Women in Dark Times (10 page)

Rootlessness, however, is also an asset, notably for women, as Woolf would later affirm. Luxemburg came from a world, in the words of Arendt, in which ‘a universal humanity and a genuine, almost naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted’.
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‘One aspect of Rosa’s internationalism,’ wrote Nettl, ‘was to prefer the foreign.’
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‘I do see the strengthening of inter­national feeling,’ she wrote to Henriette Roland Holst in 1904, ‘to be in and of itself, a means of fighting against bigotry and ­ignorance.’
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In Breslau prison at the end of her life, she translated
A History of My Contemporary,
the autobiography of the Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko: ‘From the conflict of three nationalities,’ she wrote in her introduction, ‘he made his escape into humanitarianism.’
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Goethe’s ‘universalism of interests’ was her ideal.
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There is another important analogy to be made here with psychoanalysis. The unconscious knows no national boundaries. Far from being a petty bourgeois or Eurocentric concept, Freud’s famous universalism was at least partly his advance-guard riposte to those who would castigate psychoanalysis as a ‘Bosch’ (Germanic) and/or Jewish science. The question of nationalism shadowed the emergence of psychoanalysis as much as it did the revolutions of the times. Freud famously attributed his own insights to the fact that as a Jew he could see the world obliquely.

Luxemburg’s opposition to the idea of national self-determination – which was so central in her dispute with Lenin (and not only with him) – has to be understood in these terms. It was the fervent nationalism of the official Polish Socialist Party which led Luxemburg and Jogiches to split off and form the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Lithuania and Poland in 1893. ‘The nation as a uniform social-political whole,’ she observed in 1908, ‘simply does not exist.’
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Although she gave their journal one of her articles, she did not align herself with the Jewish Socialist movement, the
Bund
, which fought for the recognition of Jews as a national minority, and which Jogiches supported. It was one of the few political disagreements between them. She could not see the Jews as a special case. ‘What do you want with this particular suffering of the Jews,’ Luxemburg wrote to Mathilde Wurm in 1917 in one of her most controversial letters. ‘The poor victims on the rubber plantations in Puntumayo, the Negroes in Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play a game of catch are just as near to me [ . . . ] I have no special corner of my heart reserved for the ghetto; I am at home wherever in the world there are clouds, birds, human tears.’
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She had of course been the target of anti-Semitism, endemic even in her own party in Germany. At the 1901 Social Democratic Congress, Wolfgang Heine told delegates that the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who of course included Luxemburg, were behaving like guests who ‘come to us and spit in our parlour’ (remember Adler insisting ‘we will not allow her to spit in our soup’).
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Looking back over his life, the German politician Gustav Noske accused Luxemburg and her fellow émigrés of turning Marxism into a ‘secret science’, the idea of a secret society or esoteric knowledge being another classical trope of anti-Semitism. By 1919 Noske was Defence Minister, responsible for the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. It seems unlikely that his anti-Semitism did not play its part when he authorised the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg.

To say that Luxemburg was impatient with her Jewishness would, however, be to venture an understatement. She refused to read the Dreyfus affair, for example, as a Jewish matter, seeing it in terms of the struggle of socialism against militarism and clericalism, which it also was. And yet that is not the whole story (it rarely is). Her letters are peppered with Yiddish, although more than once she uses the word ‘kike’.
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And, as Rory Castle has recently uncovered, she wrote about anti-Semitism, describing it in a 1910 article, ‘After the Pogrom’, as the ‘common banner of political backwardness and cultural barbarism’.
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If she was at least partly in flight from her Jewishness, her Jewishness also returned, unbidden, to her. Although she and her family had struggled to be part of the non-Jewish world, they never relinquished their Jewishness. Her father, Edward, was a leading member of the Reformist Jewish community in Zamo
ść
and actively involved in its cultural and educational work.
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We could say that in the end her Jewishness was a ‘given’, one of the ‘indisputable facts’ of her life, as Arendt herself put it in her famous exchange with Gershom Scholem.
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In the ‘Junius’ pamphlet Luxemburg compares socialists opposing the war to ‘the Jews whom Moses led through the desert’ (she is paraphrasing Marx).
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She also has moments of striking prescience, writing to Sophie Liebknecht in the midst of the war that, although the time for pogroms in Russia is over, in Germany they might be about to begin.
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‘In Eastern Europe the subject most preferred for diverting the people’s bad disposition has always been the Jews,’ she wrote in her introduction to
Korolenko
, ‘and it is questionable whether they have yet played their role to the end.’
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The ‘Junius’ pamphlet ends with her reciting the murderous refrains of the war, ‘ “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” ’ – just how murderous she could not have yet known – which ring out while the soldiers and workers of France, Germany, Italy and Belgium totter ‘over their graves, grappling in each other’s death-bringing arms’.
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For Luxemburg, nationalism was violence. If the war taught her one thing it was how exciting virulent, mind-numbing patriotism could be. For Arendt, it is paradoxically her cosmopolitanism which shows how profoundly Luxemburg was in fact Jewish-identified (a majority of the anti-nationalist break-away Polish party were Jews). In Arendt’s eyes, this inclusive, borderless vision is what makes Luxemburg a true European, passionately engaged till the end of her life ‘in the destinies’ – note the plural – ‘of the world’.
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What this meant, among other things, is that she could see through the rhetoric of war. ‘It is a distorted form of bourgeois hypocrisy,’ she wrote in the ‘Junius’ pamphlet, ‘which leads each nation to recognise infamy only when it appears in the uniform of the other.’
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If freedom is the freedom to think ‘otherwise’, then the question of the other is latent to that of freedom: to which others are you willing to accord the right to be free (instead of imputing infamy to them as a prelude to killing)? Luxemburg’s universalism is therefore the other side of her openness to the other, however far it takes her (‘
jusqu’à outrance
’). Again in this she is way ahead of her time. ‘A man who hastens to perform an important deed,’ she wrote in
Rote Fahne
(
Red Flag
), the paper of the Spartacists, ‘and unthinkingly treads upon a worm on his way is committing a crime.’
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‘I am no more important than the ladybug,’ she wrote from prison in April 1917, ‘and I am inexpressibly happy with this sense of my own insignificance.’
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This is how she describes the ecological disaster, the 1891 famine ‘of truly biblical proportions’ that was the outcome of the policies of the Czar. She is citing a parson who gave evidence to the official enquiry:

For the last three years, bad harvests have been sneaking up on us and one misfortune after another plagues the peasants. There is the insect pest. Grasshoppers eat up the grain, worms nibble on it, and bugs do away with the rest. The harvest has been destroyed in the fields and the seeds have been parched in the ground; the barns are empty and there is no bread. The animals groan and collapse, cattle move meekly, and the sheep perish from thirst and want of fodder . . . Millions of trees and thousands of farmhouses have become a prey to flames. A wall of fire and smoke surrounded us . . . It is written by the prophet Zephania: ‘I will destroy everything from the face of the earth, saith the Lord, man, cattle, and wild beasts, the birds and the fish.’

How many of the feathered ones have perished in the forest fires, how many fish in the shallow waters! . . . The elk has fled from our woods, the raccoon and the squirrel have died. Heaven has become barren and hard as ore; no dew falls, only drought and fire. The fruit trees have withered away and so also the grass and the flowers. No raspberries ripen any more, there are no blackberries, blueberries, or whortleberries far and wide; bogs and swamps have burned out . . . Where are you, green of the forests, oh delicious air, balsam scent of the firs that gave relief to the ailing? All is gone!
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You can only be a genuine revolutionary if you are in touch with the creaturely, microscopic cruelties of an exploitative, nature-blind, world. True socialists cannot only concern themselves with human beings: ‘The “bloody Rosa”, exhausted and overwhelmed by work,’ wrote Zetkin, ‘was capable of turning round on a road to pick up a caterpillar that had lost its way and to take it to a new source of nourishment.’
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‘In a pantheistic sense, [she] recognised the unity of all living matter.’
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One day in November 1917, as Luxemburg was walking through the prison courtyard in Breslau, she noticed a military supply wagon driven by water buffaloes instead of horses. There were said to be at least a hundred of these animals in Breslau alone. Wild buffaloes from Romania, they were ‘accustomed to their freedom’, and had to be ‘beaten terribly before they grasped the concept that they had lost the war’.
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Pushed beyond endurance, they mostly perished. As she watched a soldier flailing the buffaloes, one bleeding animal drew her attention: ‘As I stood before it, and the beast looked at me, tears were running down my face – they were
his
tears.’
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What saves this from sentimentality is the identification. Luxemburg does not wail and moan from the sidelines but catapults herself into the place of the beast. Two years later she herself will be clubbed, shot and thrown into the river. But in prison, she never loses her sense of irony. The soldier struts the yard, smiling and whistling some popular tune to himself, ‘and the entire marvellous panorama of the war passed before my eyes’.
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*

When Luxemburg was released from Barnim Street women’s prison in February 1916 (for a matter of months only), she was greeted by a crowd of more than a thousand women who gathered her up and followed her en masse to her home, which they had crammed with presents: ‘window boxes with flowers, baked goods, canned goods, fruitcakes, teabags, soap, cocoa, sardines, and the finest vegetables – just like in a delicatessen’ (a true labour of love as everything had been baked, canned, preserved by the women themselves).
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‘It would have been a heartfelt joy for you,’ she wrote to Clara Zetkin, ‘to see these women.’ At a dinner the same evening, the chairperson explained to her that the demonstration had been made by the women ‘quite spontaneously’. They loved her because ‘she always spoke a sharp word to the party leaders’ and because those higher up the party would rather ‘see her going
into
prison than coming out of it.’ These women knew that Luxemburg’s voice, as much as her views, was the true, and most hated, source of her power. She was overwhelmed. She wanted, she wrote to Zetkin, to ‘howl with shame’, but consoled herself with the thought that she was merely the ‘wooden pole on which they are hanging their universal readiness for struggle’.
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Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship to feminism was complex. It was not as a woman, any more than as a Jewess, that she predominantly self-identified. She wanted, as Nettl puts it, neither to ‘claim the privileges’ nor to ‘accept the disabilities’ of being a woman – as if somewhere to be a woman meant crippling injustice either way.
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We could say that Luxemburg was a feminist despite herself. ‘Are you coming to the women’s conference?’ she wrote to Luise Kautsky in 1911. ‘Just imagine. I have become a feminist!’
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Clara Zetkin, her closest woman friend, was leader of the German Social Democratic Women’s Movement and editor of its newspaper
Gleichheit
(
Equality
).
Zetkin was behind the launch of the first International Women’s Day in March 1911. ‘When are you going to write me that
big letter
about the women’s movement?’ Luxemburg wrote to her in 1901.
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As well as intimate friends, Zetkin and Luxemburg were united on all major party issues – the war, revisionism – true comrades in arms. They were also the joint targets of misogyny from the men who – according to her Barnim Street women supporters – would have preferred to see Luxemburg going in, rather than coming out, of jail. ‘The two females,’ Karl Kautsky wrote to Bebel in 1913, are ‘planning an attack on all central party positions’ (as if, even in the midst of revolutionary struggle, women were the enemy to be most feared).
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By 1918, Luxemburg was pleading with Zetkin to write something about women for
Rote Fahne
– ‘that [issue] is so important now and none of us understand anything about it’ – and then, since the matter has become so ‘urgent’, she asks her to produce a women’s paper as a weekly, bi-weekly or daily supplement to the paper: ‘Every day lost is a sin.’
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