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Red Rosa

The writings of the martyred socialist Rosa Luxemburg give a plaintive view of historyspaths not taken.

ByChristopher Hitchens

THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED verdict on 20th-century ideologythat its

totalitarian character eclipses any of the ostensible differences between its

left and right versionsis one that few wish to dispute. Indeed, the very

term totalitarian was most probably coined by the dissident Marxist Victor

Serge, to denote a uniquely modern form of absolutism that essentially sought

to abolish the private life and the individual conscience. As with concepts, so

with consequences: David Roussets early classic, LUnivers

Concentrationnaire,foreshadowed the image of the camp as the place where

the human surplus of brute Utopianism was disposed of, no matter what theclaimed character of the regime.

This convergence or symmetry does not automatically translate into a strict moralequivalence. More people may have been consumed by the Gulag than by the Nazi lager

system. Yet Robert Conquest, the preeminent historian of Stalinism, when invited to pass a

judgment, found the Hitlerite crimes to be more damnable. Pressed to enlarge on this, hereplied: I simply feel it to be so. I think the intuition of many morally intelligent people

would be the same.

Another way in which a distinction might be drawn is this: we have no real record of any

dissident writing by the minority of intellectuals who were drawn to Fascism andNational Socialism. Indeed, were it not for a certain sick fascination with the pornography

of violence and racism, there would be scant point in studying the political writings of

Louis-Ferdinand Cline, let alone of Alfred Rosenberg, at all. Martin Heidegger andGiovanni Gentile may have laid down an obfuscatory barrage of pseudo-historical

justification for the cult of supreme national leadership, but it survives mainly as a

curiosity. Most important: it is quite impossible to imagine any terms in which they could

ever have formulated a critique of Hitler or Mussolini as having betrayed the original idealsof their respective movements. The ideologies blankly forbade and foreclosed any such

contingency.

By contrast, even Lenins wooden tome The Development of Capitalism in Russiaconstitutes some species of analysis and anatomy, of a kind that would be merely ridiculous

to compare with the ravings ofMein Kampf. And from the many Marxists who took issue

with Lenin, there proceeded a number of works of a high order of seriousness, and failing

to scrutinize them would severely limit ones knowledge of modern history. To me, themost brilliantand the most engagingof these Marxist intellectuals was Rosa

Luxemburg, the Polish-born Jew who was the most charismatic figure in the German Social

Democratic Party (SPD).

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Bertrand Russells first book (evolved from a series of lectures he gave in 1896) was on the

character of this historic party. Wedded to a rather formalist Marxism in theory, the party in

practice provided millions of workers and their families with something like an alternativesociety within Germany: not merely trade unions but welfare associations, educational

institutions, holiday camps, and womens associations. Strongly critical of Prussian

militarism, it felt confident enough in 1912 to declare that in the event of war, it would callfor strikes and protests, and endeavor to make alliances with fraternal parties in the other

combatant nations. In the event, war hysteria proved so damnably potent that the majority

of the Socialist International capitulated in August 1914 and voted to take part in thegreatest fratricide the world had ever seen. (Lenin was so shocked by this that he at first

refused to believe that the SPD had in fact deserted its position.) Luxemburg was one of the

few of the partys leaders to maintain a stance against the kaiser, and was imprisoned as aconsequence. The central tranche of this collection of her letters was written during that

bleak incarceration, and that great political relapse. The confusion of the moment is caught

in a letter from October 1914, in which she urgently seeks instruction on the best manner of

forwarding information by way of Benito Mussolini, entirely unaware that this hithertoanti-war socialist editor had deserted the cause and begun his long swing to the fanatical

right.

Slightly lamed since childhood, married only to gain the formalities of citizenship, and

famous for the scornfulness of her polemics, Luxemburg was easy to portray as a thwartedand unfeminine personage. But her correspondence shows her to have been an active and

ardent lover, as well as a woman constantly distracted from politics by her humanism and

her love for nature and literature. In a single letter to herinamorato Hans Diefenbach(whose life was to be thrown away on the western front), written from a Breslau jail in the

summer of 1917, there are tender and remorseful reflections on the deaths of parents; some

crisp appraisals of the style of Romain Rolland; a recommendation that Diefenbach readHauptmanns The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint; and some extended observations on the

ingenious habits of wasps and birds, as observed through the windows of her cell. Another

letter to him earlier in the same year is saturated with their common addiction to the worksof Goethe and Schiller, and goes on to offer a spirited hypothesis of a possibly feminist

Shakespeare, based on the figure of the unquenchable Rosalind inAs You Like It. Her

favorite word of opprobrium for the war-makers was barbaric, and it becomes plain that by

this she intended no ordinary propaganda slogan, but an intense conviction that Europeanculture itself was being outraged and profaned. She was righter even than she knew.

Her internationalism was so strong that she despised anything to do with lesser or sectarian

identities. This led her to oppose any nationalist claims made by her fellow Poles and

fellow Jews (in retrospect, perhaps, a somewhat questionable position for any Germanpolitician to have been taking). To her friend Mathilde Wurm, she wrote rebukingly:

What do you want with this theme of the special suffering of the Jews? I am just as much

concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks inAfrica with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. You know the words that were written

about the great work of the General Staff, about General Trothas campaign in the Kalahari

desert: And the death rattles of the dying, the demented cries of those driven mad by thirst

faded away in the sublime stillness of eternity. Oh that sublime stillness of eternity, in

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which so many cries of anguish have faded away unheard, they resound within me so

strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire

world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.

The quotation is from a conscience-stricken German soldier in the army of General Lothar

von Trotha, who had in 1904 issued a general extermination order against the rebelliousHerero tribe in what is now Namibia. One feels another crackle of premonition whenreading again about this once-notorious atrocity: the imperial ethnologists in German South

West Africa who conducted hideous medical experiments on the Herero included the

mentors of Josef Mengele, and the first political governor of the province had been

Hermann Goerings father. Von Trotha himself became a member of a race-myth cultgroup calling itself the Thule Society, which was one of the seedbeds of the early Nazi

Party. For Luxemburg, the hecatomb of the European war was partly a projection of the

brutality of empire back into its metropolis. Her prompting was always to the enlargementof the picture: the concept of the global did not in the least intimidate her. Indeed, she

took it as her point of departure.

A pre-war and pre-incarceration letter to another lover (Kostya Zetkin, son of Clara) is

almost entirely devoted to a rhapsodic review of Bachs Saint Matthew Passion, endingwith praise and thanks for some violets and a glimpse of the antics of her cat, Mimi, who

features in many more missives. When jailed, Luxemburg decided with immense regret not

to take the animal with her, deeming it wrong to imprison a feline. This may appearmawkish or sentimental, but consider this extract from my favorite of all her letters. Written

to Sophie Liebknecht from the same Breslau jail in late December 1917, it describes some

Romanian buffalo, pressed into service as beasts of burden by the German army. As theydragged their impossibly heavy load into the prison yard, they continued to be flogged with

the blunt end of the whip handle by an exceptionally callous soldier:

Sonyichka, the hide of a buffalo is proverbial for its toughness and thickness, but this tough

skin had been broken. During the unloading, all the animals stood there, quite still,exhausted, and the one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him

with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child. It was

precisely the expression of a child that has been punished and doesnt know why or what

for, doesnt know how to get away from this torment and raw violence All this time theprisoners had hurriedly busied themselves around the wagon, unloading the heavy sacks

and dragging them off into the building; but the soldier stuck both hands in his trouser

pockets, paced around the courtyard with long strides, and kept smiling and softly whistlingsome popular tune to himself. And the entire marvelous panorama of the war passed before

my eyes.

That dry closing sentence, I submit, acquits the letter of mawkishness and makes its register

of animal torture more like that of Dostoyevsky. It also assists in pointing up the deepcontrast with Lenin, who famously distrusted his emotions and tried his best to silence the

appeals of nature and art. Though he did once refuse to shoot a vixen because really, she

was so beautiful, he turned away from a performance of BeethovensAppassionata lest itshaunting loveliness distract him from the requirements of the struggle, and only emerged

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from an apparent reverie at the summit of a Swiss mountain to exclaim that the damned

Mensheviks were hell-bent on spoiling everything.

Ever since the 1905 upheaval in Russia, Luxemburg had suspected Lenins faction of whatshe scornfully termed a barracks mentality. A short while after the 1917 revolution, we

find her writing a succession of letters, describing the situation in Russia as abysmal andthe Bolsheviks as deserving of a terrible tongue-lashing for their repression of rivalparties such as the Social Revolutionaries, and their unilateral decision to abolish the

Constituent Assembly. She extends this condemnation to include the police mentality

(concerning incessant foreign conspiracies) that underlay Soviet foreign policy. She

singles out a certain Jzef as a particular exemplar of this attitude, and with yet anothershock of premonition, one discovers that this was the party name of her fellow Pole Felix

Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka and later considered the father of the KGB. It was

during this time that Luxemburg made her imperishable defense of free speech, boldlystating that the concept was meaningless unless it meant the freedom of the one who

thinks differently.

Still, her general optimism about the tide of revolution that obliterated the monarchs and

empires that had started the war can give one a lump in the throat. Writing in December1917, she exclaimed:

In Russia the time of pogroms has passed once and for all. The strength of the workers and

of socialism there is much too strong for that I can sooner imaginepogroms against

Jews here in Germany.

Perhaps aware that she was giving a hostage to fortune, she hastily added, Anyhow an

atmosphere conducive to that prevails here, one of viciousness, cowardice, reaction, and

thick-headedness.

This last premonition was the most sobering of all. Released from prison by the strikes andmutinies that accompanied the abdication of the kaiser, Luxemburg was propelled to the

center of revolutionary politics and journalism in Berlin. In January 1919 she was arrested,

and her capacious skull splintered by a rifle butt in the hands of a member of the Freikorps,the debased militia that was to form the pattern and nucleus of the Brownshirts. In her

assassination, wrote Isaac Deutscher, Hohenzollern Germany celebrated its last triumph

and Nazi Germany its first. Over her corpselater thrown into the Landwehr Canalwas

to step a barbarism even more ruthless and intense than any she had dared to imagine. HadGermany gone the other way, is it completely fanciful to imagine an outcome that would

have preempted not just Nazism but, by precept and example, Stalinism too? However

debatable that might be, one cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at thisdistance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed

the history of possibility.

Christopher Hitchens is anAtlantic contributing editor and a Vanity Faircolumnist.