Remembering Rosa / Erinnerung an Rosa

Every time I leave my house I pass the next street, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße.

Until now I hadn’t given it much thought, but today is exactly 150 since her birth, and I noted an online symposium which started educating me about this remarkable woman.

The event describes her as “a towering figure of the classical movement - a brilliant thinker, sharp-tongued rhetorician, and trailblazing leader of the proletarian cause”.

It goes on to note that “She was, by all accounts, a truly unique figure. A Jew, a Polish woman, physically disabled and politically an irreconcilable Marxist - the obstacles to her pursuing her aims in life were legion, yet she rose to become one of the paramount leaders of the largest and strongest socialist movement in the Western world, German Social Democracy”.