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Rosa Luxemburg: A Life
A biography of Rosa Luxemburg praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Susan Sontag.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
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83 people want to read
About the author
Elżbieta Ettinger
9 books2 followersA novelist, biographer and professor of writing who helped build the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.
A native of Warsaw, Poland, Ettinger survived the Holocaust, escaping the Warsaw ghetto shortly before its liquidation; she then worked for the Polish resistance while maintaining a false identity as a Catholic Pole (she was also known by her wartime pseudonym, Elzbieta Chodakowska).
Ettinger earned a Ph.D. in American literature from Warsaw University in 1966; she moved to Massachusetts the following year and served as a Senior Fellow at the Radcliffe (now Bunting) Institute until 1974.
From 1975 to 1996, Ettinger served as professor of writing at MIT, where she was named Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and Literature. A demanding and forceful teacher, she helped build the Institute's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and was instrumental in bringing such writers as I. B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elizabeth Bishop to the MIT community.
A native of Warsaw, Poland, Ettinger survived the Holocaust, escaping the Warsaw ghetto shortly before its liquidation; she then worked for the Polish resistance while maintaining a false identity as a Catholic Pole (she was also known by her wartime pseudonym, Elzbieta Chodakowska).
Ettinger earned a Ph.D. in American literature from Warsaw University in 1966; she moved to Massachusetts the following year and served as a Senior Fellow at the Radcliffe (now Bunting) Institute until 1974.
From 1975 to 1996, Ettinger served as professor of writing at MIT, where she was named Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and Literature. A demanding and forceful teacher, she helped build the Institute's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and was instrumental in bringing such writers as I. B. Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elizabeth Bishop to the MIT community.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 7, 2021
"It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman. That's why there are so many of us." - Jane Goodall
I started off 2021 with Helen Lewis's book 'Difficult Women' exploring the history of women's struggle for equality in work, vote, love and all that counts. Few months later, I found Margaret Thatcher's panegyric biography by Jonathan Aitken. Even with the author's bias acknowledged, I couldn't restrain myself from being enthralled by the force of her personality. It only made me read more about her which led me to other writings full of diametrically opposite vigorous disdain. Uncannily, the intensity of abomination against her only further intensified my obsession and turned me into an ardent aficionado.
Rosa Luxemburg: I wasn't aware of her name until last year when Eduardo Galeano, in his quintessential manner, both said and left unsaid a lot about her. I borrowed this book last Sunday and now that I've finished reading it, I have a lot going on in my head.
That's the thing with difficult women, they may differ in their beliefs but at their core they all share tenacity, strength of character, and a tendency to confound the expectations that society imposes on women without their permission.
Thatcher and Luxemburg were poles apart and yet so similar. Thatcher's nationalism denounced socialism. Luxemburg's socialism decried nationalism. But they were both determined to disrupt the status quo and disrupt they did. Humble beginnings only made both of them more self-determined with strong belief in the power of education and hard work. Defying the stereotypes, both rose to the top, with their voices that just couldn't be ignored anymore.
Even now, long after they're gone, both of them are found to be leaving their footsteps on the sands of time full of vicissitudes. They would continue to be divisive - abhorred and revered - for ages to come. That's what legends are made of.
I started off 2021 with Helen Lewis's book 'Difficult Women' exploring the history of women's struggle for equality in work, vote, love and all that counts. Few months later, I found Margaret Thatcher's panegyric biography by Jonathan Aitken. Even with the author's bias acknowledged, I couldn't restrain myself from being enthralled by the force of her personality. It only made me read more about her which led me to other writings full of diametrically opposite vigorous disdain. Uncannily, the intensity of abomination against her only further intensified my obsession and turned me into an ardent aficionado.
Rosa Luxemburg: I wasn't aware of her name until last year when Eduardo Galeano, in his quintessential manner, both said and left unsaid a lot about her. I borrowed this book last Sunday and now that I've finished reading it, I have a lot going on in my head.
That's the thing with difficult women, they may differ in their beliefs but at their core they all share tenacity, strength of character, and a tendency to confound the expectations that society imposes on women without their permission.
Thatcher and Luxemburg were poles apart and yet so similar. Thatcher's nationalism denounced socialism. Luxemburg's socialism decried nationalism. But they were both determined to disrupt the status quo and disrupt they did. Humble beginnings only made both of them more self-determined with strong belief in the power of education and hard work. Defying the stereotypes, both rose to the top, with their voices that just couldn't be ignored anymore.
Even now, long after they're gone, both of them are found to be leaving their footsteps on the sands of time full of vicissitudes. They would continue to be divisive - abhorred and revered - for ages to come. That's what legends are made of.
February 20, 2019
Hagiographical account of Rosa Luxemburg's life, focusing more on her emotional and personal life. We will not find any critical passages here, nor embarrassing facts; the negatives are presented neutrally or glossed over. Rather than a complete picture, we get a rose-tinted, soft-focus, slightly dreamy one of someone who set out on a path inspired by Russian terrorists. It's the story of a woman with a terrible identity crisis, who, as a young girl, fell in with a bad crowd, ended up in prison, learnt about Marx, got romantically involved with a sociopath (Leo Jogiches), and dedicated herself to communism. Now, this Leo Jogiches, whom I suspect was autistic, is probably the real protagonist here, because he was the driving force much of the time. Very troubled. Very intense. Completely anti-social and destructive. At the moment you only learn of him indirectly, via Ettinger's and Nettl's biographies. I would like someone to write his biography, because his life was truly grim.
March 1, 2015
A telling account of a political legend.
Appearances notwithstanding, Lina Luksenburg achieved something Rosa never did: she appropriated two cultures, Jewish and Polish, and felt as comfortable with both as Rosa felt uncomfortable. It may have been precisely the ease with which her mother was bicultural that made Rosa envious and angry.
Rosa was not close to either of her parents. Their concerns - children, home, day-to-day existence -- their petit bourgeois tastes and transparent Jewishness embarrassed her. She believed herself to be Polish even if no one else did.
It was a tribute to Polish youth that the Russian system of public education -- a religion of blind obedience, as Alexander Herzen, a 19-century Russian thinker, called it -- had not killed their soul. In Russian, wrote Herzen, “the naturally expansive feelings of youth were brutally driven inwards; instead, ambition and jealous, spiteful rivalry were encouraged. Who was not destroyed grew up sick, crazed. . . Before they reached the age of 20, people became hypochondriacs, suspicious, worn out. Infected with the passion for self-observation, self-examination, self-accusation, they carefully studied their own psychological symptoms, and loved endless confessions and discussions about their own neuroses. Herzen, like Mickiewicz, mourned the “decaying Europe.”
In the streets, striking workers were brutally beaten by the Russian police, and along with conspicuous new wealth grew the squalor of the new proletariat. And once the questioning started, everything was questioned: Mickiewicz and positivism, the Church and Darwin, materialism and antimaterialism, Fantasy and enthusiasm flared in heated discussions; “revolution” and “socialism” connoted a new, just world to come.
At school, the girls now blooming into women invited the inevitable unflattering comparisons. Flustered, excited, they fantasized about romance and elopement, lovers and husbands.
In exile the revolutionary’s greatest weapon was his pen. … [Jogiches] knew that battles are fought on the pages of newspapers, not only on the barricades, and that a good pen was the most needed and most effective weapon. To wield political influence, he needed a pen. That pen was Rosa.
Jogiches resented her tearful complaints about how different he was “when I wasn’t your wife yet.” He had what he wanted: an adoring woman -- part wife, part mother -- and a disciple.
Each used the letters as a substitute for a life lived together and as a means of controlling the other.
“I immediately decided to make the parting easier for you. I’d stop writing to you,” she announced somewhat perversely after a month’s silence.
“Our only ties,” she mourned, “are the cause and the memory of old feelings.” Plainly, she was at a loss. “I don’t have a home anywhere. I do not exist as myself.” Commands, instructions, criticism -- these were all she got from him.
Rosa’s efforts to gain his attention were promptly dismissed as inappropriate sexual overtures. He gave her a disparaging look that silenced her and prepared to leave. Her heart sank, her eyes filled with tears. There was so much she wanted to tell him, while he was ready to leave, believing that all she wanted was to make love. As often before, she felt trapped, helpless, and angry. She oculd not speak, she could not move. She just stood there with a lump in her throat, ready to love, ready to kill. He looked at her, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and closed the door behind him.
To sublimate her insecurity, Luxemburg needed constantly to captivate and to capitulate; to sublimate his, Jogiches needed to display superiority. She depended on him for physical love and admitted this loudly and clearly; he was not influenced by sexual intimacy, and he told her so. In belittling her, he elevated himself. In public life, she had a name, he had none. To compensate for this inequity, he would make sure he was the master in private.
She loved him passionately and was willing to live on crumbs.
When she made an error she berated herself and begged forgiveness -- “if forgive you can” -- and felt she did not “deserve” a caress. The strain showed. Rosa complained of migraines, a nervous stomach, exhaustion, and fierce menstrual pains.
She oscillated between fighting with Jogiches for an equal voice in the party and relinquishing her adult responsibilities in exchange for the security of his embrace. “I no longer want, my dearest love, to be an ‘adult,’ a ‘responsible person’... I just want to come back to you and find peace in your arms.” In such instances, Jogiches’ roles as lover and mentor became inseparable. The lover rewarded her for the smooth execution of instructions and the mentor punished insubordination.
Gradually, Luxemburg learned to fend for herself, often at the expense of Jogiches’ pride.
Luxemburg was working hard to finish her dissertation. In 1897, Luxemburg obtained her doctoral degree in law and political science, magna cum laude on May 1. A highly respectable publishing house, Duncker and Humblot in Leipzig, accepted her dissertation, “The Industrial Development of Poland,” for publication; her article “Step by Step,” a study of the Polish bourgeoisie, was published by the leader German SPD (the German Social Democratic Party) paper, Die Neue Zeit (The New Era), to considerable critical acclaim. For Jogiches the future looked bleak. The discrepancy between his youthful aspirations and the disappointments of adulthood was never clearer.
Rosa’s agony did not end with her mother’s death. In a mood of utter despair she described in letters to her family her lonely life, making them feel wretched for abandoning her at a time when she needed them most. (Her sister) Anna was ready to pack and go to her sister. “I realize now how cruel it was to leave you alone,” she wrote after the funeral. “No! Not for one more day will I leave you like that, lonely, abandoned… Dear God! How will I ever repair that wrong! I shudder at the thought of you, all alone in your little room, sitting alone, going to bed, getting up, with no one to cry your heart out to.” Instantly plans were made for Elias Luksenburg (her Dad) or Anna, or both, to join Rosa. Promptly, Rosa answered that she was leaving Switzerland. She compulsively kept writing, at the rate of two or three letters a day, intensifying their distress, guilt, and admiration. She did not want to live, Rosa wrote, there was no reason for her to go on with her mother gone. Anna’s reaction was “How can you, how dare you to even entertain such thoughts! You must never forget mother’s words -- that you alone will make our family’s name famous.”
Though she berated herself occasionally, she really believed that the key to their happiness was in Jogiches’ hands. “Only be good and love me.”
It is not certain who suggested that she marry Olympia Lubeck’s son, Gustav, but it was probably Jogiches. The wedding took place in Basel on 19 Apr 1898. Roaalia née Luxemburg, 28 years of age, and Gustav Lübeck, mechanic, age 29 -- gave as their residence Jogiches’ address in Zurich. Rosa’s date of birth was given as 25 Dec 1870, instead of 5 March 1870.
In Germany, the workers had never before seen a Fräulein Doktor.
Hungry for recognition, Jogiches expected Luxemburg to praise his hard work lavishly. But she just wrote that her life was hectic, she was “irreplaceable” in one district or another, that she was building important contacts. In Germany, conventional, orderly, hardworking, she became still more voracious for “life” than before and still less able to see the contradiction inherent in her passion for a man who was unable to satisfy her.
“One could do the Polish workers no bigger favor than to Germanize them,” Ignaz Auer, the SPD executive who sent her to Silesia, told her. “But this should not be mentioned to them,” he said. Luxemburg did not share Auer’s view and wondered why he drew a line between “them,” the Poles, and her? Because she was a Jew? Her ambiguous position as a Polish Jew was used for political expediency.
[Her father] Elias Luksenburg’s last letter to Rosa; An eagle soars so high he loses all sight of the earth below… I won’t burden you anymore with my letters.
Gemütlichkeit - coziness
In Germany, Rosa was enchanted by the Gemütlichkeit
After Luxemburg moved to Germany, Jogiches’ newly regained freedom suited him well. The chasm between Luxemburg, swiftly moving ahead, and him, stagnating, was widening. His doctoral degree was not going to bridge it. Although he finished only a seminar paper, which he presented in July 1900, Luxemburg kept referring to “your doctoral thesis” in her letters. To brush off her incessant questions, Jogiches told her that the thesis was in the works.
Jogiches still insisted on keeping their relationship secret. His demand to keep it hidden from Luxemburg’s family bordered on obsession.
When Luxemburg realized that Jogiches was not going to join her, that he enjoyed his bachelor’s life, that not even the evocation of her father’s authority moved him, she presented Leo with an ultimatum. He reproached her for never giving a thought to his “inner life,” for egotism, for an inability to give. If that was true, she threw back, it was because “the only thing you let me do is keep my mouth shut.” Their estrangement was his fault, not hers: “Even in Zurich we were spiritual strangers and the frightful loneliness of these last two years [1896-8] is engraved on my mind.”
Jogiches simply wanted no constraint, no control, no closeness. After he agreed to join her in Berlin he still dwelled in his letters on their political partnership rather than on the feelings which keep lovers together. Fearful of losing each other, both of them were ready for some kind of compromise. Their mutual dependence, at once creative and destructive, personal and political, grew into a knot they could not disentangle.
Leo Jogiches was not made of stone, as Luxemburg maintained. He loved her, and her incessant demands that he love her differently deepened his sense of failure. He was not better, no more accomplished as a lover, she let him know, than he was as a husband. “Here in Berlin,” she said, “I constantly see the kind of women men live with, how those men worship them and yield to their domination, and all the time, in the back of my mind, I’m aware of the way you treat me.”
The two years Luxemburg spent alone in Berlin brought her fame and prestige. But the price she paid was high. She was afraid of succumbing to madness. She had her first bouts of depression. “I’m aware I did not achieve anything,” she reproached herself. “And I’m aware I shall not do one tenth of what I should do. Dissatisfaction with myself is my permanent psychological state, remorse that I haven’t done this or something else gnaws at me day in day out, hour after hour. The feeling of guilt doesn’t leave me for a single moment.”
Yet publicly, her achievements were spectacular. Personally, she had none. Loneliness was destroying her.
Between Rosa’s ultimatum to Jogiches in March 1900 and his arrival in Berlin at the beginning of August, Luxemburg pressed hard to settle her divorce from Gustav Lübeck. Another three years passed before Luxemburg’s marriage was dissolved.
It was easy to mislead her distant family about her marital status, but Luxemburg’s German milieu presented a problem. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was anything but bohemian, and conventional mores were strictly observed. A common-law marriage was not acceptable. Both as a public figure and as a member of the party’s elite, Luxemburg had to guard her reputation.
Her friends were the most influential people in the SPD. In the 2 years before Jogiches joined her, Luxemburg had become a “family member” of the Kautskys (editor of Die Neue Zeit), a confidante of Clara Zetkin, a favorite of August Bebel, and a protég´of Franz Mehring. They were taken by her sophistication and her devotion to socialism and were attracted by her personality.
Clara Zetkin was a desirable ally, in particular because of her radicalism; yet for Luxemburg friendship was a spiritual, not a pragmatic, matter. The solid, great, full-bosomed German woman, 13 years her senior, met a need unrelated to ideology or politics -- she personified security.
Elias Luksenburg had died on 30 Sep 1900 while Rosa was in Paris attending the Congress of the International, or, as she sarcastically wrote in retrospect, “taking care of mankind’s urgent affairs and making the whole world happy.” Her father had been buried for a week when she returned to Berlin. Rosa was left with the memory of the two weeks she had grudgingly spent with him at a spa in Aug 1899. More than ever before, the sick old man had personified weakness, intimidation, humbleness, the attributes of the morally, socially, and physically crippled Jews. he had no interests other than money, no dreams but to strike a small bargain. He moaned at night and spoke in a plaintive voice; his hands trembled and he walked with a shuffle. Confronted with the source of her tension, she could barely contain fear, revulsion and anger.
In the fall of 1901 Rosa rented a 2-room apartment on Cranachstrasse No. 58, where she was to live for the next 10 years. The nightmare of sublet rooms was over.Heavy velvet curtains matched the deep-red wallpaper, the floor under the woolen rug was waxed and polished. There were pictures on the walls, some painted by Luxemburg, and the customary knickknacks among which the porcelain figures of Amor and Psyche was her favorite.
Her six-course dinners became the talk of the party’s gossip network: salmon and eggs, beet soup with sausage rolls, fish in sour sauce, steak with vegetables, compote, cheese with radishes for dessert, followed by black coffee and cognac. The problems of entertaining were entirely new: to select well-matching guests, to make no faux pas, to be a success. “As you see,” she joked, “not even Count Bülow suffers as many headaches and such serious ones as I do.”
In 1902 and 1903, Luxemburg spent long stretches of time away from Berlin on speaking tours. To counter the influence of the Polish Socialist Party, she cofounded an SPD-sponsored paper in Poznan (German-annexed Poland) in 1902, devoted “to the affairs of the working people.” Its aim, the unification of Polish and German workers, never became popular among the Poles.
The Congress of the Second International, convened in Amsterdam in Aug 1904, and brought Luxemburg still more prestige. Jean Jaurès (a French Socialist leader; initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats) passionately defended his policy during the Dreyfus affair, castigating Luxemburg and the German SPD for manipulating the proletariat with technical formulas. At the end of the oration there was no one to translate it from the French. Spontaneously Luxemburg got up and, with her customary flair and drama, rendered his speech into German, the ardor of the original intact. Her gesture is a perfect example of the spirit that permeated the International, a spirit that died together with European socialism in the First World War.
Once the Congress ended, Rosa Luxemburg returned to Germany -- and went straight to jail. This was the touch of glory she needed to feel a full-fledged revolutionary -- a 3-month prison sentence for insulting Emperor Wilhelm II in a public speech.
As a political prisoner, she was allowed to write letters and to receive clothes, newspapers, books, and guests.
“I promise myself,” she wrote Jogiches from her prison cell, “to live life to its fullest as soon as I’m free.” His lonely existence was insane and abnormal, she told him; she had always hated his “asceticism” (she put the word in quotation marks) and her isolation made her hate it even more. “The moral of the story,” she wrote to him, was that “whoever feels poverty-stricken should sit down and make an ‘inventory’... just to discover how rich he is. You should make an inventory of your riches more often, and if you don’t forget to include my modest person… you will feel like Croesus.”
Croesus, (died c. 546 bc), last king of Lydia (reigned c. 560–546), who was renowned for his great wealth. He conquered the Greeks of mainland Ionia. He ruled until defeat by the Persians.
Her final stroke was reserved for Lenin’s “ultracentralism,” a euphemism for autocracy: “The ‘disciple’ Lenin has in mind is by no means implanted in the proletariat only by the factory, but equally by the barracks, by the modern bureaucracy, by the entire mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state apparatus… The ultracentralism advocated by Lenin is permeated in its very essence by the sterile spirit of a night watchman [Nachtwätchergeist] rather than by a positive and creative spirit. He concentrates mostly on controlling the party, not on fertilizing it, on narrowing it down, not developing it, on regimenting and not on unifying it.”
Their differing views did not diminish the respect they had for each other. Luxemburg met Lenin in 1901 in Berlin. One of the first on the European scene to recognize his political genius, Luxemburg regarded him as a worthy partner. Not so Jogiches. He and Lenin, both autocratic and ruthless, were too much alike to develop anything but mutual antipathy. Lenin is said to have avoided any personal contact with Jogiches. It fell to Luxemburg to prevent a public clash between the two men who, in her opinion, were the most outstanding revolutionaries of the time.
Jogiche and Rosa both settled into middle age, and distance freed him, always a reluctant lover, from her demands. All that mattered was her pen.
In fact, she did not understand. For a long time, she refused to believe that Jogiches was deliberately cutting her off. He did write to her, but at his own will, to coordinate political strategy or to demand an article.
Vereint schlagen, aber -- getrennt marschieren [fight together, but march separately].
Ten years Luxemburg’s junior, W -- a Polish Jew from Warsaw, and close collaborator of Jogiches -- was one of several men much younger than she who fell under her spell.
When in June 1905, Leo asked Rosa about her vacation plans, she answered that she was perfectly fine at home and was even putting on weight. Without suggesting they spend the vacation together, she advised Jogiches to take two weeks off. It was not difficult for Jogiches to join Luxemburg or for her to join him. Clearly, neither was keen on meeting. Suddenly on 7 Aug, she cable Jogiches that she was coming to Kraków.
She stayed with Jogiches for about 12 days. The meeting was tragic. Luxemburg told him there was another man in her life.
It hit Jogiches hard. The one person he had trusted unreservedly had betrayed him; the one woman he was close to had deceived him. He felt cheated, wounded, lost.
Luxemburg’s tone had changed. But Jogiches could distinguish compassion from passion and guilt from love. If there was something more offensive than her disloyalty it was her pity. That his despair was so transparent added to his humiliation. “How sad you sound in your letters!” she wrote. “Don’t be so desperate and chase all your devils straight to hell. Stop philosophizing and start living with what’s real. This damn philosophizing is good for nothing.” For all her sympathy, Luxemburg was not ready to resume the relationship in its prior form: “You must let me do what I please and how I please… I simply live the life of a plant and must be left just as I am.”
His letters continued to be “short and sad.”
Appearances notwithstanding, Lina Luksenburg achieved something Rosa never did: she appropriated two cultures, Jewish and Polish, and felt as comfortable with both as Rosa felt uncomfortable. It may have been precisely the ease with which her mother was bicultural that made Rosa envious and angry.
Rosa was not close to either of her parents. Their concerns - children, home, day-to-day existence -- their petit bourgeois tastes and transparent Jewishness embarrassed her. She believed herself to be Polish even if no one else did.
It was a tribute to Polish youth that the Russian system of public education -- a religion of blind obedience, as Alexander Herzen, a 19-century Russian thinker, called it -- had not killed their soul. In Russian, wrote Herzen, “the naturally expansive feelings of youth were brutally driven inwards; instead, ambition and jealous, spiteful rivalry were encouraged. Who was not destroyed grew up sick, crazed. . . Before they reached the age of 20, people became hypochondriacs, suspicious, worn out. Infected with the passion for self-observation, self-examination, self-accusation, they carefully studied their own psychological symptoms, and loved endless confessions and discussions about their own neuroses. Herzen, like Mickiewicz, mourned the “decaying Europe.”
In the streets, striking workers were brutally beaten by the Russian police, and along with conspicuous new wealth grew the squalor of the new proletariat. And once the questioning started, everything was questioned: Mickiewicz and positivism, the Church and Darwin, materialism and antimaterialism, Fantasy and enthusiasm flared in heated discussions; “revolution” and “socialism” connoted a new, just world to come.
At school, the girls now blooming into women invited the inevitable unflattering comparisons. Flustered, excited, they fantasized about romance and elopement, lovers and husbands.
In exile the revolutionary’s greatest weapon was his pen. … [Jogiches] knew that battles are fought on the pages of newspapers, not only on the barricades, and that a good pen was the most needed and most effective weapon. To wield political influence, he needed a pen. That pen was Rosa.
Jogiches resented her tearful complaints about how different he was “when I wasn’t your wife yet.” He had what he wanted: an adoring woman -- part wife, part mother -- and a disciple.
Each used the letters as a substitute for a life lived together and as a means of controlling the other.
“I immediately decided to make the parting easier for you. I’d stop writing to you,” she announced somewhat perversely after a month’s silence.
“Our only ties,” she mourned, “are the cause and the memory of old feelings.” Plainly, she was at a loss. “I don’t have a home anywhere. I do not exist as myself.” Commands, instructions, criticism -- these were all she got from him.
Rosa’s efforts to gain his attention were promptly dismissed as inappropriate sexual overtures. He gave her a disparaging look that silenced her and prepared to leave. Her heart sank, her eyes filled with tears. There was so much she wanted to tell him, while he was ready to leave, believing that all she wanted was to make love. As often before, she felt trapped, helpless, and angry. She oculd not speak, she could not move. She just stood there with a lump in her throat, ready to love, ready to kill. He looked at her, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and closed the door behind him.
To sublimate her insecurity, Luxemburg needed constantly to captivate and to capitulate; to sublimate his, Jogiches needed to display superiority. She depended on him for physical love and admitted this loudly and clearly; he was not influenced by sexual intimacy, and he told her so. In belittling her, he elevated himself. In public life, she had a name, he had none. To compensate for this inequity, he would make sure he was the master in private.
She loved him passionately and was willing to live on crumbs.
When she made an error she berated herself and begged forgiveness -- “if forgive you can” -- and felt she did not “deserve” a caress. The strain showed. Rosa complained of migraines, a nervous stomach, exhaustion, and fierce menstrual pains.
She oscillated between fighting with Jogiches for an equal voice in the party and relinquishing her adult responsibilities in exchange for the security of his embrace. “I no longer want, my dearest love, to be an ‘adult,’ a ‘responsible person’... I just want to come back to you and find peace in your arms.” In such instances, Jogiches’ roles as lover and mentor became inseparable. The lover rewarded her for the smooth execution of instructions and the mentor punished insubordination.
Gradually, Luxemburg learned to fend for herself, often at the expense of Jogiches’ pride.
Luxemburg was working hard to finish her dissertation. In 1897, Luxemburg obtained her doctoral degree in law and political science, magna cum laude on May 1. A highly respectable publishing house, Duncker and Humblot in Leipzig, accepted her dissertation, “The Industrial Development of Poland,” for publication; her article “Step by Step,” a study of the Polish bourgeoisie, was published by the leader German SPD (the German Social Democratic Party) paper, Die Neue Zeit (The New Era), to considerable critical acclaim. For Jogiches the future looked bleak. The discrepancy between his youthful aspirations and the disappointments of adulthood was never clearer.
Rosa’s agony did not end with her mother’s death. In a mood of utter despair she described in letters to her family her lonely life, making them feel wretched for abandoning her at a time when she needed them most. (Her sister) Anna was ready to pack and go to her sister. “I realize now how cruel it was to leave you alone,” she wrote after the funeral. “No! Not for one more day will I leave you like that, lonely, abandoned… Dear God! How will I ever repair that wrong! I shudder at the thought of you, all alone in your little room, sitting alone, going to bed, getting up, with no one to cry your heart out to.” Instantly plans were made for Elias Luksenburg (her Dad) or Anna, or both, to join Rosa. Promptly, Rosa answered that she was leaving Switzerland. She compulsively kept writing, at the rate of two or three letters a day, intensifying their distress, guilt, and admiration. She did not want to live, Rosa wrote, there was no reason for her to go on with her mother gone. Anna’s reaction was “How can you, how dare you to even entertain such thoughts! You must never forget mother’s words -- that you alone will make our family’s name famous.”
Though she berated herself occasionally, she really believed that the key to their happiness was in Jogiches’ hands. “Only be good and love me.”
It is not certain who suggested that she marry Olympia Lubeck’s son, Gustav, but it was probably Jogiches. The wedding took place in Basel on 19 Apr 1898. Roaalia née Luxemburg, 28 years of age, and Gustav Lübeck, mechanic, age 29 -- gave as their residence Jogiches’ address in Zurich. Rosa’s date of birth was given as 25 Dec 1870, instead of 5 March 1870.
In Germany, the workers had never before seen a Fräulein Doktor.
Hungry for recognition, Jogiches expected Luxemburg to praise his hard work lavishly. But she just wrote that her life was hectic, she was “irreplaceable” in one district or another, that she was building important contacts. In Germany, conventional, orderly, hardworking, she became still more voracious for “life” than before and still less able to see the contradiction inherent in her passion for a man who was unable to satisfy her.
“One could do the Polish workers no bigger favor than to Germanize them,” Ignaz Auer, the SPD executive who sent her to Silesia, told her. “But this should not be mentioned to them,” he said. Luxemburg did not share Auer’s view and wondered why he drew a line between “them,” the Poles, and her? Because she was a Jew? Her ambiguous position as a Polish Jew was used for political expediency.
[Her father] Elias Luksenburg’s last letter to Rosa; An eagle soars so high he loses all sight of the earth below… I won’t burden you anymore with my letters.
Gemütlichkeit - coziness
In Germany, Rosa was enchanted by the Gemütlichkeit
After Luxemburg moved to Germany, Jogiches’ newly regained freedom suited him well. The chasm between Luxemburg, swiftly moving ahead, and him, stagnating, was widening. His doctoral degree was not going to bridge it. Although he finished only a seminar paper, which he presented in July 1900, Luxemburg kept referring to “your doctoral thesis” in her letters. To brush off her incessant questions, Jogiches told her that the thesis was in the works.
Jogiches still insisted on keeping their relationship secret. His demand to keep it hidden from Luxemburg’s family bordered on obsession.
When Luxemburg realized that Jogiches was not going to join her, that he enjoyed his bachelor’s life, that not even the evocation of her father’s authority moved him, she presented Leo with an ultimatum. He reproached her for never giving a thought to his “inner life,” for egotism, for an inability to give. If that was true, she threw back, it was because “the only thing you let me do is keep my mouth shut.” Their estrangement was his fault, not hers: “Even in Zurich we were spiritual strangers and the frightful loneliness of these last two years [1896-8] is engraved on my mind.”
Jogiches simply wanted no constraint, no control, no closeness. After he agreed to join her in Berlin he still dwelled in his letters on their political partnership rather than on the feelings which keep lovers together. Fearful of losing each other, both of them were ready for some kind of compromise. Their mutual dependence, at once creative and destructive, personal and political, grew into a knot they could not disentangle.
Leo Jogiches was not made of stone, as Luxemburg maintained. He loved her, and her incessant demands that he love her differently deepened his sense of failure. He was not better, no more accomplished as a lover, she let him know, than he was as a husband. “Here in Berlin,” she said, “I constantly see the kind of women men live with, how those men worship them and yield to their domination, and all the time, in the back of my mind, I’m aware of the way you treat me.”
The two years Luxemburg spent alone in Berlin brought her fame and prestige. But the price she paid was high. She was afraid of succumbing to madness. She had her first bouts of depression. “I’m aware I did not achieve anything,” she reproached herself. “And I’m aware I shall not do one tenth of what I should do. Dissatisfaction with myself is my permanent psychological state, remorse that I haven’t done this or something else gnaws at me day in day out, hour after hour. The feeling of guilt doesn’t leave me for a single moment.”
Yet publicly, her achievements were spectacular. Personally, she had none. Loneliness was destroying her.
Between Rosa’s ultimatum to Jogiches in March 1900 and his arrival in Berlin at the beginning of August, Luxemburg pressed hard to settle her divorce from Gustav Lübeck. Another three years passed before Luxemburg’s marriage was dissolved.
It was easy to mislead her distant family about her marital status, but Luxemburg’s German milieu presented a problem. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was anything but bohemian, and conventional mores were strictly observed. A common-law marriage was not acceptable. Both as a public figure and as a member of the party’s elite, Luxemburg had to guard her reputation.
Her friends were the most influential people in the SPD. In the 2 years before Jogiches joined her, Luxemburg had become a “family member” of the Kautskys (editor of Die Neue Zeit), a confidante of Clara Zetkin, a favorite of August Bebel, and a protég´of Franz Mehring. They were taken by her sophistication and her devotion to socialism and were attracted by her personality.
Clara Zetkin was a desirable ally, in particular because of her radicalism; yet for Luxemburg friendship was a spiritual, not a pragmatic, matter. The solid, great, full-bosomed German woman, 13 years her senior, met a need unrelated to ideology or politics -- she personified security.
Elias Luksenburg had died on 30 Sep 1900 while Rosa was in Paris attending the Congress of the International, or, as she sarcastically wrote in retrospect, “taking care of mankind’s urgent affairs and making the whole world happy.” Her father had been buried for a week when she returned to Berlin. Rosa was left with the memory of the two weeks she had grudgingly spent with him at a spa in Aug 1899. More than ever before, the sick old man had personified weakness, intimidation, humbleness, the attributes of the morally, socially, and physically crippled Jews. he had no interests other than money, no dreams but to strike a small bargain. He moaned at night and spoke in a plaintive voice; his hands trembled and he walked with a shuffle. Confronted with the source of her tension, she could barely contain fear, revulsion and anger.
In the fall of 1901 Rosa rented a 2-room apartment on Cranachstrasse No. 58, where she was to live for the next 10 years. The nightmare of sublet rooms was over.Heavy velvet curtains matched the deep-red wallpaper, the floor under the woolen rug was waxed and polished. There were pictures on the walls, some painted by Luxemburg, and the customary knickknacks among which the porcelain figures of Amor and Psyche was her favorite.
Her six-course dinners became the talk of the party’s gossip network: salmon and eggs, beet soup with sausage rolls, fish in sour sauce, steak with vegetables, compote, cheese with radishes for dessert, followed by black coffee and cognac. The problems of entertaining were entirely new: to select well-matching guests, to make no faux pas, to be a success. “As you see,” she joked, “not even Count Bülow suffers as many headaches and such serious ones as I do.”
In 1902 and 1903, Luxemburg spent long stretches of time away from Berlin on speaking tours. To counter the influence of the Polish Socialist Party, she cofounded an SPD-sponsored paper in Poznan (German-annexed Poland) in 1902, devoted “to the affairs of the working people.” Its aim, the unification of Polish and German workers, never became popular among the Poles.
The Congress of the Second International, convened in Amsterdam in Aug 1904, and brought Luxemburg still more prestige. Jean Jaurès (a French Socialist leader; initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats) passionately defended his policy during the Dreyfus affair, castigating Luxemburg and the German SPD for manipulating the proletariat with technical formulas. At the end of the oration there was no one to translate it from the French. Spontaneously Luxemburg got up and, with her customary flair and drama, rendered his speech into German, the ardor of the original intact. Her gesture is a perfect example of the spirit that permeated the International, a spirit that died together with European socialism in the First World War.
Once the Congress ended, Rosa Luxemburg returned to Germany -- and went straight to jail. This was the touch of glory she needed to feel a full-fledged revolutionary -- a 3-month prison sentence for insulting Emperor Wilhelm II in a public speech.
As a political prisoner, she was allowed to write letters and to receive clothes, newspapers, books, and guests.
“I promise myself,” she wrote Jogiches from her prison cell, “to live life to its fullest as soon as I’m free.” His lonely existence was insane and abnormal, she told him; she had always hated his “asceticism” (she put the word in quotation marks) and her isolation made her hate it even more. “The moral of the story,” she wrote to him, was that “whoever feels poverty-stricken should sit down and make an ‘inventory’... just to discover how rich he is. You should make an inventory of your riches more often, and if you don’t forget to include my modest person… you will feel like Croesus.”
Croesus, (died c. 546 bc), last king of Lydia (reigned c. 560–546), who was renowned for his great wealth. He conquered the Greeks of mainland Ionia. He ruled until defeat by the Persians.
Her final stroke was reserved for Lenin’s “ultracentralism,” a euphemism for autocracy: “The ‘disciple’ Lenin has in mind is by no means implanted in the proletariat only by the factory, but equally by the barracks, by the modern bureaucracy, by the entire mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state apparatus… The ultracentralism advocated by Lenin is permeated in its very essence by the sterile spirit of a night watchman [Nachtwätchergeist] rather than by a positive and creative spirit. He concentrates mostly on controlling the party, not on fertilizing it, on narrowing it down, not developing it, on regimenting and not on unifying it.”
Their differing views did not diminish the respect they had for each other. Luxemburg met Lenin in 1901 in Berlin. One of the first on the European scene to recognize his political genius, Luxemburg regarded him as a worthy partner. Not so Jogiches. He and Lenin, both autocratic and ruthless, were too much alike to develop anything but mutual antipathy. Lenin is said to have avoided any personal contact with Jogiches. It fell to Luxemburg to prevent a public clash between the two men who, in her opinion, were the most outstanding revolutionaries of the time.
Jogiche and Rosa both settled into middle age, and distance freed him, always a reluctant lover, from her demands. All that mattered was her pen.
In fact, she did not understand. For a long time, she refused to believe that Jogiches was deliberately cutting her off. He did write to her, but at his own will, to coordinate political strategy or to demand an article.
Vereint schlagen, aber -- getrennt marschieren [fight together, but march separately].
Ten years Luxemburg’s junior, W -- a Polish Jew from Warsaw, and close collaborator of Jogiches -- was one of several men much younger than she who fell under her spell.
When in June 1905, Leo asked Rosa about her vacation plans, she answered that she was perfectly fine at home and was even putting on weight. Without suggesting they spend the vacation together, she advised Jogiches to take two weeks off. It was not difficult for Jogiches to join Luxemburg or for her to join him. Clearly, neither was keen on meeting. Suddenly on 7 Aug, she cable Jogiches that she was coming to Kraków.
She stayed with Jogiches for about 12 days. The meeting was tragic. Luxemburg told him there was another man in her life.
It hit Jogiches hard. The one person he had trusted unreservedly had betrayed him; the one woman he was close to had deceived him. He felt cheated, wounded, lost.
Luxemburg’s tone had changed. But Jogiches could distinguish compassion from passion and guilt from love. If there was something more offensive than her disloyalty it was her pity. That his despair was so transparent added to his humiliation. “How sad you sound in your letters!” she wrote. “Don’t be so desperate and chase all your devils straight to hell. Stop philosophizing and start living with what’s real. This damn philosophizing is good for nothing.” For all her sympathy, Luxemburg was not ready to resume the relationship in its prior form: “You must let me do what I please and how I please… I simply live the life of a plant and must be left just as I am.”
His letters continued to be “short and sad.”
July 19, 2025
Elzbieta Ettinger's 1987 biography of Rosa Luxemburg distinguishes itself by delving into Luxemburg's personal life and romantic relationships, beyond her political activism. This focus on the intimate sphere is a consistent thread in Ettinger's biographical interests—a fascination with the often-difficult romantic lives of powerful Jewish intellectual women.
Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish pacifist socialist, who would eventually be murdered in 1919 by Freikorps thugs amid the postwar chaos of Berlin, is often the subject of biographies focused on her political struggles and theoretical texts. Ettinger instead proposes a more intimate portrait, unearthing Luxemburg's passionate, tumultuous, and unconventional romantic entanglements, particularly with Leo Jogiches, her lifelong comrade and lover. Their relationship, characterized by intense intellectual collaboration and emotional dependence (some today might say co-dependence), forms the emotional core of Ettinger's narrative. Ettinger details the power dynamics, jealousies, and intellectual sparring that defined their bond, presenting it as both a source of strength and personal pain. Beyond Jogiches, Ettinger explores Luxemburg's other relationships, including her marriage of convenience and later affair with Kostia Zetkin (a German physician, social economist and political activist, 15 years Luxemburg’s junior), illuminating her complex emotional landscape and yearning for companionship.
This deep dive into Luxemburg's romantic life is serves as a lens through which Ettinger examines the profound challenges faced by a woman who defied societal norms as a political activist who was at once a woman, a Jew, and a cripple (three strikes, yer out!). Operating in a male-dominated political arena and navigating antisemitism, Luxemburg's personal life was as radical as her politics. Ettinger argues her relationships, with their difficulties, were integral to her being, shaping her political vision. The emotional demands and intellectual camaraderie in these relationships fueled her intense work but also her sense of isolation.
Ettinger's emotive biographical approach to Luxemburg foreshadows her later, more controversial 1995 work on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In both, Ettinger is drawn to a formidable female Jewish intellect and her fraught romantic relationships. With Arendt and Heidegger, Ettinger confronted the moral complexities of Arendt's affair with the Nazi philosopher, revealing a deeply personal dimension. As with Luxemburg, Ettinger refused to separate Arendt the public intellectual from her private passions, suggesting these intimate connections are crucial to understanding a person's life and thought. The common thread is how these extraordinary women, driven by intellectual pursuits, navigated love and desire, often at great personal cost, challenging societal expectations. Ettinger's biographies are thus not just historical accounts but psychological explorations of how personal lives intersect with public personas, particularly for women who dared to break molds.
While some critics might argue that emphasizing romantic life risks reducing these towering political figures to “girls who want it all,” I would argue that Ettinger's work enriches our understanding by treating them as more than the sum of their “front stage” public personas. By detailing Luxemburg's emotional landscape, Ettinger humanizes her, revealing the woman behind the revolutionary icon. This approach provides a nuanced, empathetic portrait, showing the personal strength required to sustain a life of political struggle and intellectual endeavor amidst personal turmoil.
Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish pacifist socialist, who would eventually be murdered in 1919 by Freikorps thugs amid the postwar chaos of Berlin, is often the subject of biographies focused on her political struggles and theoretical texts. Ettinger instead proposes a more intimate portrait, unearthing Luxemburg's passionate, tumultuous, and unconventional romantic entanglements, particularly with Leo Jogiches, her lifelong comrade and lover. Their relationship, characterized by intense intellectual collaboration and emotional dependence (some today might say co-dependence), forms the emotional core of Ettinger's narrative. Ettinger details the power dynamics, jealousies, and intellectual sparring that defined their bond, presenting it as both a source of strength and personal pain. Beyond Jogiches, Ettinger explores Luxemburg's other relationships, including her marriage of convenience and later affair with Kostia Zetkin (a German physician, social economist and political activist, 15 years Luxemburg’s junior), illuminating her complex emotional landscape and yearning for companionship.
This deep dive into Luxemburg's romantic life is serves as a lens through which Ettinger examines the profound challenges faced by a woman who defied societal norms as a political activist who was at once a woman, a Jew, and a cripple (three strikes, yer out!). Operating in a male-dominated political arena and navigating antisemitism, Luxemburg's personal life was as radical as her politics. Ettinger argues her relationships, with their difficulties, were integral to her being, shaping her political vision. The emotional demands and intellectual camaraderie in these relationships fueled her intense work but also her sense of isolation.
Ettinger's emotive biographical approach to Luxemburg foreshadows her later, more controversial 1995 work on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In both, Ettinger is drawn to a formidable female Jewish intellect and her fraught romantic relationships. With Arendt and Heidegger, Ettinger confronted the moral complexities of Arendt's affair with the Nazi philosopher, revealing a deeply personal dimension. As with Luxemburg, Ettinger refused to separate Arendt the public intellectual from her private passions, suggesting these intimate connections are crucial to understanding a person's life and thought. The common thread is how these extraordinary women, driven by intellectual pursuits, navigated love and desire, often at great personal cost, challenging societal expectations. Ettinger's biographies are thus not just historical accounts but psychological explorations of how personal lives intersect with public personas, particularly for women who dared to break molds.
While some critics might argue that emphasizing romantic life risks reducing these towering political figures to “girls who want it all,” I would argue that Ettinger's work enriches our understanding by treating them as more than the sum of their “front stage” public personas. By detailing Luxemburg's emotional landscape, Ettinger humanizes her, revealing the woman behind the revolutionary icon. This approach provides a nuanced, empathetic portrait, showing the personal strength required to sustain a life of political struggle and intellectual endeavor amidst personal turmoil.
September 4, 2020
A very thorough biography, warts and all and an interesting history of Germany and the surrounding areas between the wars.
August 30, 2014
Well-written and thoroughly researched, although somewhat lacking in focus on Luxemburg's contribution to Marxist theory. The article "Reform or Revolution", which brought her to prominence, is merely briefly mentioned, without any explanation what it is about. Her other works are given more attention, but it still felt insufficient. Nevertheless, it was a very enjoyable and touching read that brilliantly portrays the human side of the great revolutionary. Her humanism and faith in progress should be a never-ending source of inspiration to all.
March 6, 2015
Loved this book really explored her depth as a person and as an advocate
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