Rosa Luxemburg

#FiveSentenceFiction: Hunger

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In memory of Rosa Luxemburg, assassinated by proto-nazis in Berlin, on 15 January 1919.

Landwehrkanal u. Herakles Brücke

She’s here, standing still on this bridge, over the canal I know so well: I am surprised she accepted the invite.

Her creator’s description of her is so true: the curves of a goddess, the raven hair, the icy grey pupils, and those lips…

Ah, this hunger, this hunger for her soul…

Looking down at me with utter contempt, she says: “Here, not that long ago, your minions killed a good woman, a very good friend of mine…”

I don’t have the time to reply, in a fluid and unstoppable move she seizes my bony legs and throws me over in the dark waters of the canal: she’s a warrior, and I a miserable devil.

Brandenburg and her capital: #longing

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I dream of the city, as it was, long before Frederick, not the capital of  a respected and feared kingdom, with a formidable army, but the main settlement of a peaceful people, in the midst of lakes and thick forests, surrounded by wilderness.

Soldiers plundering a farm during the thirty years' war Then came the long war, the uninterrupted banditry, the destructions, the killing of women and children by drunk and pitiless soldiers, the burning of churches. All the German lands were ransacked by marauding troops of mercenaries, and the land’s own army was no better. Lawlessness ruled, and finally the whole land laid in ruins. But the people fought back, order was recreated out of chaos… It took thirty years.

The city, Faust’s city, later became the capital of the new kingdom, that was proclaimed, far to the East, in Königsberg, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, the Ostsee. When Frederick, der Philosopher König, inherited the crown from his father, der Soldaten König, Prussia was already a power among the other European powers. His city, Berlin, became the centre of the Enlightenment, and it was befitting that Königsberg was also Immanuel Kant’s birth place.

So, I keep dreaming, of the long history, of Blücher’s victory in Waterloo, for it was Prussia, and the Prussian armies that won that war. Before many others. I see the Siegessaüle column, in the middle of the Tiergarten, and the memorial that dominates Viktoria Park. My thoughts are never very far from there, from the streets of Kreuzberg, from the river, from the Landwehr canal where they threw the martyred body of Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. So much to think about, to write about.

Soon, we will walk those streets again, our minds full of those memories, our eyes capturing the beauty and strangeness of the scenery: us, among  so many others, enthralled, astonished, under the spell of Berlin. And so many ghosts, so many familiar faces that cannot be there, but somehow are, out of films, out of books, out of our own demented imagination, out of a deep past.

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#WritersWednesday: July 25

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A hero for our time: Rosa Luxemburg

 She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, who ended her life in the violent and extreme world born from the chaos and massacres of the first world war. A revolutionary, she was also a sharp and lucid critique of the rising bolshevik dictatorship in Russia. Born in 1871 in Zanosc, in the Polish area of Russia, “at sixteen, when she graduated at the top of her class from the girls’ gymnasium in Warsaw, she was denied the gold medal because of “an oppositional attitude toward the authorities.”” She was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Poland, and witnessed the failed revolution of 1905 in Russia. With Karl Liebknecht, the only deputy in the Reichstag to vote against German participation to the war in 1914, she became one of the leaders of the socialist movement in Germany, from 1898 until her murder in 1919 during the suppression of the Spartakusbund uprising in Berlin.

In “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals”, first published in 1913, and her most important theoretical book, Rosa deconstructed the mechanism of reproduction and survival of capitalism, from its origins to the present. Her work is one of a handful of reliable guides for those who wish to understand how and why we are where we are, and what really leads to economic crises, financial collapse and misery for a majority of us.

In January 1919, on the orders of the new chancellor Friedrich Ebert, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested, and brutally murdered while in police custody by the lost soldiers of the Freikorps, who were soon to form the backbone of the National-Socialist party, the Nazis.

On the evening of her murder she wrote:

“The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this ‘defeat’ into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this ‘defeat’.
‘Order reigns in Berlin!’ You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I shall be!”

Clara Zetkin wrote: “In Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both mind and heart, a consuming and creative passion. To prepare for the revolution, to pave the way for socialism – this was the task and the one great ambition of this exceptional woman. To experience the revolution, to fight in its battles – this was her highest happiness. With will-power, selflessness and devotion, for which words are too weak, she engaged her whole being and everything she had to offer for socialism. She sacrificed herself to the cause, not only in her death, but daily and hourly in the work and the struggle of many years. She was the sword, the flame of revolution.”

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