Red Dreams and the New Millennium: Notes on the Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg

Abstract

Rosa Luxemburg always seemed larger than life. An intellectual and a social activist, possessed of enormous charisma, she exacted tremendous loyalty from her friends and often a grudging admiration from her enemies. She struggled both as a woman and a Jew in the socialist labor movement and died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Freikorps during the Spartacus Revolt of 1919. Her letters published following these events, and the castigation of her legacy during the “bolshevization” of the German Communist Party during the 1920s, provide abundant evidence of her courage, her sensitivity, and her humanism. None of this, however, gives her any particular salience for the present. Luxemburg disliked turning personal issues into political ones. She would probably have noted that there were many less heralded men and women—just as sensitive and just as brave—who died just as tragically. Luxemburg would have said: “Look to my work.”

The following is the text of a lecture given at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin on June 19, 2000; it was translated and published in the German journal in Utopie-Kreativ No. 123 (January, 2001), pp. 9–16.