Rosa (59 page)

The air grew static. Hoffner felt suddenly stifled by the place. He needed the east and the Berlin he still knew: somewhere there—and there alone—he would find a way to keep moving. He turned to Pimm, and together they headed into the long night.

Author’s Note

R
osa did, in fact, float up on May 31, 1919. By then, Lieutenant Vogel and Rifleman Runge had been brought up on charges, but the trial was as much of a sham as the investigation had been. Vogel was sentenced to two years and four months for committing a misdemeanor—illegally disposing of a corpse while on duty, and for filing an incorrect report; Runge received two years and two weeks for attempted manslaughter. The presiding magistrate—a man who would go on to hold a prominent position in the Nazi People’s Court—referred to extenuating circumstances, and the men’s excellent war records, as justification for the light sentences. In 1933, Runge petitioned the Ministry of Justice for compensation for his unjust imprisonment, and for his early contribution to the cause of Nazi Germany. After all, his Fhrer “had also paid for his ideals with prison.” Runge was awarded six thousand marks.

A detective named Ernst Tamshik was, for a time, held responsible for Leo Jogiches’s death: the official report stated that Jogiches had been shot in the back “while attempting to escape.” No charges were ever brought.

Dietrich Eckart continued to preach from his wine-cellar perch, and came to be known as Hitler’s mentor. Along with fellow Thulian Anton Drexler, he designed the philosophy and policies of the German Workers’ Party, which eventually changed its name to the National Socialists under Hitler’s leadership. Eckart died of liver failure in 1923, and thus failed to see the full potential of his work. The rag of a paper that he had purchased with Drexler in 1918 became the
Volkischer Beobachter
(
National Observer
), the central organ of Nazi Germany.

The
Freikorps,
which had played so pivotal a role in crushing the revolution, went on to even greater fame in the 1920s. Under the command of Ernst Roehm, the
Korps
became Hitler’s Brownshirts—the SA. They, too, however, missed out on the fruits of their labors. On June 30, 1934, Hitler had the SA leadership purged during “the Night of the Long Knives” in order to placate the army’s High Command. The
Wehrmacht,
as it turned out, wanted nothing to do with a bunch of thugs.

As for Albert Einstein, Käthe Kollwitz, and Leo Jogiches, they were all in Berlin during the revolution of 1919 (Einstein had, in fact, been the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute since 1914); the remaining characters in the book were not.

All excerpts from Rosa’s letters are authentic and can be found in either
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg
(Humanities Press, 1993) or
Comrade and Lover
(MIT Press, 1979). The Shelter Registration Form that appears in chapter four is a reprint of a Weimar document, the text of which can be found in the collection of Joseph Roth’s feuilletons titled
What I Saw
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).

A Brief Biography

R
osa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1870, to a middle-class family of assimilated Jews in the small town of Zamosc on the easternmost edge of Poland. Shunned by the predominantly Orthodox and Hasidic communities, the family moved to Warsaw in 1873, where, for the next fifteen years, Rosa did everything she could to distance herself from the petit-bourgeois lifestyle her parents tried to emulate; even their stifled Judaism embarrassed her. Life was not made any easier when, at the age of five, she was misdiagnosed with a tubercular hip and forced to bind her legs in a cast for nearly a year. When she emerged, Rosa was left with a severe limp, a deformity she would struggle to conceal for the rest of her life.

Intellectually, Rosa also began to stand apart. Under an 1879 Russian law, classes in Polish literature and the humanities were strictly forbidden; remarkably, Polish could be taught only as a second language. The Russification of education in Warsaw began to force Rosa and other young Polish intellectuals to go underground, lending a conspiratorial aura to their studies. Figures such as the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, with talk of equality and social justice, became inspirations for these new radicals. For some, however, such ideas had an influence beyond the classroom: at just seventeen, Rosa joined Proletariat, an illegal socialist group, whose goal was to build a worker’s party. Thrilling as it must have been, it was also very dangerous, as the authorities suddenly began to take notice of her. At this point, it was her ideas and actions, not her physical limitations, that were drawing attention. It was time for Rosa to leave Warsaw.

Fear of prison, however, was not the only reason she needed to go. At the time, women—especially Jewish women—had no access to Polish universities. In February 1889, not quite nineteen, Rosa was smuggled out of the country in the back of a hay cart, then left to find her way to Zurich and its open university. Luckily, she was well at home there. A thriving band of Polish migrs had set up shop at the university, among them a fellow conspirator named Leo Jogiches. Over the next fifteen years, the two would become lovers—to Rosa’s mind it was a marriage, although there were never any official papers to say so—as well as comrades, plotters, prisoners, and rabble-rousers, all in the name of socialism. And while she would get her doctorate and publish countless articles—thus making a name for herself in the Polish and German parties—Jogiches would never manage to get out more than a few pages. She became the face of young socialism, while he remained only a shadow.

The tension eventually tore them apart. Rosa was left to struggle on her own, taking on both the German establishment and the less radical elements of her own Social Democratic Party. Where they wanted reform, Rosa wanted revolution. Her polemics isolated her still further, leaving her—by 1912—as the sole voice of the radical left. And while, for a time, she was allowed to teach at the Party’s school in Berlin—her work on Marxist economy was too innovative to be ignored—men like Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann were now taking the socialists in a far more moderate direction. Only something of drastic proportions could bring Rosa back to the fore.

Sadly, the war proved her final undoing. When the workers of Germany, Russia, England, and France voted for rearmament, it was the end of the International. It was also the end of her freedom: Rosa spent all but a few months of the war in prison—under the hollow euphemism of “protective custody”—writing and waiting. And when her release finally came in November 1918, it ushered in the last cruel hope of her life. The revolution was here. Her old comrade, Karl Liebknecht, had managed to sweep the workers up into a frenzy, building on the unrest in Kiel and the rest of Germany. Rosa returned to Berlin in triumph on November 11, and for the next eight weeks watched as the Social Democrats thwarted her every attempt at genuine socialist revolution. In a last, desperate effort to lay claim to the revolution, she and Jogiches—reunited again—along with Liebknecht, formed the first German Communist Party, under the banner of Spartakus, and took to the streets. They were crushed.

Her last days were spent on the run, moving from one safe house to the next, the press branding her a traitor—the Devil Jewess—until, on the night of January 15, the soldiers came, took her to the Hotel Eden, and killed her. Four months later, her body appeared floating in the Landwehr Canal, almost unrecognizable after being in the water for so long a time. And so began her legend.

About the Author

J
onathan Rabb is the author of
The Overseer
and
The Book of Q.
He lives in New York with his wife and two children.

ALSO BY JONATHAN RABB

The Overseer

The Book of Q

Frontispiece:
Weiblicher Akt mit grünem Tuch, von hinten gesehen
(
Female Nude with Green Shawl Seen from Behind
), by Käthe Kollwitz (1903), from Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Used with permission of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Copyright 2005 by Jonathan Rabb

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
                                    Rabb, Jonathan.

                                                      Rosa / Jonathan Rabb.

                                    1. Luxemburg, Rosa, 1871–1919—Fiction. 2. Attempted assassination—Fiction.

                  3. Women revolutionaries—Fiction. 4. Women socialists—Fiction. 5. Women

                  communists—Fiction. 6. Berlin (Germany)—Fiction. I. Title.

                                                      PS3568.A215R675 2005

                                                      813'.54—dc22

2004014169

MAP ILLUSTRATION BY JACKIE AHER

eISBN: 978-0-307-23729-3

v3.0