Rosa Luxemburg

As a woman and a Jew in late nineteenth-century Warsaw, Rosa Luxemburg experienced both misogyny and anti-Semitism. Escaping Poland, she studied politics at the University of Zürich, and became the most prominent radical Marxist of her day. While many socialists supported their national governments when war broke out in 1914, Luxemburg, true to her socialist-internationalist beliefs, denounced the fighting as war against the working classes of all countries. A brilliant writer and orator, Luxemburg sought a radical socialist revolution in Germany. She was murdered by the soldiers who arrested her in 1919, but her reputation as a brilliant political theorist survives today.

1. All of Rosa Luxemburg's works, along with a biography and several photos, are available in English at
   http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/
2. A dynamic photograph of Luxemburg's colleague Karl Leibknecht, making what turned out to be his final speech before being murdered along with Luxemburg, is available at
   http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/ju000696/
3. Imprisoned during World War I, Luxemburg was not released until November, 1918. See a photo of one of the mass rallies of the November revolution in Berlin at
   http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/ba103392/index.html