Rosa Luxemburg: An Intimate Portrait

by Mathilde Jacob, David Fernbauch (Introduction), Hans Fernbauch (Translator)

Rosa Luxemburg holds an enduring fascination as a radical socialist committed to democratic values, and a woman whose charismatic personality and impassioned speeches inspired her followerswithout resort to bureaucratic organisation. Her assistant and friend Mathilde Jacob was Rosa Luxemburg's mainstay during her years of imprisonment in the First World War. 'My dearest Mathilde' provided material and emotional support, organised Rosa Luxemburg's clandestine communication with the outside world, and herself played a key role in the illegal work of the Spartacus group. When revolution broke out in Germany in 1918, she sought unsuccessfully to protect Rosa Luxemburg in the tragic events that led to her death. Mathilde Jacob's memoir, written as testimony of 'love for a person and for a cause', and sent abroad for safe-keeping when she fell victim to the Nazis, was unknown to Rosa Luxemburg's early biographers and has only recently been published in Germany. It paints a vivid portrait both of Rosa Luxemburg herself, and of the group of friends - Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi - that with her made up the Spartacus leadership. This translation is by Hans Fernbach, who knew Mathilde Jacob as a family friend in Berlin; it is introduced by David Fernbach, whose publications include, as editor, the Pelican edition of Karl Marx's Political Writings.

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mathilde Jacob was the secretary and friend of Rosa Luxemburg — when Luxemburg was in prison during World War I, Jacob was the essential link to the outside world, smuggling in news and smuggling out articles. She wrote down her recollections of Rosa Luxemburg and her friends during war and revolution in the 1930s. She couldn't publish them, but she was able to smuggle them out of Germany, along with Luxemburg's papers, in 1939, before she was murdered by the Nazis.

This important historical document remained at the Hoover Institution in California. It was only published by a West Berlin historical journal in 1988. David Fernbach (whose grandfather Wolfgang Fernbach and father Heinz Fernbach knew Jacob) translated the report into English and published it in 2000 as "Rosa Luxemburg: An Intimate Portrait." I read the German original, supplemented by the introduction and the appendix of the English edition.

The character who really comes to life here is Luxemburg's lifelong co-conspirator Leo Jogiches: he never wrote anything, but he led the revolutionary underground in Germany. He lived in Neukölln, where we are trying to get a plaque put up for him.

I had read a number of books based on this document, so there weren't a lot of surprises, but it was still an excellent look at Rosa Luxemburg as a person with all her contradictions. Since the English translation is easily available, while the German original can only be found in university libraries, I am going to try to digitize this and put it online.

[Chris]

An intimate portrait of Rosa Luxemburg sharing her tender emotions and interests with her closest companions,
The turbulent politics of the time are present in every moment of this book.
It is a vital historical document, presenting new perspectives and pointing to other resources.
I found the revolutionary rhetoric to be timeless (and,still, ineffective). Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches, and others railed against the militarism of the ruling parties that led to the catastrophe of the World War, but the ruling parties still had their support from the masses, or from the majority of the masses. There was something missing from the revolution that couldn’t sway support from those who held power.
The harassment of the radicals seems like a false flag, serving to bolster the radicals’ ideas of their own influence over the masses, while limiting their true effectiveness.
Something in the generalities of the descriptions of oppressive bourgeois rule here sound like the writings I see in contemporary “leftist” publications like Jacobin. These tracts write to ideals and ignore the realities of food on the table, roof over the head, and car, electric, oil, and health bills paid, not in some dreamy future (be that future a year, a decade, or, even, tomorrow, hence), but now. I think when Revolution fails its because it doesn’t answer immediate needs.