Rosa Luxemburg

Born in Zamość, in what was then Russian-ruled Poland, Rosa Luxemburg became one of the most influential socialist writers and activists in Europe. As a young woman involved in underground politics, she left for Zürich, where she studied and earned a doctorate, before building her public life mainly in Germany.

Luxemburg was a major Marxist theorist as well as a gifted speaker and journalist. She helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, became a leading figure on the left wing of German social democracy, and wrote important works including Reform or Revolution, The Mass Strike, and The Accumulation of Capital. Her writing combined economic analysis with a deep concern for democracy and popular participation.

During World War I, she became a powerful anti-war voice, co-founding the Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht after opposing Germany’s war policy. In the turbulent aftermath of the war, she was among the founders of the Communist Party of Germany. She was murdered in Berlin on January 15, 1919, at the age of 47, but her letters, essays, and political writings have kept her voice alive far beyond her own time.