SI’ve been to the grave of Rosa Luxemburg, at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Berlinto shoot the episode of A special day on Spartacus. The Socialists Memorial is located here. Rosa was an extraordinary woman. Polish, Jewish, the youngest of five children, she will limp her whole life due to a hip disease aggravated by an unsuccessful operation, but this will not take away her strength.
In a world where women have little space, she will be a philosopher, economist, journalist, revolutionary socialist. She is against both the reformists, who she believes are too timid, and Lenin, who she considers an aspiring dictator.
In 1916, together with Karl Liebknecht, he took up the myth of Spartacus, the slave who rebelled against the Romans, and founded the Spartacist League in his honor.a revolutionary movement fighting against the First World War.
Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
In the war, Germany was defeated and sank: the Germans found themselves crushed by hunger, unemployment, low wages. Rosa Luxemburg fuels strikes, factory occupations, demonstrations. The dream of the League of Spartacus is a socialist republic where power belongs to those who work.
Rosa Luxemburg at the 2nd International (Socialist) Conference in Stuttgart in 1907 (photo Getty Images).
At the beginning of January 1919, social tension led to one of the largest workers’ uprisings in German history.. The Social Democratic government, frightened by the risk of a Bolshevik revolution, calls for help from the Freikorps, militias of former soldiers returning from the front. The revolt was bloodily repressed, with no fewer than 150 victims.
Karl is tortured and killed. Rosa is murdered with a gunshot and then thrown into a canal on the night of January 15, 1919. Her body was found only months later. The League of Spartacus is cancelled. But not his memory. Bertolt Brecht composed perhaps naive, certainly romantic lines: “Now the Red Rose has also disappeared / Where she is buried is unknown / Since she told the truth to the poor / The rich sent her to the afterlife”.
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All articles by Aldo Cazzullo.