Thorn and Eagle
Wynner, Edith
Thorn and Eagle Rosa Luxemburg, by J. P. Nettl. Oxford University Press. Two volumes. 984 pp. $20.20. Reviewed by Edith Wynner Tt would be a great pity if this mas-terly combination of biography...
...Her parents, assimilated Jews, were moderately well-off, concerned with worldly Polish affairs rather than communal Jewish ones...
...And outside the socialist ranks, by 1905 the German liberal press called her "Bloody Rosa...
...To the leaders of the Second International, among whom she first appeared at the age of twenty-two, she was a thorn in the flesh...
...Her biographer concludes that for her "it was a fitting end which helped to preserve her from Stalin's special form of Bolshevik dishonor...
...She was torn between her desire for the defeat of German imperialism and her passionate wish for the end of the war to save further bloodshed...
...In 1898, after a marriage of convenience to acquire German citizenship, she settled in Berlin, which she always hated, and embarked on a busy life of socialist journalism, pamphleteering, speaking, teaching, unending Marxist controversy, several stretches in prison, and, finally, martyrdom, all before she reached her forty-eighth year...
...He wrote "This Is Reading...
...Off and on, they also admired her intellect, her brilliant style, and her unique capacity to make even the study of economics fascinating...
...She had several short-lived victories in this struggle but in the end revisionism won in Germany...
...Juggling and misrepresentation of her ideas in accordance with party requirements are still a part of the Communist power struggle...
...He spent three years as a graduate student in the department of government and Asian studies at Indiana University...
...Her doctoral dissertation was a major work of scholarship which gained immediate commercial publication...
...C. WALTER CLARK JR...
...Reviewed by Edith Wynner Tt would be a great pity if this mas-terly combination of biography and history were read only by Marxist scholars, for it is a skillfully guided tour through the intricate labyrinth of more than half a century of Socialist-Communist debate and maneuver...
...Victor Ad-ler, the Austrian Socialist, called her "a poisonous bitch . . . clever as a monkey...
...RICHARD FLACKS is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago...
...And many who now reject the Communist straitjacket look to her for inspiration, for her influence extends beyond Marxism...
...This particular form of Marxist civil war is still very much with us in its Sino-Soviet phase...
...Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 in a largish Polish town within the Russian Empire...
...It is a tragic commentary on our time that the gruesome murder of this gifted woman should, in retrospect, seem relatively merciful...
...For a few hectic weeks after her release she lived the life of direct revolutionary action which she always advocated...
...derous, unimaginative German leadership she appeared quarrelsome, disrespectful, uncompromising, intransigent, too young, too foreign, too impatient, too intellectual, too superior, and—female...
...What lifts Rosa Luxemburg above the shrill vituperation of Marxist infighting is a strong humanitarianism...
...To August Bebel, the German leader, she was a gadfly who exhausted his small fund of benevolence...
...Soon after her settlement in Germany she launched a full-scale campaign against the leading Socialist theoretician, Eduard Bernstein, accusing him of revisionism and opportunism...
...She attended high school in Warsaw where she probably came in contact with revolutionary elements...
...At the moment she is honored in Poland and East Germany but treated gingerly in Russia...
...Socialist support of the war drove her to a final break with the German Socialist Party and swept her into co-leadership with Karl Liebknecht, another intransigent and outspoken opponent of the war and its Socialist supporters...
...On January 15, 1919, she and Liebknecht were arrested by a detachment of Freikorps troops, beaten half-dead, and finally shot...
...Together they founded Spartakus to oppose the war and undermine the Socialist Party...
...Undaunted, she moved on to oppose the German, Austrian, and Russian Socialist Parties on the national question (she opposed self-determination of nationalities) and laid down Marxian law to German, French, Belgian, and other parties whose activities caught her attention...
...In these pages, Lenin is just another little known emigre maneuvering for power and funds doled out by the powerful German Party...
...To Lenin in 1922, three years after her assassination, "she was and is an eagle...
...FRANK G. JENNINGS is a consultant to the New World Foundation and a frequent contributor to Saturday Review...
...Throughout this period her home was a center for Polish emigre revolutionary activities...
...From prison in 1917, Rosa Luxemburg wrote what is perhaps her own best epitaph: "I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears...
...He was a member of the group that founded Students for a Democratic Society and is currently engaged in research on student activists...
...is an instructor in political science at Drake University...
...Rosa Luxemburg spent much of the war period in prison...
...She became the German Party's authority on Polish and Russian affairs and helped sit in judgment on the endless factional quarrels of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks...
...The shock of war's outbreak in 1914 almost drove her to suicide...
...EDITH WYNNER is working on a history of World War I peace initiatives...
...Little wonder that to the ponTHE REVIEWERS PAUL HOLLANDER is a research fellow at the Russian Research Center, as well as an assistant professor of sociology, at Harvard, where he teaches a course on Soviet social structure...
...Her political writings and correspondence were regularly smuggled out and contain some of her finest work...
...To her the millions of soldiers ground down in the trenches were but "proletarians temporarily dressed in field gray...
...In 1889 she was smuggled abroad and enrolled at the University of Zurich where for seven years she studied natural sciences, mathematics, and public law...
...Rosa Luxemburg was deeply involved in the two major divisions of modern Marxism which she had helped to create...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
