"[I]n the party things are proceeding along their disastrous course: the censorship is becoming stricter and stricter, the economic situation ever more difficult, and the official party, in particular the trade union leadership, is more and more becoming a government party. A vehement propaganda campaign is being waged "against the troublemakers,' that is, against all of us who defend the fundamental old positions and the glorious traditions of the party. ("Letter to Helene Winkler," Berlin-Sudende, February 11, 1915--2 Linden Street)
With Clara Zetkin, Feminist, and Karl Liebknecht Luxemburg formed Die Gruppe Internationale and published Die Internationale as its journal (The Luxemburg Reader). As a result of wartime censorship, issues of the Internationale journal were blocked; however, a year later, Luxemburg and Liebknacht formed the Spartacus Group and established its publication, Die Rote Fahne, (the Red Flag).
Luxemburg and Liebknacht joined the workers and, in Die Rote Fahne, Luxemburg called for the "occupation of all positions of power" after workers took to the streets demanding the overthrow of the Ebert-Scheidemann government (The Luxemburg Reader).
Occupation of all positions of power!
--Your idea that I should write a book about Tolstoy doesn't appeal to me one bit. For whom? What for, Hanschen? Everyone can read Tolstoy's books, and if the books themselves don't give off a powerful breath of life, I wouldn't succeed in doing so through literary commentary. Can anyone "explain' to someone else what Mozart's music is? Can one "explain' what is the magic of life? [What's the use] if people don't hear it for themselves, don't deduce it from the littlest everyday things, or more exactly: if they don't carry it within their own being? I also regard, for example, the monstrous amount of Goethe literature (that is, literature about Goethe) as pure trash, and it is my opinion that far too many such books have been written. What with all the literary noise, people forget to look at the world and all its beauty. ("Letter to Hans Diefenbach," Wronke, May 12, 1917).
In the same letter, Luxemburg writes of awakening in the mornings "already being greeted" by the sun. After breakfast, she plays with a crystal prism, a paperweight on her desk. She puts it in the sunlight light and watches as the sunrays scatter "over the floor and walls in hundred of little splashes of rainbow light." Mimi, her cat, enjoys the "game," especially when she moves the prism and makes "the bright colors dart here and there and dance around." Luxemburg enjoys the fields outside her door and gathers "fresh, juicy grass for Mimi."
She enjoyed art and painted: "the little picture I painted has made me so happy and put me in such good spirits that I immediately started a new painting yesterday," ("Letter to Kostya Zetkin," [Fiedenau, August 21, 1908]). Luxemburg enjoyed poetry and Mozart. She describes in a letter to N.S. Sesyulinsky, how she "submerged" herself "in Krasinski, a Polish poet" and how she was "enraptured mostly by Mozart--The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni--that is my real "faith.'"
Luxemburg did not die a martyr: she lived the life of a revolutionary!
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