More About Rosa Luxemburg
(90
Years After Her Death)
[Editors’ Note: On or near the 90th anniversary
of the day when Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, January 15, 1919, we posted on the
Labor Standard web site a speech by Leon Trotsky, given in Petrograd on
January 18, 1919, in tribute to Luxemburg and her martyred fellow fighter Karl
Liebknecht.
[Now, for the information of our readers, we are posting two
more items about Rosa Luxemburg that are relevant to this 90th anniversary.
[The first is an item from the German bourgeois newsweekly, Der Spiegel, which reluctantly acknowledges
the strong, continuing interest in this great revolutionary socialist of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[The second item is a translation, by George Saunders, co-editor
of Labor Standard, of a “Foreword” that was published in 1989 in East
Germany, the same year that the Stalinist-dominated “German Democrat Republic”
collapsed. This “Foreword,” by Annelies Laschitza, was written to introduce a fascinating
collection of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters (which will soon be published in
English).
[In the course of describing Luxemburg’s correspondents, the
“Foreword” gives a useful, brief account of some highlights of her
revolutionary life and reveals much about her unique personality. The
translation of the “Foreword” is copyrighted by George Saunders.
[For
fuller treatment of Luxemburg’s life and works, we would recommend, out of a
great many books about her, these five:
[Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New
York: Pathfinder, 1970); [the invaluable two-volume biography by J.P. Nettl, Rosa
Luxemburg (Oxford
University Press, 1966);
[The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review, 2004);
[the biography by Paul Frölich,
Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action (London:
Pluto, 1972); and
Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999).]
Remembering Rosa
Luxemburg Still Popular 90 Years after Assassination
by Siobhán Dowling