Three-Way Street : Jews, Germans, and the Transnational

Leslie Morris, Jay Howard Geller

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780472902576

As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany. Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Part 1

To Germany, from Germany: The Promise of an Unpromised Land?

Chapter 1

Love, Money, and Career in the Life of Rosa Luxemburg

Deborah Hertz

Rosa Luxemburg between Peoples and Nations

The legacy of Rosa Luxemburg is very much alive in our time, almost a century after her murder in 1919, during the German Revolution after World War I. Rosa Luxemburg was a well-known socialist intellectual, active in Polish and German affairs, whose personality has achieved cult status. Indeed, few of her admirers today are likely to entirely comprehend or endorse the political stance for which she gave her life. To account for her posthumous fame we can point to her dramatic life and tragic end, as well as to her notable intellectual achievements. Her dissertation, The Industrial Development of Poland, originally published in 1897 in Leipzig, remains a classic text in several languages.1 Her second major book, Reform or Revolution, summarized her polemic against the gradualist politics that were becoming the dominant stance of the German socialist party. Another notable contribution was her book The Mass Strike, which articulated her syndicalist strategy, so different from the elitist path to power of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1918.2

Whereas other female radicals of her day, such as Anna Kuliscioff, Gesia Gelfman, or Clara Zetkin, are known mainly to specialists, Luxemburg is celebrated around the world in many genres. Her admirers have named web sites, stamps, salons, foundations, schools, street signs, and even a subway station in her memory. A play by Armand Gatti called The Rosa Collective was performed in Germany in 1970, and a feature film by Margarethe von Trotta, Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, was released in 1986. In France, a rock music group is named for her; a musical about her life was recently performed; and a large painting by Jean-Paul Riopelle from 1992 is entitled L’hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. Two new novels, one in German and one in English, are based on her life.3

Then too she is publicly memorialized every January 15, the anniversary of her murder, at the spot on the Landwehr Canal where her corpse was thrown that night.4 Another commemoration of her murder takes place at her grave at the Friedrichsfeldt Central Cemetery in Berlin, where she was buried after having been dragged from the canal. Alas, we actually cannot be sure that the corpse that was buried in her casket was the authentic Rosa Luxemburg. A forensic firestorm erupted in 2009 after experts discovered a cadaver in the basement of the Charité Hospital in Berlin that they claimed was the correct skeleton.5

Scholars, too, are keeping her legacy alive. In 1990, a fourteen-volume edition of her books and articles appeared in German, and an English-language translation of that edition is currently in preparation. To grasp how her various intimate relationships influenced her public career, letters are a crucial primary source, and a one-volume selection of letters has recently been released in English.6 In the last decade alone, three new biographies have been published in Germany, and numerous editions of her essays continue to be published and republished in various languages.7

In order to understand why she chose to make her career in the leading left party in Europe, the SPD, the German Social Democrats, we must dig beneath the vague labels of internationalist and cosmopolitan so often used by Luxemburg herself and by her admirers in posterity. Like so many other intellectuals then and there, her command of languages and cultures meant she could choose from a crowded field of possible identities, each with its own politics. So many values, ideals, family relationships, and social aspirations could influence the political choices of a particular individual. Rosa Luxemburg was born into a modern, reasonably prosperous Jewish family, so assimilated that they spoke Polish at home.8 In her elite high school in Warsaw she learned Russian, necessary since Poland then belonged to the Russian empire. Her favorite authors and composers tended to be German, and all of her adult years were spent in German-speaking milieus, in Zurich and Berlin. Lurking behind her public Polish, Russian, and German identities was her Jewish heritage, a burden for her at the time. In this essay, we explore what a recent observer calls Luxemburg’s “fanatic anti-nationalism.”9 The consequence, so goes the argument, is that “the unnatural living that began with her vague wish not to be a Jew inevitably led to secretiveness.” Her behavior was “Chameleon-like,” and “admired by some, condemned by others, and undetected by most.”10

For so many reasons, Luxemburg deserves her posthumous fame around the world. But being an icon today does not presume that she was totally unique in her own lifetime. Here we challenge the pat notion recently put forward, that “Rosa Luxemburg was always an anomaly.”11 To be sure, she certainly did take a different path, as compared to the vast majority of her Jewish female peers in Russia then, who tended to remain loyal to faith and family. But memoirs and statistics teach us that she was, nevertheless, typical of a strong trend among Jewish teen girls, who fled their Jewish families and hometowns beginning in the 1870s. The runaway “Hebrew maidens” who caused so much dismay to their families may well have been inspired by the extraordinary martyrdom of the most dedicated Christian women activists of the day.12 These were years when female activists in Russia were notorious and much-discussed.13 The rebel girls, who were often born to extremely privileged noble families, often became midwives, teachers, nurses, journalists, translators, and full-time activists. Back in the 1870s in Russia, an intense commitment to the cause required constant travel, false identities, and very high-risk actions. Trust between activists was crucial. Radicals sometimes lived communally, and romances were rarely formalized in conventional marriages.

In this setting, their political ideology was still vaguely anarchist or socialist, without much attention to how these labels differed. The most divisive issue was whether assassination of leading Czarist officials, including the Czar himself, would stimulate widespread social rebellion.14 Except a tiny handful of early Jewish socialists, Jewish activists rarely attended to the social distress of their own people. It would take another generation, until the late nineties, for Zionism and Yiddish socialism to rival the mainstream left movements. The point is that as a teen activist in Warsaw, Luxemburg was not as anomalous as she became later.

It was only after she moved to Berlin, when she was twenty-eight, that Rosa Luxemburg’s speeches, her journalism, her books, and her party leadership roles made her much more idiosyncratic. In that highly argumentative milieu, success required the skills to debate theories, tactics, and strategies. By this time, German socialists had rejected the emancipated romances of the 1870s Russian activists or even of their own leaders from the previous epoch, such as the free-spirited bohemian Ferdinand Lassalle. The leading figures in the Social Democratic Party were expected to marry and lead calm domestic lives. Moreover, unlike the previous era in the radical movement, leadership now required more than fervor and the passion for martyrdom. In 1898, few women had the education, the discipline, and the ambition to achieve authentic political leadership in a major national party. In the pages to come we shall learn that the many branches of the women’s movement also offered a platform for political engagement, but Luxemburg was not attracted to the organized feminist cause.

Previous biographers and historians have familiarized us with how her intellect, her training, her passionate convictions, and her network of mentors all contributed to her very successful career in the SPD. In this essay, we learn that the large fortune of her lover and political partner, Leo Jogiches, also was crucial in Luxemburg’s political success. Love, money, and career were connected to each other for her, in immensely complex ways. Precisely for this reason, Luxemburg’s personal life is of burning interest to contemporary women, who can easily empathize with her dilemmas about how to reconcile love, domesticity, intellectual accomplishment, and political activism.

Leo Jogiches’s money played a complex role in their tempestuous love affair from the very beginning.15 From the time they first met in 1890, until their relationship went seriously awry in 1905, Luxemburg and Jogiches were a committed couple, but their relationship was kept a secret from both family and many of her political comrades. Sometimes Luxemburg pretended to be married to Jogiches, and in other situations she pretended to be single. That she felt compelled to adjust her public image in order to further her political career tells us much about the sexual codes of German socialism in her day. In order to understand how her ethnic identity informed her political choices, and to judge whether and how she was unique, we revisit two junctures in Luxemburg’s life. We first explore her life at the age of eighteen, when she left Warsaw to study in Zurich. Our second episode took place a decade later, when she had earned her doctorate, and at twenty-eight moved alone to Berlin. We now enter her life in 1889, when she departed Warsaw for Zurich, soon to meet her life companion and stormy lover, the Vilna radical Leo Jogiches.

Departing Warsaw in 1889

When Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870, she was the fifth and adored child of her family, who hailed from Zamosc, a town in the southeast corner of historic Poland. Her father was a timber merchant, and her mother, descended from a long line of rabbis, was well-educated for a woman of the time. When Luxemburg was three, the family moved to Warsaw. It was in these years that she was improperly treated for a congenital hip dislocation, and she limped for the rest of her life. At ten, Luxemburg was accepted into the very prestigious Second Russian Gymnasium for Girls. Beginning in the 1850s, when the first all-girls elite secondary schools, called gymnasia, were founded, girls from well-to-do families were able to obtain a rigorous training that might qualify them to work as teachers or governesses, or study for a doctorate at a Swiss university or train to be physicians.16

While in high school, Rosa Luxemburg joined an underground program of study groups called the Fliegende Universität (the flying university), taught by professors sympathetic to the radical cause.17 She was also active in the Second Proletariat circle, who were inspired by the propaganda of the deed politics of the Russian organization the People’s Will. By the time that Luxemburg joined the Second Proletariat in the middle years of the 1880s, terrorist tactics were being vigorously debated among radicals across Europe. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II a few years before, in 1881, which definitely did not precipitate a general uprising, support for terrorist tactics had begun to wane. It was in the early 1880s that Marxist perspectives were becoming more popular among Russian activists. Several former supporters of terrorism changed their views and formed the Emancipation of Labor circle in Geneva. They argued that organizing urban workers was a bett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: To Germany, from Germany: The Promise of an Unpromised Land?
• Part 2: Germany, the Portable Homeland
• Part 3: A Masterable Past? German-Jewish Transnationalism in a Post-Holocaust Era
• Contributors
• Index