[Lichtheim was a German-born social historian and authority on Karl Marx. In the following essay, which was originally published in Encounter in 1966, he considers Nettl's portrait of Luxemburg and her contemporaries, and applauds the moral rigor of Luxemburg's work despite its technical flaws.]

In the mythology of revolutionary socialism, east and west of the great divide, the name of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) is indissolubly linked with that of Karl Liebknecht: victims of the Spartacist rising in January 1919 whose brutal suppression by soldiers nominally responsible to a Social-Democratic government sealed in blood the wartime split of the German labor movement. Nor is this familiar assessment confined to Communist literature. In Western historiography too, their names invariably appear as though joined together by history's decree. Every study of the Weimar Republic opens perforce with an account of the Berlin insurrection launched by the nascent Communist movement against the government of Ebert and Noske. And while the ceremonial linking of the names Liebknecht and Luxemburg by today's East German regime has long ceased to be anything but a gesture towards a dimly remembered past, the legend persists that German Communism conserves the heritage of this strange pair of martyrs: the solid lawyer and Reichstag deputy, suddenly catapulted into fame by his passionate wartime oratory in 1914-1918, and the brilliant Polish-Jewish woman revolutionary who appears in these accounts as his inspirer and companion. The fact that down to 1914 they had virtually nothing in common, that Liebknecht—by philosophical conviction a Kantian—was not even a Marxist, let alone a Communist, and that in 1919 he was merely the popular figurehead of a rebellion not effectively controlled by anyone, is seldom permitted to encroach upon the myth.

It is the great merit of J. P. Nettl's enormously detailed and painstakingly scholarly work that a serious study of Rosa Luxemburg's actual historical role is now at last available to the public. A biographer by choice and inclination, he is also in effect a historian of the East European socialist movement before 1914; and while his partisanship is never concealed, he has not on the whole allowed it to interfere with the analysis of personalities and events. The comparison with Mr. Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky imposes itself. It works in Mr. Nettl's favor, if only because his intellectual apparatus includes economics and sociology, as well as the standard techniques of the historian. His grasp of Russian and Polish realities is the equal of Mr. Deutscher's, while in relation to Germany his understanding, if not quite flawless, is much superior to that of most writers whose primary background is East European. These are impressive qualifications, and they have resulted in the production of a remarkable work. Readers not put off by its formidable bulk (827 pages of text, plus two lengthy appendices, and 70 pages of bibliography in five languages, including Russian and Polish) can now at last find their way through the maze of political and theoretical conflicts from which in due course the Russian, Polish, Austrian, and German upheavals of 1917-1919 were to derive their shape.

What emerges from Mr. Nettl's analysis of the crucial role played by his heroine in these events is at first glance surprising. Those who had thought of Rosa Luxemburg as primarily a figure in German Socialist history will have to revise what they had gathered from earlier biographers. The familiar and slightly puzzling image—a young woman from Russian Poland who suddenly erupted on the German scene around 1900 and thereafter made a career as a brilliant publicist—is replaced by a far more complex and fascinating picture: that of a woman who was both a gifted theorist and a steel-willed conspirator, the central figure of a small but influential group of Polish revolutionaries who operated simultaneously in the Socialist movements of three countries—Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany; an organizer who covered her traces with such skill that even her closest German friends and associates had no real inkling of her true role in neighboring Poland and in the leadership of the conspiratorial Marxist group she had founded with her close personal and political associate Leo Jogiches. Though formally a German citizen (by way of a nominal marriage) since 1898, a prominent member of the German Social-Democratic Party, and a steady contributor to its journals, Rosa Luxemburg—almost down to the eve of war in 1914 when she partly relinquished her Polish ties—remained at heart what she had been since her student days in Zurüch in the 1890s: the theorist of a self-appointed "peer group" of revolutionaries with a following among the Polish-speaking masses of the three Eastern Empires, whose simultaneous collapse in 1918 was to restore Poland as a nation, thereby paradoxically inflicting upon Rosa Luxemburg and her group (the SDKPIL—Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) the most shattering political defeat of her life.

The secret of Rosa Luxemburg's strange personality and career, one may now say with certainty, is to be found in the fact that for twenty years she was the principal link between the German Socialist movement and the totally different world of the conspiratorial and elitist Russo-Polish underground parties and sects. Manipulating her contacts on both sides with remarkable dexterity, she managed to appear in German eyes as an expert on the Russian situation, while representing the German Social-Democratic Party (the SPD) towards the Polish and Russian factions, including Lenin's Bolsheviks, with whom she alternately feuded and cooperated. So great was her operational skill (at least while she had the benefit of Leo Jogiches' advice) that she succeeded in getting her small Marxist group, whose following was limited to a few cities, accepted by the Germans as the official representation of the Polish workers in Germany, as against the more numerous Polish Socialist Party of her rivals, the PPS. This strange configuration in turn she exploited with relentless energy to impose herself on the cautious leadership of German Social-Democracy. To the veteran August Bebel and most of the other leaders she was primarily an ally against Polish nationalism: a growing force among the Polish masses in Silesia of which they stood in mortal terror (as did the Imperial German Government). As long as she was ready to battle the nationalists on their home ground, the SPD Executive forgave her almost anything, even her doctrinaire Marxism and her constant broadsides against their own somnolent passivity. It was for this that Bebel protected her against the South German "revisionists" and against her sworn enemies, the trade union leaders; for this that Kautsky (who liked her personally) opened the pages of his great theoretical organ, the Neue Zeit, to her and allowed her to lambaste his old opponent Eduard Bernstein to her heart's content. To the more cynical SPD bureaucrats, indeed, she was hardly more than an unconscious agent of Germanization among the Polish masses in Eastern Germany. The alliance collapsed only when in 1910 she tried of it and turned against Bebel and even against her old friend and protector Kautsky. Only then did she become the leader of the extreme Left in Germany. The whole of this deeply hidden labyrinth of Central and East European politics in the years before the First World War has been illuminated for the first time by Mr. Nettl's truly Herculean labors in the German and Polish archives.

That a degree of secretiveness, and even duplicity, should in consequence have been imposed upon a woman by nature candid, outspoken, and contemptuous of make-believe, must be laid to the peculiar world of Russo-Polish emigre politics from which in 1896 she suddenly emerged, to astound the Congress of the Socialist International with the spectacle of a fiery young woman of twenty-five informing the bearded veterans of a hundred battles that they knew nothing about the East European picture, and that moreover Marx and Engels had been wrong about it. To this point it will be necessary to return. What needs to be retained here is a biographical circumstance to which Mr. Nettl has lent some reluctant prominence: the fact that her deepest loyalties lay in an area which had little to do with her public life as a representative of German Socialism. As her biographer puts it:

Many of her German friends were totally unaware of the fact that on top of her full-time work in the SPD—and on the problem of Polish organization on German soil, in Pomerania and Silesia—she was simultaneously one of the main inspirers and leaders of a Polish party whose center of gravity lay in the Russian empire.

Not only were her relations with Jogiches, Marchlewski, and others of her circle more important to her than her German friends she actually disliked Germany and the Germans, though she lived there for twenty years and played a prominent role in the SPD. A self-conscious Easterner, she preferred Russian literature to German (admittedly a judgment shared by many discerning critics), described Russian as "the language of the future," and for the rest reserved her personal affection for the French, the Italians, and other Latins. It is a remarkable story, conceivable perhaps only in an age more liberal than ours, when disregard for national frontiers was thought respectable at least by Socialists. But in large measure it responded also to certain features of her background duly recorded by Mr. Nettl: her early involvement in the conspiratorial world of Polish emigre politics in Zurüch and Paris, and her naive assumption that the moral and intellectual standards of the Jewish intelligentsia in Eastern Europe were natural also to the labor movement, or at least could be implanted in it under the guise of "proletarian internationalism."

This is the key to the story. Mr. Nettl handles it gingerly, though from time to time he summons up courage to remind the reader that the intellectual leadership of Rosa Luxemburg's and Leo Jogiches' private creation, the SDKPIL, was largely (though not wholly) a Jewish affair. Today when this particular story has been played out to its dreadful finale, there is a natural reluctance to dwell upon these circumstances. Mr. Nettl wisely resists the temptation, though he is clearly unhappy with the notion that the emotional spring which fed Rosa Luxemburg's passionate loyalty to the International was a form of Jewish Messianism. He does not wholly repudiate the idea, but leaves it in the air. Her contemporaries were less inhibited. To the majority faction of Polish Socialism, the PPS, she was quite simply a Jewish intellectual who cared nothing for Poland; to the self-consciously Jewish leaders of the Bund, the mass movement of the Yiddish-speaking proletariat in Russian Poland, she was a traitor to her people. In her own eyes she was a true internationalist and the only consistent Marxist of the lot: this although her attitude on the Polish question was in flat contradiction to literally everything Marx (and even Engels) had said on the the subject.

It is necessary to pause here. The subject is loaded with passion. It was the central issue of Rosa Luxemburg's political life—far more important to her than the boring quarrels within the German Socialist movement, or even the more fascinating disputations between Lenin and his Menshevik opponents (which she exploited with remarkable skill to promote her own group to a key position inside the Russian party). It was the one issue on which she stood ready to break with her closest associates and to fly in the face of every authority, including that of Marx. Poland was dead! It could never be revived! Talk of a Polish nation, of an independent Poland, was not only political and economic lunacy; it was a distraction from the class struggle, a betrayal of Socialism! If Marx had held a different view, then Marx had been mistaken. If the International solemnly went on record affirming the traditional Social-Democratic creed (Poland must be restored as a bastion against Tsarist Russia), then the International was misguided and must be told so, or its resolutions must be tortured to yield a different sense. Above all, the Polish Socialist majority party, the PPS, must be relentlessly pursued, up hill and down dale, and denounced as a nationalist organization falsely parading in Socialist clothing. If the very SDKPIL, her own brainchild, threatened to split and founder on this rock, so much the worse for it. One thing only counted: fidelity to proletarian internationalism as the understood it (and as Marx, poor man, had plainly not understood it). On this point, and on this alone, she was intractable. Even Jogiches at times thought she went too far, though he had originally helped her to evolve this attitude while they were both students in Zurüch in the 1890s. Her other Polish associates put up with her fanaticism on the subject, though they did not share it. In the end, the allegedly impossible happened: Poland was restored in 1918, and her veteran friend and colleague Adolf Warszawski, with her reluctant consent, fused the remnant of their following with the left wing of the PPS to form the Polish Communist Party (the right wing under Pilsudski having split off). By then twenty years had been spent, or rather wasted, on one of the strangest aberrations ever to possess a major political intellect.

For the remarkable thing is that on the national question, and specifically on the issue of Poland, Rosa Luxemburg stood entirely alone. Not a single Marxist of her generation, outside her own immediate circle, agreed with her: not even Trotsky, in many respects her equal among the Russians (though they never took to each other); certainly not Lenin, who treated her views on the subject with the good-natured disdain he reserved for the handful of opponents for whom he had a personal liking. Elsewhere the damage was considerable. As time went on, her insanity—there is no other word for it—on the topic of nationalism developed into the gravest of her political handicaps. Her doctrinaire refusal to admit the legitimacy of any national movement in Europe was repudiated by Kautsky, by Plekhanov, by the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, and virtually every other Socialist group or personality. It angered the verteran leader of Austrian Social-Democracy, Victor Adler, who on this issue became and remained her personal enemy. It embarrassed her old friend and protector Kautsky. It undermined the position of her followers in Poland and her friends among the Russians. It maddened the Polish majority Socialists and drove their less reputable elements into paroxysms of anti-Semitic fury. It very nearly wrecked her own creation, the SDKPIL. It has remained to this day the greatest single obstacle to the revival of a "Luxemburgist" tradition of democratic Socialism in post-Stalinist Poland. And it was totally unnecessary. There never was the smallest justification for it, notwithstanding the pseudo-Marxist sophistries of her Zürich doctoral dissertation of 1898 on the industrial development of Poland: sophistries which her biographer treats with the gravity of a theologian expounding a particularly incomprehensible piece of ecclesiastical doctrine. It was, from start to finish, a display of sheer intellectual perversity, backed up and sustained by the strongest of her emotional commitments: the vision of a proletarian revolution which would institute a new world order. She went so far as to assert that while national self-determination was a farce under capitalism, it would be unnecessary under socialism. Why bother about it if the revolution was going to make all things new?

Her biographer, in general a wholehearted sympathizer with her person and her views, draws the line at this point, though unwillingly. On most other issues he tends to support her and to find fault with her opponents whenever possible, but her calamitous misjudgment of the national problem is too much even for him. He does indeed set out all possible mitigating circumstances at great length, but the effect is not the intended one; for the more earnestly, in his chosen role as counsel for the defense, he addresses the jury on behalf of his client, the clearer it becomes that the case is really hopeless. A more complete misjudgment of a political issue than Rosa Luxemburg's position on the national question was never seen or heard on land or sea. Yet strangely enough, it is this heroic persistence along the wrong track that lends pathos and distinction to her conception of socialism. For her, as for many other East European revolutionaries who had renounced all ties of class and nationality, the only loyalty was to the proletariat, the only true fatherland the International. When in August 1914 the sword broke in her hand, she seriously contemplated suicide.

It is this wholly abstract, totally unrealistic, yet unshakeable commitment to a vision transcending the circumstances of daily existence that sets Rosa Luxemburg apart and lends her the dignity of a tragic figure. As a theorist—pace her biographer—she does not take first rank. Her intervention in the German revisionist controversy around 1900 was limited to the political side, if only because she had no understanding of philosophy (a handicap shared by her biographer, to judge from his extremely odd notions about Kant). As an economist she was brilliant and suggestive rather than profound. The Accumulation of Capital, her major work, though a truly remarkable tour de force and shot through with extraordinary flashes of prophetic insight into the nature of imperialism, suffers from a fatal flaw: its central theoretical argument is based on a misreading of both Marx and mathematics. (As in the case of Poland she had tried to correct the Master, and predictably come a cropper, the usual fate of Marx's critics, even among Marxists.) Her other theoretical excursions remained fragmentary. She may have anticipated some of Trotsky's notions about the "permanent revolution," though her biographer denies it; but it was Parvus and Radek (both from Eastern Europe) who first developed what was later to become the specifically "Trotskyist" view of the world situation and the function of the coming Russian upheaval within it.

In the factional struggles among the Russian Marxists she wavered uncertainly between the Bolsheviks and their opponents, and in the end reluctantly underwrote the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, with qualifications which Lenin's followers have been busy repudiating ever since. She disliked Lenin's organizational concept, but had nothing to put in its place, except a vague faith in "the masses." In general, organizational questions bored her and she never bothered to equip either her Polish party or the German Spartakus League with the kind of effective leadership that might have placed either of them at the head of a mass movement. As a party leader she was effective only when steered by Leo Jogiches (who for years did the organizational work, while she wrote brilliant tracts demolishing their opponents) and promptly lost her bearings when their long-standing personal relationship broke up under the strain of the 1905 revolution and she had to navigate by herself. Her final throw, the Berlin rising of January 1919, led directly to her death, and thereby decapitated the nascent German Communist movement. Nor was this catastrophe accidental, for although the rising had been forced upon her (against her better judgment and that of her experienced Polish associates) by the unwisdom of Liebknecht and the furor teutonicus which had seized hold of the German Communists, her decision to participate in what she regarded as an act of madness was in tune with her mystical doctrine of loyalty to the proletariat. For the rest it was an almost literal application of the revolutionary lessons she had been preaching to the Germans since her own participation in the great Russo-Polish upheaval of 1905-1906. The only revolution she had ever wanted or believed in was a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat in the great cities of Central and Eastern Europe. When it came, she was ready for it, though she must have known that defeat was certain.

What then remains of Rosa Luxemburg? Strange to say, that which she least expected: a myth—that of the woman who embodied all the faith and hope of the old pre-1914 revolutionary Socialism, and who paid for it with her life. And something else: a kind of moral heroism. No one who reads her works or studies her career can fail to see that Rosa Luxemburg was above all a moralist. Though tone-deaf in philosophy (she seems never to have understood what the argument over Kantian ethics was about) she was totally serious, and totally committed, where political morality was concerned. For her, every political question had to be argued in ethical terms, though she would have been surprised to hear it said: was not Socialist humanism the most obvious thing in the world? Her moral rigorism on matters such as war, colonial exploitation, or the denial of freedom to opponents, lifted her beyond the confines of reformist opportunism and Bolshevist cynicism alike, into a region where she outdistanced her contemporaries. On moral issues her judgment was infallible. Just as in 1914 she saw at once that the International was dead and Social-Democracy, as she put it, "a stinking corpse," so in 1918 she coupled her reluctant acceptance of the October Revolution with an incisive critique of the Bolshevik dictatorship and the beginning of terrorism. Her posthumously published reflections on the Russian Revolution were brushed aside by Lenin. Even the exiled Trotsky refused to accept them. They have nonetheless become the testament of the old humanist Socialism which was shipwrecked in the First World War. In political terms her message was utopian, for a revolution which respects the liberty of all is the hardest thing in the world to achieve and perhaps impossible, unless backed from the start by the vast majority of the people. But then a truly democratic revolution was the only kind she had ever wanted. Minority dictatorship and terrorism did not appeal to her. What she stood for was lost in the bloodbath of 1914-1918, which in turn prepared the ground for the ultimate horrors of Stalinism and Fascism: both equally repugnant to the spirit of the woman over whose tormented body victors and vanquished in the first round of Europe's civil war marched into their inheritance.