complicit in it, would serve on the Nazi People's Court (Ettinger, 1986, pp. 245-51).
Although Rosa Luxembourg's officially sanctioned murder was a harbinger of the rise of the Nazi Right, her significance as a historical figure has always attached to the Marxist Left. In life, she had been a leader of that tendency within the German and international Marxist movement that sought revolutionary rather than reformist socialism. Her death came in the aftermath of the failed "November Revolution" of German Communists following the collapse of the Kaiser's government in November, 1918 (Looker, 1974, pp. 11-12). In death, she became an official heroine and martyr of the international Communist movement. Her differences with Lenin could be conveniently forgotten, and as a martyr there was no danger of further differences.
In evaluating the career and fate of any martyr to a cause, the question always arises as to whether the martyr was more important in life or in death. In the case of Rosa Luxembourg, then, the question is, was she of greater significance as a Marxist theoretician and political agitator in prewar and wartime Germany, or as a martyr to the international Communist cause. If she had not been killed outside the Hotel Eden and thrown into the Landwehr Canal, would she still have been a figure of major importance, or is it only her death that elevated her life and gave it symbolic weight. That is the question which the remainder of this discussion will seek to answer.
In order to place her public life and work into context, it is necessary to say something about her background. Like many proletarian revolutionaries of her generation she was of bourgeois background, born in 1871 to an educated and relatively prosperous Polish Jewish family. At that time, Poland existed as a cultural entity but not as a political one; its independence had been extinguished in the eighteenth century, and its territory had been ...