people created almost an impossible cooperation for years to come among left wing parties.
- [43:01]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Jacqueline, very briefly, what's her greatest legacy?
- [43:05]
Jacqueline Rose
The concept of spontaneity and the idea that revolutionary spirit must be fostered, helped above all, not crushed and given. And actually her most important idea was her statement, freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise. One of my favourite quotes from Rosa Luxembourg.
- [43:22]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Thank you very much, Jacqueline Rose, Nadine Russell and Mark Jones. Next week we'll be discussing Roger Bacon, philosopher, mathematician from the 13th century, pioneer of scientific, modern, scientific method. Thanks for listening.
- [43:35]
Jacqueline Rose
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:42]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
We're on air again, okay, not on our live, so don't worry, sir, you want, this only goes everywhere else.
- [43:48]
Melvin Bragg
My, my comment that I wanted to make in response to Jacqueline's comment, you know, that's, you know, a Rosa Luxembourg with whom we all have a lot of Empathy. Right. You know, there she is feeling the suffering of others and sharing that suffering. And I just have to add to that the uprising that she supports, a week after she says that she won't support an uprising if it doesn't have the support of the majority of German people when the uprising starts, it's clear that they don't have the support, support of a majority within 24 to 36 hours of the uprising starting. And there's a chance in that moment that uprising could be ended with less people being killed through a negotiated settlement or through surrender on the part of the revolutionaries occupying the building. And there are two forces that don't want that to happen. One is actually the government side, because they want to crush the rebellion with the maximum force that they can bring to bear on the rebels, because they want to prove that. That they're strong. And the other force who's opposing any kind of peaceful outcome, any kind of outcome to reduce the loss of life is Rosa Luxembourg herself, who's writing articles in the Rotofana newspaper at this time, who is calling for workers to rebel, who's calling for violence, and whose violent rhetoric is becoming more and more aggressive in this time. And, you know, when we were introduced to her at the start of the programme, it was Rose Luxembourg as a pacifist, she is. But when the movement that's closest to her is sniping on people in the streets and killing innocent people, she is a preacher of revolutionary violence at this point in time. And, you know, I can see Jacqueline doesn't like this comment, but, you know, when we think of Rosa, we have to think of this angry Rosa at the end of her life, as well as the Rosa that we all like and admire in the earlier parts the of. Of her life. This isn't to say that she deserves what happens to her, that's not to say that at all. But it's just to try and understand that when the dynamics of violence take up and start defining politics, Rose's theory and her opposition to violence for the last 20, 25 years, that goes out the window in that moment. Now, tell me why I'm wrong.
- [45:58]
Jacqueline Rose
We love her anger. That's the first thing. And secondly, one of the most striking speech that she made was when she said, people are saying blood is being shed by the Russian Revolution and that it is violent. Let's go into the mines, let's go to the plantations, let's see the immiseration of life, the exploitation, the early deaths under the capitalist system. So if we're talking about violence. We have to distribute violence. And you are certainly loading the dice, Mark, if you don't mind me saying so, by saying she was not interested in stopping the loss of life, right? I really don't think that's correct. I see it very, very differently. She was exhorting a revolution because she saw what would happen if that revolution was thwarted. She saw that the revolution of the German Social Democratic Party was on the way to generating the Freikorps, who in fact were the people who murdered her, who would become the most fervent supporters of Hitler. So socialism or barbarity was the correct cry and she saw it coming. But I also think there's another thing to say, and I think we've downplayed the extent to which her political life was fueled by her sense of the complexity of the human heart. Because I think what she also thought at that point was that she owed the revolution a life. I say it completely differently. She knew she was going to die. She thought the revolution was not ready, but she felt she had no choice given her writing, given her analysis of what was happening, than to go the whole journey in what was happening, even though she knew it was going to fail. So I see it completely differently from you.
- [47:22]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Do you want to respond?
- [47:26]
Nadine Russell
I partly agree with Mark, but only partly really, because I think that by the by the Spartacus uprising, she had actually very little control on what was going on on the ground. And you know, I can see your point by sort of saying, but whatever you sort of published sort of spurs people on or you know, people, you know, sort of asks for moderation or not. But I think she was very little in control of the violence that was sort of carried out on both sides at that point in time. And I feel she. I disagree with you in a sense that you're suggesting she sort of almost encouraged it to some way or another. I think there was very little she could have done on this particular point in time because I think she actually had. I think she actually had no voice as such on the ground.
- [48:23]
Melvin Bragg
It's debatable to what extent she has a voice influencing the rebels in the newspaper buildings occupied in Berlin between the 5th and 11th of January. But it's not debatable that the opponents of the Spartacus led Spartacus named Spartacus Uprising, which we're calling the January Uprising. The opponents of it are reading Rosa Luxemburg's writings. They are engaging with her. And in that sense she is feeding into a cycle of mobilization and counter mobilization which is radicalizing everybody. And Pushing both sides into the direction of more violence. And to come back to Jacqueline's point, that may be true and maybe she has a right to offer her life to the revolution, but I'm not sure she has the right to take other people with her.
- [49:05]
Jacqueline Rose
I don't think she did. That's why we disagree. I agree with Nadine. I don't think she can be held responsible for the escalating violence of the revolution.
- [49:15]
Nadine Russell
I agree with Mark on that point that the Spartacus strategy is to create sort of radical sort of ideas. And they do it from sort of 1918 onwards and often with sort of quite spectacular demonstrations, mass assemblies and so on. That's overplaying their own strength quite considerably. So the opponents think they're actually possibly much stronger than they are. And therefore, as you said, sort of. It might not be her own people she's influencing in January 1919, but it might be her opponents who feel that they sort of need to react to that sort of radical language and to what they see on the street. As we said, quite an overreaction.
- [49:59]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
I think that that point's been argued between the two of you. As far as we can go on this context. I was very sorry, I mean, you. We, we are what we are. We're a colloquy. We're not a. We're not, we're not a four hour discussion group. That's. That's in the bag for later. But still, the, the connection you made Jacqueline, that she made between the psychic pain and the political pain, therefore the political insight was. It was fascinating. I too was. Sorry, we didn't get onto that. I mean, you've got time to develop that if you want a little bit.
- [50:29]
Jacqueline Rose
Well, I'll just say it was so central in her relationship with Leo Yogiciz, because he was, amongst all the other things, he admirably was. He was a commitment phobe and a control freak and he manipulated her and he refused to make certain commitments that she wanted and she wanted a child and then she wanted to adopt a child and he was having none of it. And he's. She wrote to him and said, you have no sense of the inner life. She said, all your interest is in one big thing, all your interest in the cause. There's nothing driven by the human heart. And she accuses him of being a schoolmaster with her. And it's obvious that her critique of Lenin and the night watchman state and playing a schoolmaster is sourced in the sexual politics of her own life very intimately and very passionately. And therefore, I think this is a whole other dimension of her legacy and of what we need to take from her, which is absolutely crucial for me.
- [51:29]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
Well, thank you all very much indeed. And the producers knocking on the door to make the great announcement.
- [51:35]
Melvin Bragg
Who'd like tea or who'd like coffee?
- [51:37]
Jacqueline Rose
Tea would be lovely. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free, find these on the website@BBC.co.uk radio4.
- [51:51]
Nadine Russell
America is changing and so is the world.
- [51:55]
Jacqueline Rose
But what's happening in America isn't just.
- [51:58]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
The cause of global upheaval, it's also.
- [52:00]
Jacqueline Rose
A symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [52:03]
Nadine Russell
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, dc.
- [52:06]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this.
- [52:08]
Jacqueline Rose
Is the Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [52:19]
Melvin Bragg (Host)
It.