Rosa Luxemburg
1871–1919 1 entry
Biography
Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German Marxist thinker, economist and revolutionary. She was born in 1871 in Zamość, in Russian Poland, into a Jewish family, became involved in socialist politics as a schoolgirl and went to Switzerland, where she earned a doctorate in Zürich. In 1898 she moved to Germany and became one of the leading voices of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party, known for her sharp pen and her speeches.
She opposed the First World War from its first day and spent most of it in prison, where she wrote on the Russian Revolution, warning that without free elections, a free press and freedom of assembly, public life withers away. With Karl Liebknecht she founded the Spartacus League and, at the end of 1918, the Communist Party of Germany. During the uprising in Berlin in January 1919 she was arrested and killed by right-wing paramilitaries. She is remembered above all for her defence of freedom and democracy within the socialist movement.
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