While this blog still does not seek to become a century ago today in retrospective blog, as we're still tracking stories important to the our overall theme, and the end of World War One and the events flowing from it are part of that story, here we have one.
And it's one that jam packed with myths that are probably so thick that disabusing them is impossible. The story of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacus Rebellion in Germany of 1919, which was coming to a head, by which we mean a bloody end.
Rosa Luxemburg, who is almost 100% incorrectly remembered by history.
With Germany in revolution and the Socialist government struggling to simultaneously put it down and to deal with the collapse of the state that had made the armistice with the Allies necessary, Rosa Luxemburg, misunderstood member of the German Spartacus League and one of its founders, urged the the consolidation of all of the non Social Democratic German radical Socialist parties into a new party to be called the Communist Party of Germany, somewhat ignoring the fact that there was already a radical left wing German party called the Communist Party which was a participant at the conference at which she was making the proposal.
Luxemburg, who will reappear here in a few days, is a quixotic figure. She had long been a left wing figure in Europe and is romanticized today by the Communists pretty much for the same reason that movie fans romanticize James Dean. . . she died prior to her career really getting started and therefore can be all things to all people.
Luxemburg was a Polish Jew by ethnicity and a citizen of the Russian Empire by birth. She'd grown up, before going to university in Switzerland, in Russian Poland and was the daughter of a father who was interested in liberal causes and a mother who was very religious. She had no familial or perosnal history with Germany whatsoever but rather chose Germany as a place in which she wished to live sometime after obtaining a doctorate, very unusual for a woman at the time, in Switzerland. She had obtained permission to live in Imperial Germany only by contracting a fraudulent marriage with Gustav Lubeck, the son of a long time friend, in order to circumvent German laws and she became a permanent resident of Germany sometime in the early 1900s.
In Germany she was a member, originally, of the Social Democratic Party which prior to World War One housed all of the left of center German political class and which was secure in its radiclalism by the fact that it didn't have a real chance to exercise power. Probably not ironically, however, as she was a Pole, not a German, she was influential in that time in the formation of the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democratic Party.
Prior to World War One it can be argued that her politics evolved. She was a radical in her socialistic views but ran counter to almost all of those who would later lionize her. She was an opponent of Polish nationalism as she did not believe in Polish (or any) self determination, a policy that would run counter to Lenin's stated beliefs but which did fit conventional communist beliefs. She was also, however, dedicated to social democracy and serious about not suppressing the votes of non socialist parties. She came to be an open critic of Lenin and of the German Social Democratic Party. By this point in time she was really a member of the Independent Social Democrats which were part of the first post war German coalition for a time until they pulled out due to their radical beliefs. She opposed the Spartacus uprising in 1919 but naively supported none the less. On this day, she proposed that the various parties of the left that were in the Spartacus League unite as the Communist Party of Germany, in spite of their already being a German communist party, and in spite of the fact that her views really did not match well with those that genuine communist held.
Her role would not go well for her.
Locally, while Germany was aflame, there was going to be "Zero Weather" in Cheyenne, which didn't mean what it sounded like. The Goshen County Sheriff was being held in connection with a killing and Congress was working on a bill for anticipated homesteading discharged soldiers.
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