Rosa Luxemburg

"I am only impressed by the advice that the counselor takes to heart." Rosa Luxemburg (* December 25, 1870 (according to the birth certificate) / March 5, 1871 (the date given by Rosa Luxemburg herself) in southeastern Poland as Rozalia Luxenburg, † January 15, 1919 in Berlin)was a person as well as a Marxist and anti-militarist. She is the current namesake of the Platz as well as the adjacent street and the hall in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus. In addition, the square is lined with Denkzeichen (quotations she has given over the years).
===Life and Work===
====Youth and Studies====
Rosa Luxemburg grew up in Warsaw and fled to Switzerland after graduating from high school to escape the Tsar's police. Together with her partner Leo Jogiches from Vilnius, she campaigned for anti-capitalism, internationalism and anti-militarism.
====In Berlin and in prison====
In 1898 Rosa Luxemburg moved to Berlin and joined the SPD there where she belonged to the left wing of the party. In 1914 she protested publicly against the SPD's approval of the war credits and founded the Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin. In February 1915, she was jailed for a speech calling for people to refuse military service. She was released from prison in 1916, but arrested again three months later for allegedly endangering the security of the Reich.
Rosa Luxemburg was released from prison on November 9, 1918. Together with Karl Liebknecht she published the newspaper Rote Fahne in order to comment on and influence the events of the November Revolution. In 1919 she was one of the founding members of the Communist Party.
===Assassination and Remembrance===
The strike, armed uprising and fire in a newspaper editorial office in January 1919 turned into the January uprising against the transitional government under Friedrich Ebert. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the military and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were defamed and hunted down by right-wing extremists as the leader of the so-called "Spartacus uprising". She was hounded on posters and demanded her death. Finally, members of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division discovered the two in the Wilmersdorf apartment where they were hiding. They took Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to the Hotel Eden, the division's headquarters, where they were interrogated and mistreated. The two were then murdered and their bodies thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Official information said that Rosa Luxemburg was killed by an angry crowd.
More than 100,000 people took part in the funeral procession from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz to the central cemetery in Friedrichsfelde for the two Spartacus leaders on January 25th. Because the body of Rosa Luxemburg had not been found by then, only an empty coffin was buried in her grave in the cemetery. Only on May 31, 1919 was the body discovered by a lock worker. On June 13, her body was buried in Friedrichsfelde, again several 10,000 people accompanied the funeral procession. From January to July 1919, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht repeatedly led to riots and civil war-like uprisings, in which several thousand people were killed.
In 1947 the city of Berlin named the square after her, in 1969 the adjacent street was named after Rosa Luxemburg. There is also a Rosa Luxemburg Hall in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus. Every year in January there is a memorial demonstration at the Central Cemetery in Lichterfelde. Since 2006, quotes from Rosa Luxemburg's publications have been in memory of the representative of the labor movement.
Category:Person
Category:Namesake