The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Though social media can irritate me at times, one of the benefits I find with its use is the conversations it can inspire about books.

A few weeks ago, someone was asking about Rosa Luxemburg on a friend's site. Since I had written about Luxemburg in the past, I started thinking about her again and last week I picked up a copy of her letters put out by Verso Books.

The book is very interesting. There is some that's dull (the ins and outs of the various communist and socialist parties of Germany, France, Poland, Russia, etc.) but Luxemburg was such a humanist and her sympathies are so often with the working people she sees around her. She's an intellectual, no doubt, but it comes from a place of passion. The letters span European centres of influence: from Paris to Zurich, from Berlin to rural Poland, from Russia to Italy. Luxemburg truly was a vagabond...

It's easy to forget with hindsight and nearly 100 years of (corrupted) Communism, but Luxemburg simply wanted better lives for the mass of humanity that suffered terribly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her collection of letters is one of those books that I keep next to bed and I read a few letters each night. She is such a good writer. When she's not pontificating on social class in Europe pre-WWI, she's focusing on nature and the birds she hears in her garden or the flowers that bloom in her window-sill.

Sometimes...it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than -- at one of our party congresses. I can say that to you, for you will not promptly suspect me of treason to socialism! You know that I really hope to die at my post, in a street fight or in prison...I seek refuge and find repose in nature. 

She's rather forgotten today though I think I came to her work via a German artist who I love, Käthe

The Funeral of Karl Liebknecht by Käthe Kollwitz

Kollwitz. Kollwitz, a committed social activist herself, was a close friend of Karl Liebknecht, who was a close friend of Luxemburg's (and many letters in this collection are addressed to him). When Liebknecht (and Luxemburg) was kidnapped and murdered, Kollwitz dedicated much of her work to commemorating him and the causes he stood for.

Luxemburg, kidnapped, shot in the head and dumped into a canal in Berlin, fell out of fashion after her death at age 47. Hated by both Communists and capitalists, her political writings have mostly been untranslated (she wrote in Polish, German, and Russian) and this letter collection contains many letters translated for the first time. What I appreciate most about Luxemburg is her voice, the vast knowledge she had on so many topics. I love, too, the window her letters allow us into a 19th century woman as she went about her life, falling in love, battling with various editors and political agitators, suffering in prison, writing about nature, politics, love, and history. Also, despite the historical period, so much of her concerns, so much of what is happening politically mirrors our own concerns and politics today. From prison in 1917:

How I deplore the loss of all these months and years in which we might have had so many joyful hours together, notwithstanding all the horrors that are going on throughout the world. Do you know, the longer it lasts, and the more the infamy and monstrosity of the daily happenings surpasses all bounds, the more tranquil and more confident becomes my personal outlook...these are the only possible lines along which history can move, and we must follow the movement without losing sight of the main trend. I have the feeling that the moral filth through which we are wading, this huge madhouse in which we live, may all of a sudden, between one day and the next, be transformed into its very opposite, may become something stupendously great and heroic.

Reading reading reading

I'm going a bit overboard with all the books I am reading lately. It's only normal, I guess. From January until the Festival, I just can't read for fun any more and because it's so quiet after the Festival and all summer, I want to cram as much reading in as I can so it gets a bit much. Since the Festival ended, I've been reading:

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki:    Almost done with this one and it's been a pleasant read. I don't know why but for reading that has nothing to do with work, I usually turn to historical Japanese fiction. It feels far away and exotic and allows me to reflect on it with absolutely no Festival angle to it...

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader:   Last fall I became very interested in Rosa Luxemburg, both in terms of her political writings but also her role in 20th century history. Käthe Kollwitz, though she doesn't mention Luxemburg directly, was very interested in the career of Luxemburg and in her assassination (though most of her images of it relate to Luxemburg's murdered associate, Karl Liebnecht). My entire adult life I have been interested in the historical role that early Communism played in forcing capitalism to change. And Luxemburg's ideas about Communism have been distorted and disrupted by just about all sides (by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, by the Vietnamese, by the Americans, the Germans, the British) without much attention paid to her actual writings. She was very much a champion of democracy and her feelings about Communism were free of all the historical baggage we now associate with the term. It's not a page-turner, but the book has been a great escape and enlightening.

Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg  I stumbled across this book in a very diffuse and chaotic way: I was watching the film Flame and Citron about the Danish Resistance during WWII and reading about one of its stars, the Danish actor Thure Lindhart who also starred in Keep the Lights On, written by Ira Sachs and based on his relationship with Bill Clegg. I usually hate these kind of confessional memoirs and the book will likely be forgotten once I put it down but it's entertaining and gives insight into a point of view I know little about (that of an addict). Sure makes my life seem dull, that's for sure...and it's very well-written.

The House of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez: This is one of the more obscure books on my latest list
but it's been very interesting. All about how literature has the power to influence, lift us up, or even kill us. Set in London, Argentina and Uruguay, this is my Saturday afternoon reading in the park book.

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata: I've just started into this one though I am big fan of Kawabata and his writings always entertain me. There is a minimalist quality to his writing, a simplicity that is engaging and lovely and his works stay with me for weeks after I finish them: Snow Country, The Master of Go, A Thousand Cranes, all works that I have read at some point and that I still remember happily where I was when I read them.

Once I get through this batch, I refuse to read so many books at the same time again. But let me tell you, it's so nice to just read for fun again!

On Käthe Kollwitz

"Like most of the socially conscious artists of her time, she lived in a world of conflicting social patterns and of individual reactions to them. The ethic of her social conscience was a personal evaluation of right and wrong and not a tactic of organized mass movements, it was social justice and not the economic interpretation of history."  - Carl Zigrosser from the Introduction to Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz.

The Weavers' Revolt (1893-98