History and Heartbreak: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

When I was a child, Rosa Luxemburg's name would sometimes be mentioned with awe in my slightly irreverent left-wing household. Who was she? I'd ask. A great socialist, I'd be told. She criticized Lenin. She was assassinated. For years I thought the Soviets had murdered her. In a sense, I wasn't so far off. In 1931 Joseph Stalin had Luxemburg "excommunicated" from the canon of Marxist heroes. If she'd been living in his Russia she'd certainly have been eliminated. No revolutionary as independent-minded as she could fail, come the revolution, to be denounced as a counterrevolutionary.


There she was: a girl, a Jew, a cripple–possessed of an electrifying intelligence, a defensively arrogant tongue and an unaccountable passion for social justice, which, in her teens, led her to the illegal socialist organizations then abounding among university students in Warsaw. In the city's radical underground, she opened her mouth to speak and found that thought and feeling came swiftly together through an eloquence that stirred those who agreed with her, and overwhelmed those who did not. The experience was exhilarating; more than exhilarating, it was clarifying; it centered her, told her who she was.

At 18–already on the Warsaw police blotter–Rosa was sent to Zurich to study, and never went home again. Although she was registered at the university as a student in natural sciences, it was at the German socialist club–with its library, reading room and lecture hall–that she got her education. There, in the autumn of 1890, she met Leo Jogiches, a Lithuanian Jew three years her elder and already a student revolutionary of local reputation. A self-styled hero of Russian radical literature, Leo was brooding, angry, remote, enamored of Bakunin's famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who "has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings, he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion–the revolution." Rosa was enraptured. Leo, in turn, was aroused by her adoration. They became lovers in 1891; but, from the start, theirs was a misalliance.

From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn't be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they'd produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace. Leo, on the other hand, withdrawn and depressed–he hated daylight, sociability and his own sexual need–told her this was nonsense; all that mattered was the Cause. Yet Rosa's longing for intimacy with him did not abate. It held her attention with the same unwavering strength as did the analysis of capital or the general strike. The irony is that it was precisely the compelling nature of this frustrating relationship that, over the next twenty-five years, would make her think hard, and yet harder, about what, exactly, this brave new world of theirs could be about.

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Over the next two decades, Luxemburg wrote books, essays and articles on one aspect of radical politics or another; engaged regularly in long speaking tours across Europe; taught in the party school; and grew into one of the most articulate and influential members of the SPD's increasingly troublesome left wing. The SPD was, essentially, a theory-driven, centrist party devoted to the workings of its own organization and to the achievement of socialist progress through parliamentary change. Luxemburg, on the other hand, believed heart and soul that capitalism in all its forms had to be eradicated–through nothing less than the spontaneous uprising of rank-and-file workers–if there was ever to be a social democracy. For Luxemburg, the words "general strike" were definitive. For the SPD elite, they were words that sent shudders up the collective spine. It was in fiery opposition to her conservative comrades that she wrote her most insightful works.


She'd been in prison many times before, and it had always been something of a lark–visitors, books, good food, furnished cells–but now the party, in more ways than one, was over. Her hair turned gray and she began to grow confused, not in her mind but in her spirit. Nevertheless, she read–Tolstoy, not Marx–and wrote incessantly. In the summer of 1918, still in prison and now in distress over what was happening in Russia as well as in Europe, she completed a pamphlet called The Russian Revolution, which to this day qualifies as one of the most stirring documents in modern political thought. Luxemburg was a diehard democrat. Never for a moment did she think democracy should be sacrificed to socialism, and in this brief work–the work of one ever mindful of what a human being needs to feel human–she laid out her impassioned insights on the danger to democracy that the Bolshevik Revolution posed.



Luxemburg was released from prison in Breslau on November 8, 1918, and went immediately to Berlin. The city reflected the dangerous chaos into which Germany's defeat had plunged the country: streets filled with armed citizens, drunken soldiers, open criminality. With Jogiches and Liebknecht at her side, Luxemburg immediately went to work to help found the Spartacus League (ultimately Germany's CP), in the hope that it would become the revolutionary group that could achieve a peaceful socialist takeover. But all such hopes were doomed; in whichever direction one looked, there was only cynicism and despair. In a desperate attempt to save the rapidly failing monarchy, the newly elected chancellor, a corrupted social democrat, had made a secret deal with the army to rid Germany of its ultra left–no matter the human cost. The Spartacists had turned violent as well: they wanted power, and they wanted it now. Luxemburg felt like she was staring into space.



What we have here are 230 pieces of correspondence, written to forty-six friends, comrades and lovers, all drawn from the six-volume German edition, which contains 2,800 letters, postcards and telegrams sent to more than 150 correspondents. Letter writing was Luxemburg's necessity: she wrote many each day, and long ones at that. Depending on whom she's writing to, they are filled with everyday news–where she's living, what she's reading, thinking about, the weather, the view from her window–or with politics: events and conferences, headlines and deadlines, party relationships and problematic positions. Whether the subject matter is mundane or acute, she addresses it with a wealth of commentary, description and opinion, uniformly enriched by a surprising knowledge of art, history and literature, and always made vivid by a strength and immediacy of feeling that is everywhere visible.

It was Luxemburg's success as a public speaker that made her think about the relation between speaking and the development of a natural style of writing. "You have no inkling of what a good effect my attempts so far to speak at public meetings have had on me," she writes Jogiches soon after she's come to Berlin. "Now I'm sure that in half a year's time I will be among the best of the party's speakers. The voice, the effortlessness, the language–everything comes out right for me…and I step onto the speaker's stand as calmly as if I had been speaking in public for at least twenty years." Shortly after this, she tells him, "I want [my writing] to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression."

From there to a sophisticated critique of party writing was one easy step. To her comrades back in Poland putting out The Workers' Cause, a paper she helped start, she advised, "I believe that people need to live in the subject matter fully and really experience it every time, every day, with every article they write, and then words will be found that are fresh, that come from the heart and go to the heart."

Her regard for writing as such is a key to her considerable understanding of the relation between art and politics. In a letter to a close friend, written from prison in May 1917, only a year and a half before her death, she recalls one of life's great experiences: "The time when I was writing the Accumulation of Capital belongs to the happiest of my life. Really I was living as though in euphoria, 'on a high', saw and heard nothing else, day or night, but this one question, which unfolded before me so beautifully, and I don't know what to say about which gave me the greater pleasure: the process of thinking, when I was turning a complicated problem over in my mind…or the process of giving shape and literary form to my thoughts with pen in hand." This is what she means when she speaks of reaching deep into oneself, to pull up the miracle of good writing that flourishes when clear thinking and expressive language feed on each other.

Rosa Luxemburg's letters have been published in English before, but this collection, of which about two-thirds are newly translated, has delivered to us a real, recognizable human being. In the previous volumes, Luxemburg often seemed uniformly heroic; here we have her in all her strength and all her frailty. And it is in the letters from prison, more than in any others she wrote, that she emerges as one of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive. To one old comrade she writes, "To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life 'on the giant scales of fate' if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud…the world is so beautiful, with all its horrors, and would be even more beautiful if there were no weaklings or cowards in it." With another friend, she indulges in descriptive memories of wandering in a field on a spring day, listening to the St. Matthew's Passion in a Berlin church, hearing a beer wagon rattle down the street, looking at the flower shop and the cigar store that flank a suburban railroad station–somehow associating all this sensuality with the Cause. Hers was a spirit that never ceased responding to the world as it was–even as she fought for a world that could be. The intactness of her responsive nature, throughout the years, seems remarkable; especially so when we consider what she was up against in her life with Leo Jogiches.

From earliest times, Luxemburg had felt existentially homeless. She believed that "home" was to be found in a cause great enough to make world and self come together in a common effort to renew the human race. That effort, of course, was socialism. At the same time, she understood–really understood–that socialism had to be made, on a daily basis, from the inside out, through the internal struggle of people to humanize (that is, "socialize") themselves, even as they worked for radical change. She knew instinctively that if socialists closed down inside, they'd become the kind of people who, devoid of fellow feeling, would make police-state socialism. This was Luxemburg's single most important insight–that socialists must remain empathic beings throughout their revolutionary lives. Otherwise, she asked, what kind of world would they be making? Whom would it serve? And how would human existence be bettered? This meditation never left her; in fact, as the years went on it grew in size and depth. Out of it, ultimately, comes her opposition to war, her criticism of Lenin, her analysis of why she reads Tolstoy in prison instead of Marx.


Your letters contain nothing but nothing except for news of The Workers' Cause. Say something nice to me!  

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