Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1918)

When I was a politics student, it was the democratic socialists, not the authoritarians like Lenin who appealed to me, and in particular  Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci: both committed to freedom; both great writers; and both disabled people who paid a heavy price for their courageous work in pursuit of a socialist utopia.

Rozalia Luksenburg was born on March 5, 1871 in Zamosc, Poland: her father was a timber merchant; her mother was the daughter of a rabbi.  The family moved to Warsaw when she was two.  By the time she was five, she could read and write.  However, a medical error left her disabled: doctors had thought she had TB, when in fact she had a dislocated hip.  Confined to a cast, she was kept in bed for a year.   She ended up with one leg shorter than the other, and had a pronounced limp for the rest of her life.  From then on, she dreaded the pity of strangers, and made great efforts to minimize the limp and not draw attention to herself.

The smallest in her class, and disabled, she devoted herself to studying at the Russian High School.  She excelled at school, and her political conscience was growing also: she wrote to a friend “My ideal is a social system that allows one to love everybody with a clear conscience.  Striving after it, defending it, I may perhaps even learn to hate.”  After graduating in 1887, she joined the Polish Marxist party, Proletariat, which had gone underground after organizing strikes the previous year that were brutally crushed by the Russian authorities.

In February 1989, she travelled to Zurich for the university education which was denied to women in Poland.  Registering as “Rosa Luxemburg”, she started out living with the family of a German socialist exile, Karl Lübeck.  He needed assistance due to his visual impairment, which increased her familiarity with German Socialist Party (SPD) writers such as Kautsky, Liebknecht, Babel and Bernstein.  She also met Leo Jogiches, a Lithuanian Jewish socialist activist.  To her, the attraction of this romantic revolutionary figure was obvious, but she could not understand what he saw in her.  After all, one of his friends described her as follows:

“She was of low build, with a disproportionately large head; a typical Jewish face with a thick nose… a heavy, occasionally uneven walk, with a limp; her first appearance did not make an agreeable impression but you had only to spend a bit of time with her to see how much life and energy was in the woman, how clever and sharp she was, and at what a high level of intellectual stimulation and development she lived.”

Together, they founded a newspaper and then the Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland in 1894.   Rosa moved to Paris  that year to research for her doctoral thesis, sending letters back to Jogiches asking for more funds and berating him for his emotional shortcoming.   In 1898, after the award of her doctorate and the death of her mother back in Poland, Luxemburg moved to Germany, which she and Jogiches thought the country most likely to have a socialist revolution.  She earned a meagre living through journalism.  After some persuasion, Jogiches joined her. 

In her journalism, in her work with the SPD, and in her activities in the Russian Social Democratic Party, Luxemburg was uncompromising and often got into ideological disputes.  For example, she took a different line to Lenin’s advocacy of  democratic centralism in What is to be done?, which she said was “imbued with the sterile spirit of the night watchman state”.  However, in practise she she also could be very controlling, as when she expelled Polish party members who disagreed with her.  

In 1904, she was imprisoned for three months for comments critical of the German Kaiser.  She wrote to Karl Kautsky: “the interests of the masses is on the move: I feel it even here penetrating through the prison walls.”  The attempt at revolution in Russia in 1905 filled her with excitement – “the revolution is splendid.  All else is bilge” and swelled the membership of the Polish socialist party.  Although she only arrived in Poland as the revolution was subsiding, but was imprisoned.  She escaped through a combination of illness – anemia, and liver and stomach problems – and bribery.  She spent the next summer recuperating in spas in Russia and Finland, and returned in late 1906 with the manuscript of her book The Mass Strike, which sought to derive lessons for Germany from Russia’s first attempt at revolution.  At the 1907 congress of the Russian party, Trotsky described her as:

“a little woman, frail and even sickly looking, but with a noble face and beautiful eyes that radiated intelligence; she captivated one by the sheer courage of her mind and character.”

Luxemburg opposed the First World War, criticizing Lenin’s nationalist tendencies.  She broke with Karl Kautsky and the SPD when it eschewed revolution and promoted the parliamentary road to socialism.  She had a troubled relationship with the USPD, a smaller left-wing party.  She puzzled over the continuing survival of capitalism, despite Marx’s predictions of its imminent collapse, before deciding that imperialism was enabling the system to prolong itself by exploiting colonial dominions, together with the role of the arms race in propping up industrialism. 

In 1915, she was sent to prison again, for incitement to disobedience the year before.  In 1916, the Spartakus League was formed, with Luxemburg writing the guiding principles from her prison cell: the League denounced both the Kaiser and the SPD for its treachery to international socialism in supporting the war.  Soon after, in February 1916, she was released from prison, sick and in pain, but a few months later she was taken into “protective custody” again, detained indefinitely.  She had to leave her cat Mimi behind this time, and was devastated when the cat, substitute for the child she never had, died the following year.  Immured in a prison fortress, Rosa read, wrote, and tended her flowers: “I feel at home anywhere in the world where there are clouds and birds and human tears”, she wrote to a friend in February 1917.  She suffered greatly from stomach pains and migraine, but her morale soared with the advent of the Russian revolution. 

In January 1918, revolutionary shop stewards in Berlin led a general strike for peace, freedom and bread.  Meanwhile, Luxemburg had written a critical appraisal of the anti-democratic character of the Russian revolution – “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” - which was not published until 1922.  Her heart was for the Bolsheviks, even though her head thought differently – “enthusiasm coupled with the spirit of revolutionary criticism – what more can people want from us?”

From September 1918, with the end of the First World War inevitable, events developed fast in Germany, as the Kaiser attempted to move to a constitutional monarchy.  Political prisoners were released in October – but not Luxemburg, who had never been found guilty of a crime.   On November 3, the German fleet mutinied in Kiel, and soon councils of workers, soldiers and sailors were controlling cities like Kiel, Hamburg, Hanover and Munich. A Bavarian Socialist Republic was declared.   Yet the remnants of the old regime and the SPD government in Berlin plotted to keep hold of power and prevent all-out revolution.  On 8 November, Rosa Luxemburg was released from prison, a white-haired, sick and exhausted woman.  On 9 November, the Kaiser abdicated.  Berlin was full of workers brandishing red flags.  Leibknecht declared the Socialist Republic of Germany from the balcony of the royal palace and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards occupied the Reichstag. 

However, the revolutionary congress that was held the next day was dominated by the SPD and the USPD.  The SPD prime minister, Ebert, conspired with the Army to defend the new  democratic republic and prevent revolution.  The Spartacists, led by Luxemburg and Leibkneht, were calling for workers control.  Civil war seemed to be looming, which was the last thing which the war-weary populace wanted.  The SPD covertly mobilised the Freikorps, comprised of demobilized ex-army paramilitaries.  A National Congress met on 16-20 December, but because it was only open to workers, Leibknecht and Luxemburg were excluded – again they were being out-maneuvered by the SPD and the USPD – and the voting at the Congress went against them.

On 30 December 1918, the Spartacist League and other workers representatives formed the Communist Party of Germany.  A big demonstration on 5 January 1919 called for Ebert’s SPD government to be deposed, and the SPD newspaper’s offices were occupied: Luxemburg realised that this was bad timing, but was forced to support her revolutionary movement.  On 8 January, the Freikorps went into action, machine-gunning the offices of the Communist newspaper, The Red Flag.  Street fighting between left and right followed, with over 1000 killed.  Luxemburg wrote her final article: 

“The revolution will ‘raise itself again clashing’, and to your horror it will proclaim to the sound of trumpets: I was, I am, I shall be.”

On the evening of 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Leibknecht were arrested.  She was ordered to be taken to prison by a Freikorps unit:  going out to the car, she was hit with a rifle butt, and then as they drove away, she was shot as she lay in the back of the car.  When the car reached the River Spree, her body was thrown in.   Minutes later, Leibknecht was also driven away and shot.  The next day, Jogiches sent a telegram to Lenin: “Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht have carried out their ultimate revolutionary duty.”  He himself was arrested on 10 March, tortured, and “shot while trying to escape”.   A few months later, Luxemburg’s body was found in the river.    On 13 June, she was buried in the Friedrichsfelde cemetery, at a ceremony attended by workers, soldiers and sailors carrying banners and red flags.  The leader of the Communist Party and Clara Zetkin spoke at the funeral, and the mourners sang the Internationale.

Rosa Luxemburg’s personal life was complex.  She lamented the impact of her political career on her family: “Politics is an inane Baal worship, driving people – victims of their own obsession, of mental rabies – to sacrifice their entire existence.”  Her relationship with Jogiches was troubled, and she more than once started relationships with other men.  In 1907, the 36-year-old Luxemburg replaced him as her lover with the 21-year-old son of Clara Zetkin.  In 1914 she took up with Paul Levi, her defence lawyer, another younger man.  Her attitude to her servants has been described as “feudal”: she was a fastidious employer, with a love of the working class that was mainly theoretical.  She could be vindictive in pursuing a political quarrel, for example against Karl Radek, a member of the Polish party.  Yet she also had a great yearning for peace and calm.  In the months before her death, an exhausted Luxemburg said to her friend Mathilde Jacob: 

“Can you tell me why I live constantly like this, without any inclination to do so?  I would like to paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals.  I would like to study natural science but above all else to live peacefully and on my own, not in this eternal whirlwind.”

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963

A very welcome guest post to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, contributed by my dear and esteemed friend Jackie Leach Scully, another graduate of Newnham College.

There are a lot of women of a certain age – around 50 – who have, let’s say, an ambivalent relationship with the story of Sylvia Plath.  Some of us were attracted to her by the romantic suicide magnet, at least before we stopped being adolescent and daft and realised that suicide is all sorts of things but one thing it isn’t is romantic.  In my defence, I can claim that what first turned me on to Plath was not anything to do with her reputation as a professional depressive but just these lines, reproduced in some piece of teenage fiction that I read:

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.


We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,


Me and you.

(That this came from a longer poem entitled ‘Lesbos’ was a bonus for a sexual identity-wobbly 14 year old, but that’s not relevant just at the moment.)

And like others, I then went through the “identification with mad girl” phase (poet=heightened sensitivity=I Don’t Know Where I Belong But Wherever It Is It Isn’t Here=me!); to the impatient, oh-get-a-life phase (as the philosopher Jacqueline Rose said, on finishing her book on Plath: “I’m sick of mad girls”); and then finally on to a reluctant empathy that’s to do with the understanding, which comes to some of us over time, of what it’s like to feel betrayed and abandoned and voiceless. Plath was unusual in having the capacity to write about those experiences in a way that speaks to a broader sense of the human condition, over and above confessional self-indulgence.

Along with the sympathy I’ve struggled with the difficult fact that her act of self-destruction so bluntly involved her children, a few doors away and protected from the oven gas by towels; and yet some of us are also familiar with the level of stricken despair that takes you to a place from which your perspective on your own self, and on your children and what might really be best for them, becomes, for want of a better term, Martian.

I’ve no idea what Plath might or might not have gone on to do had she been found in time (as some evidence suggests she thought she would be) on the morning of 11 February 1963. What I hope endures of her is not the maudlin suicide artist stuff, nor the simplistic myth of the mentally unstable and therefore doomed woman, but respect for the clarity of vision and discipline that enabled her to transform painful and difficult experiences into words like these:

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue. 


Waxy stalactites 


Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb 


Exudes from its dead boredom. 


Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls, 


Cold homicides. 


They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium 


Icicles, old echoer. 


Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes. 


And the fish, the fish - 


Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives, 


A piranha 


Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes. 


The candle 


Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten. 


O love, how did you get here? 


O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep, 


Your crossed position. 


The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.


The pain 


You wake to is not yours.

Love, love, 


I have hung our cave with roses, 


With soft rugs –

The last of Victoriana.


Let the stars 


Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric 


Atoms that cripple drip 


Into the terrible well,

You are the one 


Solid the spaces lean on, envious. 


You are the baby in the barn.

Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi (1941-2011)

“Aloof yet witty, plain but direct, regal yet casual. MAK Pataudi was so many contradictory things that eventually you stopped trying to classify him.”

(Mudar Patherya)

The first Indian to captain the Oxford University cricket team;  a member of the first Indian team to win a series against England; captain of India at the age of 21; leader of the first Indian team to win a Test series abroad.  “Tiger” Pataudi was quite literally a Prince of the game, always immaculately dressed off the field as befitted the ninth Nawab of Pataudi, son of the Begum of Bhopal.  He inherited the title on his eleventh birthday, when his father - a Test cricketer who played for England as well as India -  died playing polo in Delhi.  When royal entitlements were abolished by constitutional amendment in 1971, a certain MAK Pataudi stood for political office in protest.

Known for his batting, he scored 2, 793 Test runs, including six centuries.  This was all the more remarkable because he had lost an eye in a car accident in Hove in July 1961 and thus had no binocular vision to focus on a fast cricket ball hurtling towards him.  Tiger Pataudi liked to say that he always saw two balls, and hit the inside one.  He usually pulled his cap down over his right eye to avoid the distraction of a blurred double image.  He made his Indian Test debut less than six months after his injury: in the third Test of that series, he scored 103.  He also played for the Sussex country side, which he captained in 1966.  Had it not been for his impairment, he might have been one of the game’s truly exceptional players, instead of simply a very good one.  Oddly, the Indian team which he was instrumental in building and leading to world status contained at least one other disabled person – Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, the famous leg spinner, who had a withered right wrist as a result of polio contracted in childhood. 

Pataudi was the Muslim captain of  Hindu India, who welded all the regional cricketing stars into one cohesive and venerated national unit.  With his film star wife and his aristocratic poise, he brought glamour to the game, and it was in his day that the idolization of India’s cricket team really took off.  In later life, he was on the council of the Indian Premier League, but as Mukul Kesavan wrote:

“He remained untouched by the squabbles and sleaze that attended cricket’s transformation into big business in India.  As a consequence, death finds him happily embalmed in fond radio memories: still tigerish in the covers, still a prince among men.”

Perhaps typically for a man who grew up in a 150 room palace with over 100 servants, his only recorded brush with the law was when he was arrested for shooting a protected species of deer in 2005.

Jacqueline du Pré (1945 – 1987)

It is exactly 25 years since the death of the greatest ever English cellist, a player who will be forever associated with the Elgar Cello Concerto, and whose passion and directness struck all who heard or saw her. 

Jacqueline du Pré grew up in Oxford.  Her father was an accountant, from a Channel Islands family, and her mother was a piano teacher.  At the age of four, Jackie heard a cello on the radio, and decided that she wanted to play one.  Her mother supported her early learning on the instrument.  Jackie said later: 'My mother was a tremendous inspiration. She guided my first steps, wrote tunes for me to play, and drew pictorial descriptions of the melodies. These were quite beautiful and I used to find them tucked under my pillow in the morning so that I couldn't wait to get my hands on the cello again every day. My mother also taught me composition.”

As a child, she went to the London Cello School, and then Guildhall School of Music, where she won the gold medal.  She gave her first concert at the Wigmore Hall aged 16, playing a donated Stradivarius.  She studied with famous cellists such as Paul Tortelier and Rostropovich, who saw her as the heir of his talent.  Jacqueline du Pré became famous for her performances of the Elgar Cello Concerto at the Proms (1963-1969), and for the recording she made of the piece with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra (1965).

At Christmas 1966 she met the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.  The following year she converted to Judaism and they married in Jerusalem.  She played much chamber music with Barenboim, such as the Schubert Piano Quintet “The Trout”.  However, Jacqueline du Pré had little affection for more modern classical music.  Her recordings are justly famous, but not as extensive as her fans would have wished.

From 1971, Jackie’s playing began to decline, as she lost feeling in her fingers and strength in her arms.  Her last concerts came in February 1973, and in October 1973, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she liked to call "multiple fuckosis".  She continued to teach: I have met one of her students, who talks of how they sometimes had to carry her wheelchair to overcome access barriers.  Jacqueline du Pré died on 19 October 1987, aged only 42.

The achievement of Jacqueline du Pre cannot but be overshadowed by the success of the film Hilary and Jackie, based on a memoir by her brother and sister, and telling the story of the months in 1971 when Jackie had an affair with Christopher Finzi, her sister’s husband.  The film paints Jackie as a manipulative person.  Hilary, a musician herself, wrote: "Nobody could be with Jackie for long without being reduced by her... People couldn't live with her week in, week out, because she unwittingly destroyed them."

In one sense, the film is a counter balance to the adulation of this remarkable musical talent.  The image of the tragic genius is a classic disability trope, and to hear about her bad behaviour makes Jackie seem more real.  Although, as Helen Meekosha points out, critics resorted to shallow disability stereotypes - the tortured genius - in their reviews of the film. Meekosha, who herself has MS, talks about the tragedy of dealing with a degenerating body, and the anger and frustration which is generated by impairment, not just by social barriers.  When identity and worldly success depends on exactly the fine motor control and sensitivity which MS destroys, the frustration must be even worse.

Those who knew Jacqueline du Pré well protest that the film portrays her wrongly.  Finzi was a serial adulterer, who had several illegitimate children, and a reputation as a “sexual therapist” for troubled people, in an era where “free love” was fashionable.  Hilary consented to her sister having the affair with him. 

More to the point, Jackie was “a giver not a taker” according to her close friends and colleagues.  Documentary films by Christopher Nupen reveal her as full of “warmth, honesty and enthusiasm”, with a charisma which has become legendary.  Many suspect that jealousy underpins the negative representation of her by her siblings.  When Jacqueline du Pré died, she was surrounded by her friends, not by her relatives.