Rosa Luxemburg

Consistent internationalist, distanced feminist, emancipated Jew – who was Rosa Luxemburg? Rosa Luxemburg was the most significant woman ever to have worked in the European labor movement. Born in 1871 in the Russian part of Poland, she found her political home in Germany after studying in Zurich, aided by a marriage of convenience, where she was the only woman with a doctorate at SPD party congresses. Luxemburg is regarded as the greatest Marxist thinker of her time. She fought for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but at the same time against Lenin's authoritarian centralism. Her theory of revolution, her concept of freedom, and her unwavering internationalism made her an icon of the global protests of the 1968 movement. Her famous phrase "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently" became a slogan for civil rights activists in the crumbling GDR. In 2021, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's birth, whose thoughts and ideas contain much that is still stimulating and important today, in a time of resurgent nationalism.