Politics of maintenance and care: Rosa Luxemburg’s commonplace urban theorizing

Abstract

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) is commonly known as a political thinker, economist, and revolutionary socialist. A person of versatile interests and skills, she was certainly a widely admired public speaker, journalist, publisher, teacher, translator, editor, and party leader, as well as an amateur botanist, an occasional painter, and – particularly in her final years – an avid birdwatcher. What also powerfully comes through in her writing (especially her letters), but has received little attention to date, is that she had the mind and pen of an urban ethnographer. In her thick, vivid accounts of urban sights and sounds, Luxemburg generously tapped into her senses and emotions, in the process revealing how affect shapes urban experiences and imaginaries. Focusing on practices and politics of maintenance and care, this paper offers an analysis of Luxemburg’s multisensory descriptions of her urban surroundings and ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now’ that Doreen Massey theorized as throwntogetherness. Taking seriously Luxemburg’s observations in and about the city recorded in her letters and botanical notebooks reveals the small acts of commonplace theorizing that in academia are still too rarely recognized for what they are.

Keywords:

• Rosa Luxemburg
• Doreen Massey
• maintenance
• care
• throwntogetherness
• urban nature
• multisensory
• Berlin
• biography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The gender dynamics are worth noting here: a male writer passionately tries to ‘rescue’ a long-dead heroine from living women writers who, instead of reading exclusively her ‘important’ publications, dare to unpack Luxemburg’s letters for clues about her life and work – a gesture he compares to a ‘soap opera treatment’ and confining her to ‘a neatly manicured flower garden’ (Finn 2021).

2 W. E. B. Du Bois lived in Berlin in 1892–94 and regularly went to SPD meetings. Had Luxemburg moved to Berlin sooner, it is likely that the two would have met. For more on Du Bois and Luxemburg, see Khachaturian 2021.

3 Most excerpts cited here come from the 2013 Verso paperback edition of Georg Shriver’s 2011 English translation of Luxemburg’s letters. I have also read the Polish and German originals and refer to them directly where relevant. For biographical detail and historical context, I have read monographs, articles, and chapters about Luxemburg’s life, including Castle 2012; Ettinger 1988; Kochański 1976; Nettl 2019; Nixon 2018; Pilawski and Politt 2020; Roland Holst 1937; Rose 2014; among others.

4 Feliks Tych was a Polish historian and editor of three volumes of Luxemburg’s letters to Jogiches (1968–71).

5 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from the Polish and German publications cited in this paper are mine.

6 Annelies Laschitza was a German historian and editor of Rosa Luxemburg’s collected works in German.

7 The family name has been variously spelled over the centuries, depending on the time, place, and person: Luksenburg, Luxenburg, Luxemburg, or Luksemburg (see Pilawski and Politt 2020, 12–14).

8 She also inadvertently replicated some gendered notions of sound in her description of the leakage of unintelligible cries of women prisoners into public space (see Carson 1992).

9 In a 1905 letter to her partner Leon Jogiches, she wrote about the arrival of a new maid named Donna: ‘Sunday was the first day I could ‘train’ her how to clean and tidy up one room after another, then how to do the cooking, then how to set the table, then how to wash the dishes, then making coffee, then the evening meal, then getting the bed ready for the night’ (2013, 197). Luxemburg’s party friends shared maid recommendations with her, and the maids in turn gossiped among themselves about their employers (see Luxemburg 1968a, 1968b).

10 Although most Luxemburg biographers writing in English refer to her long-term life partner (1890–1906) Jogiches as her lover, she herself addressed him as her husband (mąż in Polish). The two never married, but Luxemburg’s letters reveal that she deeply desired (and repeatedly asked him) to formalize their relationship and wished for a proper wedding at which their families could meet (see Luxemburg 1968b).

11 On 15 January 1919, three days after the deadly end of the Spartakusaufstand (a week-long uprising in Berlin supported by the newly founded Communist Party of Germany), Luxemburg was captured by a far-right paramilitary unit, brutally beaten, and shot in the head. Her body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal.

12 Over the years, alongside her activism, she developed friendships not only with the top SPD figures, but also, more significantly, with their wives, including Luise Kautsky and Sophie Liebknecht, whose work for the movement was often overshadowed by their more famous husbands named Karl. Luxemburg also found a lifelong ally and friend in the women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin, who visited the capital occasionally from Stuttgart, and cherished friendships with fellow Berliners Mathilde Jacob and Mathilde Wurm.

13 Luxemburg remained close with Luise and her children even after falling out with Karl in 1910 over his increasingly reformist politics.

14 Luxemburg ‘made the heroic decision’ not to bring Mimi to prison with her: ‘the little creature is accustomed to cheerfulness and liveliness, she likes it when I sing and laugh, and play tag with her all over the house, she would definitely get down in the dumps here’ (2013, 414). Luxemburg left the cat with a dear friend in Berlin.

15 The originals are stored at the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw. They were published in book form by Berlin’s Karl Dietz Verlag in 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Volkswagen Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Agata Lisiak

Agata Lisiak is Migration Studies professor at Bard College Berlin. Email: [email protected]