She was born on March 5, 1871 in Zamość, in what was then Congress Poland, in the Russian Empire, with the name Rozalia Luksenburg. Historian Rory Castle wrote: "From her grandfather and father, she inherited the belief that she was a Pole first and a Jew second, with her emotional connection to the Polish language and culture and her passionate opposition to Tsarism being of central importance. Although her parents were religious, they did not consider themselves to be Jewish by nationality, rather 'Poles of the Mosaic persuasion.'"
She turned to Socialism in high school in Warsaw, and moved to Zürich, Switzerland after graduation. She began an affair with a Lithuanian Jewish revolutionary, Leo Jogiches. She became a journalist, and caught people's attention with a speech at the Second International's Third Congress in Zürich in 1893. She moved to Berlin in 1898, opposing the Germanization of Poles in the Prussian Partition (East Prussia), and the Russification of the rest of Poland, part of the Russian Empire.
Like many Socialists and Communists, she considered the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 to be a dress rehearsal for the real thing. But there seemed to be no sign of that real thing coming, and Jogiches broke up with her, devastating her.
In 1913, she published The Accumulation of Capital. The book originated from her attempt to resolve a technical problem in Karl Marx's theory of capitalist reproduction. Her central thesis was that capitalism, as a closed system, could not realize the surplus value it generated, and was therefore dependent on a constant expansion into non-capitalist economies and social strata for its survival and accumulation.
But the outbreak of World War I led to the militarization of Germany, and her arrest in September 1914. It was only as a result of the revolution following the defeat in November 1918 that she was released. Germany was a total mess after the Armistice, and the provisional government, led by Friedrich Ebert, could barely keep the country together. This led Rosa and some friends to from the Spartacus League, a let-wing group named for the slave that led a rebellion against Rome in 73 BC. On December 30, 1918, the League was absorbed into the Communist Party of Germany.
A revolution broke out on January 5, 1919, and became known as the Spartacist Uprising. In Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag, the League's newspaper), she passionately urged the workers on.
The provisional government employed the Freikorps, newly formed right-wing paramilitary units composed of demobilized soldiers and officers, to suppress the uprising. By January 13, the fighting was largely over, and the revolt was crushed. The Spartacist leaders went into hiding.
On the evening of January 15, Rosa Luxemburg and the other major leader of the League, Karl Liebknecht, were discovered in an apartment in the Wilmersdrof district of Berlin, and arrested by Freikorps soldiers. They were taken to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division. There, they were interrogated and tortured. Liebknecht was taken out first, shot, and delivered to a mortuary as an "unidentified man."
Luxemburg was then led out. A soldier named Otto Runge struck her on the head with his rifle butt as she left the hotel. She fell, was struck again, and then bundled into a car. She was shot in the head, and her body, weighted with stones, was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Her body was not found until May 31, 1919. According to later testimonies, it was alleged that Hermann Souchon was the soldier who killed her. Both Luxemburg and Liebknecht were 47 years old.
Two months later, on March 10, 1919, while investigating her murder, Leo Jogiches was himself murdered in prison in Berlin. He was 51.
Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, "Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."
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January 15, 1919 was a Wednesday. This was also the day of the Great Molasses Flood in Boston. I have a separate entry for that event.
Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And while the NHL season was underway, no games were scheduled. So there no scores on this historic day.
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