She was born in to a family of bourgeois merchants in Zamosc, Poland. While still at school in Warsaw she joined the revolutionary movement. She studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. In 1898 Rosa Luxemburg became a German citizen and wrote for German journals. In 1914 she founded, together with Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacus League which opposed World War I. The Spartacists followed Marx and Engels and had revolutionary aims. Luxemburg spent most of the war in German prisons. At the end of 1918 she and Leibknecht transformed the Spartacus League into the German Communist Party. As the War ended they tried to proclaim a German Soviet Republic. A few weeks later members of the Frei Korps (alienated and workless army officers) beat her up, shot her in the head and threw her body in a canal. Her major intellectual contribution was her concept of supranationalism foretelling the disappearance of nations.

 

Bibliography

 LUXEMBURG, Rosa. The letters of Rosa Luxemburg. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Eric Bronner; with a foreword by Henry Pachter. Pp. xii, 259: ill., ports. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978

 LUXEMBURG, Rosa. The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism? New introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe. Pp. 109 [Ann Arbor]: University of Michigan Press, 1962

 LUXEMBURG, Rosa. Selected political writings of Rosa Luxemburg. Edited and introduced by Dick Howard. Pp.441. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971

LUXEMBURG, Rosa. Rosa Luxemburg speaks. Edited with an introd. by Mary-Alice Waters. Pp. 473. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970

 

Web Sites of Interest

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung