A red, red Rosa (not to mention green and pink)

Shulamit Aloni has a good recollection of the first book she purchased. In 1942, when she was 14, she used her pocket money to buy a biography of controversial German-Jewish Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg that had recently been translated into Hebrew, and she later also bought Luxemburg's "Letters From Prison," which was published that year.

"Since then, she has been the woman I most admire," says Aloni, a former Meretz chairwoman and education minister. "I was a student at the Ben Shemen Youth Village and a member of [left-wing Zionist youth movement] Hashomer Hatzair, and already I was a polemicist. After reading the biography and the letters, Luxemburg's courage to resist and her unique personality captivated me. Alongside scientist Marie Curie, she was the heroine of my youth, a humane model of a fighter faithful to her opinions and to universal social justice, who was concerned for the downtrodden and the unfortunate wherever they are." As the Israeli left wing diminished in strength, the availability of Luxemburg's writings in Israel dropped off. Aloni even lost her copy of "Letters From Prison," a collection of 22 letters written by the Jewish revolutionary between 1916 and 1918, while she was imprisoned in Germany because of her opposition to World War I, which she predicted would lead to "a crisis as never before in history." The letters were sent to her good friend Sophie Liebknecht, the wife of Karl Liebknecht, who was one of the outstanding leaders of the German left and Luxemburg's ideological partner, with whom she helped found the Spartacus League, whose goal was to bring about a Communist revolution in Germany.

But now the Sifriat Hapoalim publishing house is dusting off the book and reissuing it, in the same 1942 Hebrew translation from the German - by poet Lea Goldberg - that Aloni first encountered. The reissue was initiated by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is identified with the new German Left Party. The foundation is dedicating its Israeli headquarters this week. In honor of the inception of its activity in Israel and the publishing of the letters, the foundation will hold a conference tomorrow in Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv to discuss Luxemburg's heritage and her relevance to the contemporary Israeli and German left. Ninety years after her assassination, and now of all times - when the Israeli left has been defeated and humiliated at the polls - politicians and intellectuals from both countries will try to reveal new dimensions of Luxemburg, widely known as Red Rosa. Lectures at the free conference, which will take place between 9 A.M. and 5:30 P.M., will be given in Hebrew and German, with simultaneous translation.

Opening shot

Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were released from prison after World War I, and both were murdered in Berlin about two months later. They were killed on January 15, 1919, by soldiers from Germany's Freikorps when the right-wing militia was putting down a workers uprising. The murder, to which the Social Democratic government turned a blind eye, was the opening shot in a long chain of political assassinations that rocked Germany in the first years of the Weimar Republic. Luxemburg's body was tossed into one of the canals in Berlin and found only five months later.

The reissuing of the book includes a foreword by Aloni, in which she discusses the significance of the letters, which she says is not limited Luxemburg's political views or the fact that she was assassinated.

"She was a woman of culture, an educated and sensitive woman, with the soul of a poet," says Aloni. "Her letters are full of poetry, they are a paean to the beauty of blossoming and birdsong, and they are full of longing for her friends, along with acceptance of her fate and her pain."

A cultured revolution

On the bank of the Landwehr Canal in Berlin's Tiergarten Park, where Luxemburg's body was discovered, there is a modest memorial to her: a massive cast-iron plate dropped diagonally into the water, on which the name of Rosa Luxemburg appears in raised capital letters that look as though they are emerging from the water.

The memorial is fitting, in that Luxemburg always swam against the stream. She was born on March 5, 1871, to an educated Jewish family in the Polish city of Zamosc (which was then under Russian control) and educated in Warsaw. She was active in revolutionary movements in Poland in her youth, then moved to Switzerland because of her fear of the authorities. She studied political science and law at the University of Zurich (the first university in Europe to accept women), from which she received her doctorate.

For about two decades, from 1897 until her assassination, Luxemburg was active in Germany and in the Socialist International, and was an outstanding and controversial Marxist leader and theoretician. She fought not only against the ultra-nationalist waves, the bourgeois attitudes and the capitalist bubbles, but against her left-wing colleagues as well; she sharply criticized the Social Democrats, especially when they were overcome by a spirit of patriotism and supported the war, and she also opposed her fellow Marxists. Unlike many of them, she rejected violent action, favored general strikes as the main weapon of the class war and believed that "a revolution can also take on a cultural form" without bloodshed.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, while she was still in prison, Luxemburg wrote "The Russian Revolution," in which she attacked the dictatorship being shaped by Lenin. "Good organization does not precede action, but is the product of it," she wrote. "The organization of revolutionary action can and must be learnt in revolution itself, as one can only learn swimming in the water."

MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) maintains that Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks is of tremendous importance, citing her interest in showing that democracy and socialism should go hand in hand.

"She was the first in the revolutionary leftist camp to put her finger on what in the end led to Stalinism, and she opposed the erroneous idea that socialism is possible without democracy, that it is possible to separate socialism and political democracy," he said. "In her criticism of Lenin's first steps in the government she identified early on what was to become the main reason for the failure of socialism in the 20th century. As opposed to Bolshevism, she wanted to expand democratization beyond politics and to implement it in the areas of economics and society as well, in a belief, which is relevant to our times as well, that among the masses there is a far greater revolutionary potential than what would seem at a superficial glance."

In Khenin's opinion, one of the main lessons to be learned from Luxemburg's legacy, which is also significant in the contemporary Israeli context, is "her ability to counter the tendency to be carried away by ultra-nationalism, to withstand majority opinion and to courageously oppose war."

"Luxemburg understood that war is not a 'work accident' within the system of imperialist capitalism, but is one of its means of expression," said Khenin. "War is another way for capitalism to deal with the contradictions that characterize it, a way to provide for its need to find external markets."

A garden in prison

"Letters from Prison" conveys the impression that Red Rosa was also quite fond of nature and animals. She kept a garden in prison, was pained by the abuse of animals, missed her beloved cat Mimi, saved an injured butterfly that landed on her window, and even writes that she feels more at home in nature than at party conventions.

"In Luxemburg there was a connection between 'red' and 'green' in two dimensions," says Khenin. "First, on the experiential and emotional level, she felt close to birds, to flowers and to animals, and felt that without all this nature, man's life is very incomplete. And second, on the theoretical level, she analyzed the mechanisms of the expansion of capitalism from an ecological perspective as well. Like Marx before her, she understood that the mechanisms of the growth of capitalism do not take into account the capacity of the environment, and are liable to destroy it."

When the New Left becomes obsolete

Luxemburg was not alone in her social struggle, and many other Jews in her time were also attracted to revolutionary ideas and movements, and drew others into them as well. Nevertheless, as philosopher Hannah Arendt writes in her 1968 book "Men in Dark Times," in a reference to Luxemburg's activity in the German Social-Democratic Party: "She was an outsider, not only because she was and remained a Polish Jew in a country she disliked and a party she came soon to despise, but also because she was a woman."

Luxemburg, who considered women's liberation part of the problem of the overall liberation of the proletariat, became an object of admiration among liberal feminists. Her feminist side is evident not only in her philosophy, but in her personal life as well. She married only for the sake of convenience, and did not live with her husband or have children; she also had romantic relationships with quite a number of men. Even the fact that she was politically successful in spite of the physical defect from which she suffered (because of a childhood illness, she limped), is sometimes seen as a reflection of her feminine daring. In the book of letters, the feminine aspect is reflected primarily in Luxemburg's untiring encouragement of Sophie Liebknecht.

However, Arendt warns of the danger of turning Luxemburg into a romantic legend that can be recalled with a nostalgia that lacks any real political bite. Arendt says "every New Left movement, when its moment came to change into the Old Left - usually when its members reached the age of 40 - promptly buried its early enthusiasm for Luxemburg together with the dreams of youth."

Arendt's aged-based distinction sounds somewhat amusing in the Israeli context, considering that almost all the speakers at the Luxemburg conference slated for tomorrow have long since overcome the crisis of turning 40. Along with Aloni and Khenin, other speakers will include former minister Yair Zaban; former MK Tamar Gozansky; Barbara Swirski, director of the Adva Center for policy analysis; literature scholar Natascha Gordinsky; and historians Gadi Algazi, Moshe Zimmermann and Moshe Zuckerman. On the German side, participants will include Harald Kinderman, the German ambassador to Israel, and Petra Pau, vice president of the Bundestag on behalf of the Left Party.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation began operating in Israel at the same time that it opened an office in Ramallah. Dr. Angelika Timm, director of the Israeli office, explains that its activity in the region reflects German left-wing recognition that it, like all of Germany, bears a historical responsibility for Israel. "The foundation supports civic projects, such as educational initiatives for peace and humanism, the empowerment of women and assistance to weakened populations, and tries to promote mutual understanding between Israeli and German society," she said.

Timm, who used to be an East German citizen, remembers that in the late 1980s people began to express veiled criticism of the Communist regime in the country with posters inscribed with one of Luxemburg's most famous sayings: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." This statement is now engraved at the entrance to the foundation's offices in the heart of Tel Aviv in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and German.

Rose-tinted cloud

In a letter from July 20, 1917, which is included in the book, Luxemburg tells of "a glorious sight" she saw one evening through the window of her prison cell: "When I was lying on the sofa I noticed a pink glow reflected from the window, which surprised me, for the sky was overcast. On the background of the monotonously gray sky there towered in the east a huge cloud of an amazingly beautiful rose colour; it was so detached from its surroundings that it looked like a smile, like a greeting from afar. I drank deep draughts of this rosy radiance."

In light of the fact that in the original text Luxemburg uses the word "rose," some people may try to interpret her words not only as a description of the sky, but also as a self-portrait. In the letter, written about a year and a half before her death, Luxemburg writes that the glorious sight she saw in the sky caused her to breathe easy, to spread out her arms in front of her window and to become strengthened in her faith: "Surely when there are such colours and such forms, life is lovely, life is worth living?"