A historical biography of the revolutionary woman whose radical politics still divide opinion
The University of Zurich was the first college in Europe where women could walk out with a doctoral diploma, officially certifying their higher education. The title of the first female doctor went to Russian Nadezhda Suslova, who graduated in medicine in 1867. It is sometimes claimed that Rosa Luxemburg was the first Polish woman to obtain the doctor title, but this is incorrect. That distinction belongs to Stefania Wolicka, who defended her dissertation in 1875, becoming not only the first Polish woman with a doctorate but also the first woman in Europe to earn a degree in philosophy. The first doctorate in economics awarded to a Polish woman went to Zofia Daszyńska in 1891. Rosa Luxemburg came next, though unlike her predecessors, she did not come from Polish nobility.
By 1890, international female students outnumbered their Swiss counterparts, the great majority of them being subjects of the Russian Tsar. Most of them hailed from Warsaw, Odesa, Vilnius and Saint Petersburg, and the student transcripts, which listed religion, reveal that most were Jewish.
Three-quarters of the visiting girls chose medicine, where – as the student Käthe Schirmacher notes – ‘in lectures, alongside eighty Swiss men, sat a hundred Russian women’. Indeed, Zurich was also the first academic institution to have female students sharing the benches with their male classmates. Before Rosa even graduated, the university appointed its first female lecturer.
Rosa’s time at university overlapped with that of: the well-known German writers, Ricarda Huch and Lou Andreas-Salomé; the radical feminist Anita Augspurg; the socialists Ida, Lyubov and Vera Axelrod; and some time later, the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Most of the students from eastern Europe, however, have now been forgotten. Their stories can still be traced through figures like Fajga Wolfensohn; Daniela Neumann describes her relationship with Rosa Luxemburg in a book on young women from the Russian Empire studying at Swiss universities.
Fajga Wolfensohn was the same age as Rosa, the daughter of a merchant from Simferopol, and belonged to the socialist debating society during her studies in botany and medicine. After graduating, she returned to Russia to educate and provide medical aid to the poor. She was arrested in Yekaterinoslav for socialist activism in 1902, then worked in the provinces under police surveillance. In 1904, she fled to Odesa, where she resumed her medical practice. After the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, she joined the Mensheviks. Her trail goes cold after the October Revolution.
Fajga became friends with Rosa Luxemburg, who enrolled in the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy in the winter semester of 1889/1990. Rosa intended to graduate in botany, so she followed the prescribed curriculum, beginning with microscopy classes and lectures in zoology. She cut her hair at this time, as seen in a photograph she sent home, though she later let it grow out again. In October 1889, she moved in with a German family just a few houses down from 5 Nelkenstrasse, the Lübecks at number 12. The address was well known in political émigré circles. The journalist Karl Lübeck had left Germany even before the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Laws. After the fall of the Paris Commune, when fear of a popular uprising gripped all of Europe, he had fallen into disfavour with Bismarck as the editor-in-chief of the influential weekly Der Sozialdemokrat.
Plagued by illness, Karl struggled to support his wife and eight children while in exile. Using a wheelchair and nearly blind, he welcomed Rosa’s assistance: she read him newspapers and books, while he dictated his letters and articles to her. The arrangement proved to be both excellent German practice for Rosa and her first education in journalism as well as Marxism. She could listen in on the discussions that filled the house and use his library. In return for her help with housekeeping, she could have her room rent-free, which was important, as money from Warsaw arrived irregularly.
Translated by Dawid Mobolaji
A historical biography of the revolutionary woman whose radical politics still divide opinion
Translation rights: Anna Rakoczy, a.rakoczy@marginesy.com.pl
Rosa Luxemburg is an engaging and thoughtfully composed biography of the legendary philosopher and revolutionary. Luxemburg’s unlikely life story begins in 1871 in the Polish city of Zamość – itself founded as an experiment in utopian planning – and ends in Berlin with her murder by the police during the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919. Given her radical political views, activism and unconventional lifestyle, Luxemburg remains a controversial figure in her native Poland and across the world.
In the biography, the subject is neither lionised nor condemned. Veteran journalist Weronika Kostyrko brings the reader into the world of Luxemburg – who was also the survivor of a pogrom and a woman living with a disability – amid all its complexity. Employing a wealth of quotations from philosophical texts and personal correspondences, the author allows Luxemburg to speak for herself, as both a thinker and a human being.
Rosa Luxemburg expands upon and enriches the pre-existing body of work on the revolutionary thanks to its grounding within the Polish historical context and its emphasis on Luxemburg’s human experiences and relationships. The book will appeal to the reader that enjoys historical biographies, as well as those interested in political movements, disability, and cultural, Jewish and women’s history.
Jess Jensen Mitchell
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
