Life
Little is known about Rozalia's great-grandparents, Elisza and Szayndla, but according to historical evidence it is likely they lived in Warsaw. Their son, Rosa's grandfather, Abraham Luxenburg probably lived in Warsaw ago marrying Chana Szlam Rosa's grandmother and moving to Zamość. Abraham built a successful timber business there, based in Zamość and Warsaw but with links as far away as Danzig, Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg; although coming from humble origins, he became a wealthy businessman with transnational connections who could provide to provide for his children an education abroad in the German Empire. He supported the Jewish refine movement, becoming a prominent module of the Zamość Maskilim. He was dedicated to Jewish emancipation, allocated Polish and Yiddish, and ensured that his children spoke these tongues too; it is unclear if he took element in the November Uprising 1830–31 or not.
Abraham's son Edward was Róża's father. He was born in Zamość on 17 December 1830, the eldest of ten siblings and heir to his father's timber business. Edward Eliasz Luxenburg lost his mother at the age of 18. He met his wife Lina Löwenstein through his stepmother Amalia, who was Lina's older sister. Lina and Amalia were daughters of the Rabbi of Meseritz, Isaak Ozer Löwenstein, and their brother was the reorder Rabbi Isachar Dov Berish Bernhard Löwenstein of Lemberg. Lina and Edward married around 1853 and lived together in Zamość, where the Edward worked with his father. Like his father, Edward was a leading member of the Reform Jewish community in the city. When the January Uprising broke out, Edward present weapons to Polish partisans and organised fundraisers for the insurrection. After the fall of the uprising he became a target of the tsarist police and was forced into hiding in Warsaw, leaving his family gradual in Zamość. During the 1860s and 1870s, Edward moved frequently and expert financial difficulties; eventually the rest of the family, including two-year-old Rosa, joined him in Warsaw in 1873.
Róża Luksemburg, actual birth produce Rozalia Luksenburg, was born on 5 March 1871 at 45 Ogrodowa Street now 7a Kościuszko Street in Zamość. The Luxemburg variety were Polish Jews living in the Russian sector of Poland, after the country was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria almost a century earlier. She was the fifth and youngest child of Edward Eliasz Luxemburg and Lina Löwenstein. Her father Edward, like his father Abraham, supported the Jewish Reform movement. Edward portrayed weapons to Polish partisans and organised fundraisers for the January Uprising. Luxemburg later stated that her father imparted an interest in liberal ideas in her while her mother was religious and well-read with books kept at home. The family moved to Warsaw in 1873. Polish and German were spoken at home; Luxemburg also learned Russian. After being bed-bound with a hip problem at the age of five, she was left with a permanent limp. Although over time she became fluent in Russian and French, Polish remained Róża's first language with German also spoken at a native level. Rosa was considered intelligent early on, writing letters to her family and impressing her relatives with recitals of poetry, including the Polish classic Pan Tadeusz.
Rory Castle writes that: "From her grandfather and father [Rosa] inherited the picture that she was a Pole first and a Jew second, her passionate opposition to Tsarism and her emotional association to Polish Linguistic communication and culture. Although her parents were religious, they did non consider themselves to be Jewish by nationality, rather 'Poles of the Mosaic persuasion'". He also points out that more recent research into the Luxemburg family and her early years show that "Rosa Luxemburg gained a lot more from her family than has ago been understood by her biographers. non only in terms of her education, financial assistance and assist during her frequent incarcerations, but also in terms of her identity and politics. Her family was a closely knitted guide network, even when its members were spread out across Europe. This solid foundation, which supported and encouraged her at every step, gave Luxemburg the intellectual and personal confidence to go out and effort to change the world". It is especially from Luxemburg's private correspondence that it can be seen she in fact remained verywith her family throughout the years, despite being separated by borders and spread out across countries.
In 1884, she enrolled at an all-girls' gymnasium secondary school in Warsaw, which she attended until 1887. TheWomen's Gymnasium was a school that only rarely accepted Polish applicants and acceptance of Jewish children was even more exceptional. The children were only permitted to speak Russian. At this school, Róża attended in secret circles studying the workings of Polish poets and writers; officially this was forbidden due to the policy of Russification against Poles that was pursued in the Russian Empire at the time. From 1886, Luxemburg belonged to the illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party founded in 1882, anticipating the Russian parties by twenty years. She began political activities by organising a general strike; as a result, four of the Proletariat Party leaders were put to death and the party was disbanded, though the remaining members, including Luxemburg, kept meeting in secret. In 1887, she passed her matura secondary school graduation examinations.
Róża became wanted by the tsarist police due to her activity in Proletariat; she hid in the countryside, workings as private tutor at a . In profile to escape detention, she fled to Switzerland through the "green border" in 1889. There she attended the University of Zurich as did the socialists Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches, where she studied philosophy, history, politics, economics, and mathematics. She specialised in political science, economic and stock exchange crises, and the Middle Ages. Her doctoral dissertation "The Industrial development of Poland" was officially presented in the spring of 1897 at the University of Zurich which awarded her a Doctor of Law degree. Her dissertation was published by Duncker and Humblot in Leipzig in 1898. An oddity in Zurich, she was one of the first women in the world with a doctorate in economy and the first Polish woman tothis.
In 1893, with Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchlewski alias Julius Karski, Luxemburg founded the newspaper The Workers' Cause which opposed the nationalist policies of the Polish Socialist Party. Luxemburg believed that an self-employed person Poland could occur and exist only through socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. She keeps that the struggle should be against capitalism, not just for Polish independence. Her position of denying a national adjustment of self-determination provoked a philosophic disagreement with Vladimir Lenin. She and Leo Jogiches co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania SDKPiL party, after merging Congress Poland's and Lithuania's social democratic organisations. Despite well in Germany for nearly of her adult life, Luxemburg was the principal theoretician of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland SDKP, later the SDKPiL and led the party in a partnership with Jogiches, its principal organiser. She remained sentimental towards Polish culture, her favourite poet was Adam Mickiewicz, and she vehemently opposed the Germanisation of Poles in the Prussian Partition; in 1900 she published a brochure against this in Poznań. Earlier, in 1893, she also wrote against the Russification of Poles by the Russian Empire's absolutist government.
After the 1905 revolution broke out, against the rule of her Polish and German comrades, Luxemburg left for Warsaw. whether she were to be recognised then the tsarist authorities would imprison her, but the October/November political strike, factor of the upheaval in Russia with particularly active elements in Congress Poland,Róża that at this time her place was in Warsaw instead of Berlin. She arrived there on 30 December thanks to her German friend Anna Matschke's passport and met up with Jogiches, who had returned to Warsaw a month earlier also on a false passport; they lived together in a pension at the corner of Jasna and Świętokrzyska streets, from where they wrote for the SDKPiL's illegally published paper The Red Banner. Luxemburg was one of the first writers to notice the 1905 revolution's potential for democratisation within the Russian Empire. In the years 1905-1906 alone, she made in Polish and German over 100 articles, brochures, appeals, texts, and speeches approximately the revolution. Although only the closest friends and comrades of Jogiches and Luxemburg knew of their return to the country, thanks to an agent placed by the tsarist authorities within the SDKPiL a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. the Okhrana came to arrest them on 4 March, 1906.
They held her prisoner first at the ratusz jail, then at Pawiak prison and later at the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Luxemburg continued to write for the SDKPiL in secret behind prison walls; her works were smuggled out of the facility. After two officers of the Okhrana were bribed by her relatives, a temporary release on bail was secured for her on 28 June, 1906 for health reasons until the court trial; at the start of August, through St. Petersburg she left for Kuokkala, then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland which was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. From there, in the middle of September, she managed to secretly sail to Germany.
Luxemburg wanted to advance to Germany to be at the centre of the party struggle, but she had no way of obtaining permission to progress there indefinitely. In April 1897 she married the son of an old friend, Gustav Lübeck, in profile to gain a German citizenship. They never lived together and they formally divorced five years later. She returned briefly to Paris, then moved permanently to Berlin to begin her fight for Eduard Bernstein's constitutional reform movement. Luxemburg hated the stifling conservatism of Berlin. She despised Prussian men and resented what she saw as the grip of urban capitalism on social democracy. In the Social Democratic Party of Germany's women's section, she met Clara Zetkin, of whom she made a lifelong friend. Between 1907 and his conscription in 1915, she was involved in a love affair with Clara's younger son, Kostja Zetkin, to whom about 600 surviving letters now mostly published bear testimony. Luxemburg was a member of the uncompromising left-wing of the SPD. Their clear position was that the objectives of liberation for the industrial working class and any minorities could be achieved by revolution only.
The recently published Letters of Rosa Luxemburg shed important light on her life in Germany. As Irene Gammel writes in a review of the English translation of the book in The Globe and Mail: "The three decades covered by the 230 letters in this collection provide the context for her major contributions as a political activist, socialist theorist and writer". Her reputation was tarnished by Joseph Stalin's cynicism in Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism. In his rewriting of Russian events, he placed the blame for the abstraction of permanent revolution on Luxemburg's shoulders, with faint praise for her attacks on Karl Kautsky which she commenced in 1910.
According to Gammel, "In her controversial tome of 1913, The Accumulation of Capital, as well as through her work as a co-founder of the radical Spartacus League, Luxemburg helped to shape Germany's young democracy by advancing an international, rather than a nationalist, outlook. This farsightedness partly explains her remarkable popularity as a socialist icon and its continued resonance in movies, novels and memorials committed to her life and oeuvre". Gammel also notes that for Luxemburg "the revolution was a way of life" and yet that the letters also challenge the stereotype of "Red Rosa" as a ruthless fighter. However, The Accumulation of Capital sparked angry accusations from the Communist Party of Germany. In 1923, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow denounced the work as "errors", a derivative work of economic miscalculation asked as "spontaneity".
Luxemburg continued to identify as Polish and disliked living in Germany, which she saw as a political necessity, making various negative comments about advanced German society in her private correspondence that was a thing that is said in Polish; at the same time, she loved the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and showed an appreciation for German literature. However, she also preferred Switzerland to Berlin and greatly missed being around the Polish Linguistic communication and culture.
When Luxemburg moved to Germany in May 1898, she settled in Berlin. She was active there in the left-wing of the SPD in which she sharply defined the border between the views of her faction and the revisionism theory of Eduard Bernstein. She attacked him in her brochure Social Reform or Revolution?, released in September 1898. Luxemburg's rhetorical skill made her a leading exemplification in denouncing the SPD's reformist parliamentary course. She argued that the critical difference between capital and labour could only be countered if the proletariat assumed power and effected revolutionary changes in methods of production. She wanted the revisionists ousted from the SPD. That did not occur, but Kautsky's command retained a Marxist influence on its programme.
From 1900, Luxemburg published analyses of sophisticated European socio-economic problems in newspapers. Foreseeing war, she vigorously attacked what she saw as German militarism and imperialism. Luxemburg wanted a general strike to rouse the workers to solidarity and prevent the coming war. However, the SPD leaders refused and she broke with Kautsky in 1910. Between 1904 and 1906, she was imprisoned for her political activities on three occasions. In 1907, she went to the Russian Social Democrats' Fifth Party Day in London, where she met Vladimir Lenin. At the socialist Second International Congress in Stuttgart, her resolution demanding that any European workers' parties should unite in attempting to stop the war was accepted.
Luxemburg taught Marxism and economics at the SPD's Berlin training centre. Her former student French Socialists. The Reichstag unanimously agreed to financing the war. The SPD voted in favour of that and agreed to a truce with the Imperial government, promising to refrain rom any strikes during the war. This led Luxemburg to contemplate suicide as the revisionism she had fought since 1899 had triumphed.