Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg. A Life by Mark Almond

Summary

Elzbieta Ettinger's Rosa Luxemburg is a strange amalgam, a new old-fashioned sort of biography. On the one hand, it celebrates a feminist, a Socialist, an outsider by birth and conviction, but at the same time, it is written in the breathless style and with the heavy hand of fate constantly drawn to the reader's attention, which used to be so typical of the hagiography of more traditional heroes. In other words, it is a very good read, full of interesting information and colourful scenes, plus insight into the innermost thoughts of the characters in their moments of crisis, but it is also a little short on historical perspective.

In her preface, the author laments the lack of official interest in Luxemburg in her native Poland, where ‘there is but a lightbulb factory bearing her name … One of the most prominent of socialist thinkers, Luxemburg is still awaiting a biographer in her own country’. When she turns to Germany, ‘her adopted country’, Ettinger's discussion is extraordinarily blind to the existence of two German states, where once there was a Reich. Ettinger is loftily dismissive of West Germans who speak of Luxemburg as a ‘German revolutionary’, which she sees as ‘perhaps not merely a sign of ignorance but of the confusion which surrounds her’.

The DDR's cult of Luxemburg is overlooked. Of course, there is something more than ironic in East German Bolsheviks paying ritual tribute to the martyrs of January, 1919. In January, 1988, local human rights activists, often drawn from church groups which would have been despised by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, committed sacrilege in the eyes of the Stasi. Uninvited guests at the memorial ceremonies, on their homemade banners they quoted Luxemburg's posthumously published anti-Leninist theses. The demonstrators were quickly bundled away - frequently to West Germany where Rosa Luxemburg's views are not considered subversive, probably not much considered at all.

During the peak of Stalin's terror in the 1930s, Luxemburg was posthumously disgraced as a Trotskyist, presumably because of their shared Jewish origin, since their visions of socialism were so incompatible.