Source: Counterpunch

Red Rosa is wonderfully composed and tells a story that is compelling, inspirational and fundamentally human.

As I looked around at the sea of red flags and thousands of mostly young Germans in military fatigue jackets and bellbottom jeans, I heard her name shouted from the podium. I don’t recall the reference or much else from the speech because immediately afterwards, we began marching. It was a rather eventful protest, with the police opening their water cannons several times along the route and us marchers blocking streetcars and traffic in response; which natural gave the police another opportunity to use their water cannons.

Luxemburg was not only one of the few women prominent in the socialist movement of the twentieth century.  She remains one of its most inventive and radical theoreticians.  Her works on imperialism, credit, the role of the strike, and imperial war are both relevant and prescient in their application of Marxist economic theory and capitalist war.  Indeed, her discussion of credit under monopoly capitalism is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the capitalist economy crashed in 2007-2008 and why it will crash again.Her unrelenting opposition to imperial war and disgust with those who call themselves socialist yet support such wars is an inspiration to those of us who find ourselves in a similar situation today.  Most importantly, her commitment to revolutionary struggle and a personal freedom unknown to most women of her time (and to many if not most women today) is an inspiration.

Her life is an inspiration in itself.   That is the message one gathers while reading the recently released biography, Red Rosa.  Composed as a graphic “novel”—what I still call a comic book—this work is a reasonably complete introduction to Luxemburg’s life and works.  It is also a historical overview of the times she lived and worked in.  The excellent artwork is accompanied by a slightly fictionalized narrative (think poetic license) portraying this revolutionary’s life, loves, fears and joys.  The creator, Kate Evans, provides enough political and historical context to paint a narrative that shows Luxemburg to be a woman both of her time and ahead of her time.

One discovers the trails she blazed in her personal life complemented those she forged in the world of revolutionary socialism.  This was a time when women were not expected to take on the roles Luxemburg insisted on.  The force of her thought and the relentlessness of her political being demanded that otherwise dismissive men both in opposition and solidarity consider her presence.  The notes and commentary provided by Evans and her editor Paul Buhle are both a useful addition to the graphics and text and a means to an even fuller understanding of Luxemburg’s life, thought and times.

On September 16, 1913 Luxemburg gave one of her most famous antiwar speeches in Frankfurt.  In that speech she called on Germans to refuse to fight and was arrested for the speech’s content.  In the winter of 1914 she was sentenced to a year in prison. Riots against the sentence broke out in several cities across Germany.

Nowadays, a road built in the 1990s named Rosa Luxemburg Landstrasse runs through part of Frankfurt am Main, apparently with little or no irony intended on the part of the authorities (to its credit, Frankfurt has been governed by a mostly left-leaning council for several decades.)  Given the fact that Germany has sent troops to various regions under the NATO banner in recent years, I wonder how Luxemburg’s antiwar sentiments would be received in 2015.

Also, given that Luxemburg and her fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht were murdered by the predecessors of at least one of the political formations who named that street (the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland -SPD), I also can’t help wondering if she would reject what was certainly meant to be an honor.

Red Rosa is a wonderfully composed and lively book.  The story it tells is compelling, inspirational and fundamentally human.  Instructional in its politics and discussions of economics, Red Rosa is also at turns humorous, romantic, and emotional.  The decision to write this work in the graphic novel form was a brilliant one; if there is a biography whose multiple dimensions requires more than words to tell it, Rosa Luxemburg’s is such a biography.

Red Rosa

Illustration from Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans. Published by Verso.

Source: New Satesman

Her most enduring insight was to assert fearlessly that socialism and democracy are nothing without each other.

In 1915, writing under the pseudonym Junius to evade prosecution, German Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

To Luxemburg’s dismay, rather than uniting in opposition to the First World War, Europe’s left-wing parties rallied behind their national governments. “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throats,” she observed acidly.

Luxemburg and co-leader Karl Liebknecht responded in 1916 by founding the revolutionary Spartacist League (named after Spartacus, the leader of the largest Roman slave rebellion), a breakaway from Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

Stripped of their original context, Luxemburg’s words – “socialism or barbarism” – have been derided by liberals as a false dichotomy. Did Stalinism not prove that some hideous admixture of both could result? If so, Luxemburg can credibly claim to have foreseen the rise of barbarous socialism. Indeed, her life and work demonstrated rare moral clarity.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 to a Jewish family in Zamosc in Russian-occupied Poland. Having been politicised from her early years – a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms began in 1881 – she joined the Polish Proletariat Party at the age of 15. Faced with the permanent threat of arrest, the intellectually precocious Luxemburg emigrated to Switzerland, where she attended the University of Zurich and became one of the few women in the city to be awarded a doctorate.

Luxemburg considered herself a citizen of the world, a view she expressed with unsparing force. Writing from prison in 1917 to her Jewish friend, the socialist and feminist Mathilde Wurm, she declared: “What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world.”

But it was to acquire German citizenship – and a place in Europe’s pre-eminent socialist party – that Luxemburg married Gustav Lubeck, the son of a friend, in 1897 (the couple never lived together and divorced five years later).

Though a foe of reformist socialism, Luxemburg’s most notable dispute was with Lenin. Following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, she upbraided the Bolsheviks for their disbandment of the elected Constituent Assembly and their suppression of rival parties. “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all,” she insisted, asserting that “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” (a slogan adopted by East German protesters in 1988). Here, there are echoes of John Stuart Mill, who wrote in On Liberty that unless received wisdom was “vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice.”

Six years before Stalin’s malevolent ascent began, Luxemburg identified the conditions that would enable the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to become the dictatorship of one man. “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution… bureaucracy remains as the active element.”

Having been imprisoned by the German government in 1916 for seeking to organise an anti-war general strike, Luxemburg was released on 8 November 1918, the day before the Kaiser abdicated and a republic was established.

Though Liebknecht went further and proclaimed a “free socialist republic”, Luxemburg opposed demands for the Spartacists to emulate the Bolsheviks and seize power by force. Following the formation of the German Communist Party in January 1919, she advocated participation in the inaugural Weimar elections but the party congress endorsed a boycott. When a mass workers’ uprising began in response to the government’s dismissal of Emil Eichhorn, the left-wing Berlin police chief, Luxemburg foresaw catastrophe but felt obliged to participate.

The Social Democratic president Friedrich Ebert responded by ordering the proto-Nazi Freikorps to crush the rebellion. On 15 January, her skull having been cracked with a rifle butt, Luxemburg was shot dead and thrown into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal (where a cast-iron memorial bearing her name now rests). “In her assassination,” Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, hauntingly observed, “Hohenzollern Germany celebrated its last triumph and Nazi Germany its first.”

Barbarities far greater than those Luxemburg envisaged would follow. But her most enduring insight was not to grasp how quickly the centre can collapse. Rather, it was to assert fearlessly that socialism and democracy are nothing without each other.

George Eaton is deputy editor of the New Statesman.

Source: The Guardian

Rosa Luxemburg’s letters bring to life a humane socialist whose ideas still resonate today

Edwardian England, with its rituals of roast beef and empire, was grimly inimical to social change, yet Lenin sought refuge there in the early 1900s while on the run from the tsarist police. In London he took his protege Trotsky round the Jewish heartlands off Brick Lane. The Whitechapel backstreets had long served as an asylum for international socialists and dreamers of every stripe.

Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born internationalist, found the Whitechapel district “dark and dirty” on her arrival in 1907. The 36-year-old had come to London from Berlin to attend a congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party (soon to become the Soviet Communist party). Among the delegates were Lenin, Trotsky and a walrus-moustached future apparatchik called Stalin.

Revolution was in the air. Stalin, then little known outside his native Georgia, had settled in a Whitechapel Road boarding house. His landlord, a poor Jew, spoke Russian. The area, with its obscure exuberance of life, fascinated Luxemburg. It was a sanctuary for Ashkenazi Jews who had escaped the pogroms in 1880s Russia. Their side-locks, kaftans and Yiddish would have struck Luxemburg as backward tribal marks.

Like Trotsky, Luxemburg was an example of Europe’s new, secularised Jew. Her father, a Warsaw timber trader, considered himself assimilated within the Catholic majority. Luxemburg herself regarded her Jewishness as an irrelevance. She cared little for the derision and sorrows heaped on her co-religionists in Russian territories. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” she upbraided her friend Mathilde Wurm in 1917. “I am just as much concerned by the poor blacks of Africa.”

Yet, to judge by this absorbing new collection of her letters, she was inevitably shaped by Judaism and its fierce moral parables of deliverance and survival. The self-ironical humour and love of learning of her “forefathers” were characteristics that Luxemburg saw in herself. Written in German, Polish, French and Russian in the years 1891-1919, the letters radiate erudition (as well as an occasionally acid tongue). During her imprisonment in Berlin for anti-militarist beliefs she read Goethe and Cervantes, and marvelled at the “bantering hobgoblin mood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream“. The letters are also fraught with punctilious descriptions of nature, from honey bees to the “dwarf-sized yarrow plants” blooming in the prison yard.

Like many secular Jews, Luxemburg applauded the 1917 uprising against the Romanov monarchy. “The events in Russia are of amazing grandeur and tragedy,” she wrote to a social democrat friend from her cell. At the same time she was appalled by the prospect of Bolshevik mob rule and condemned the violence unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky against counter-revolutionaries. The Bolshevik use of terror was, in Luxemburg’s pacifist view, an expression of political “weakness” and the trapdoor disappearance of innocents disconcerted her greatly.

In January 1919, against her better judgment, she lent her support to the communist uprising in Berlin. Hoping to repeat the success of the October revolution, the left-wing Spartacist League (of which Luxemburg was a founder) was brutally crushed by proto-Hitlerite Freikorps. Luxemburg was clubbed to death by nationalists and her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal, between what would later be west and east Berlin. She was 47. “The old slut is swimming now,” somebody remarked. No one stood trial for the murder of “Red Rosa”.

In the 30s, her name was blackened further by Stalin, who scorned the apparently bourgeois cult of “Luxemburgism”. Her reputation was allowed to revive only after 1956, when Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin. Her most famous slogan – “Freedom is also the freedom of those who think differently” – was adopted by student protestors in East Germany in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down. That same year, Margarethe von Trotta’s soberly elegiac film, Rosa Luxemburg, was released.

If anything, Luxemburg’s insistence on social justice seems more pertinent now with the world financial crisis. Her main theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, sought to counter the lure of the market. A deep-dyed democrat, Luxemburg hated what she called the “German mentality” and reputation for officiousness, and saw her role as somehow Russifying Germany. Punctilious in answering her letters, she fired off hundreds of missives to friends, lovers and colleagues, some of them very lengthy. Her need to write was clearly overwhelming and she wrote as though she was thinking aloud, the words pouring out. “God forgive me this prose poem of wretched quality!” she apologises to a journalist friend in 1898.

In her personal life, Luxemburg displayed a middle-class fastidiousness at odds with her combative politics. The sight of women on bicycles she found “aesthetically displeasing” and she flinched from displays of too much leg. A soapbox “fighter” rather than a soulless statistician, she championed the cause of Polish and German coal miners, shoemakers, tailors, party workers. Socialism for her was above all a comradely ideology that sought to address inequalities. Notably, these letters reflect personal anxieties of betrayal (“The jibber-jabber of our wavering friends”) and political danger. Speaking to audiences of up to 5,000 people, she was vulnerable to the assassin’s bullet.

Published to coincide with the 140th anniversary of Luxemburg’s birth in March 1871, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg come as near as anything to the way this extraordinary woman talked with loved ones and friends. Perhaps for the first time in English, Rosa Luxemburg emerges whole from the shadows of Stalinism and previous biographers. This is a wonderfully compelling record, both poignant and timely.

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza
Translated by George Shriver

Published by Verso

Source: Journeyman

100 years since her death, Rosa Luxemburg’s life and writing are more than ever an inspiration for all who believe, like her, another world is possible.

Every January since 1919 (except during the Nazi era, when the graves were desecrated), thousands gather at the graves of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery to mark the anniversary and remember their brutal murder. This year, the centenary of their deaths, the commemoration will be held on 13th February 2019.

The SPD was the oldest and largest organisation of its kind in Europe, and the one in which Marx and Engels had been most personally involved. But after years in the political wilderness outlawed by Bismarck’s draconian regime it had evolved in a direction far removed from its revolutionary roots. Although maintaining a large membership and considerable party apparatus it had developed an ideology – the ‘revisionism’ of theorist Edward Bernstein – essentially loyal to the imperial German state whilst maintaining the language of Marxism. In response, a young Jewish woman who had fled from repression in Poland – Rosa Luxemburg – wrote the pamphlet ‘Social Reform or Revolution?’ that summarised the crisis facing the party.

This crisis came to a head in August 1914 when the SPD delegates in parliament shocked the Socialist world by voting to support the Kaiser’s war policy. Socialists in France, England and Russia had pledged to prevent war between their ruling classes, but when put to the test the Socialist 2nd International effectively disintegrated along patriotic lines. Rosa Luxemburg briefly contemplated suicide – but instead split from the SPD, along with Karl Liebknecht and other radicals, to form the Spartacist League.  Another larger group – the USPD or independent Socialists – also broke away adopting a halfway position between the revolutionary Spartacists and the ‘moderates’.

Finally in November 1918 after four years of war, German society crumbled both at the front and at home – the working class took to the streets in a series of strikes, and the navy mutinied.  Naturally they initially turned to the largest and ‘official’ opposition group – the SPD. And when the Kaiser abdicated and the generals tried to prop up the old order by negotiating an armistice, the ruling class sought an alliance with these ‘moderate’ Socialists to avert the threat of a Bolshevik-style revolution. So the SPD found itself thrust into the position of running the country – and two months of revolution and counter-revolution began.

Large-scale strikes and demonstrations continued and the mutineers – organised in the ‘People’s Naval Division’ – refused to be disarmed.  Other demobilised and disaffected soldiers adopted  ultra-nationalism and a hostility to the Left as the ‘betrayers’ of Germany; they organised themselves in Far Right paramilitary groups – the Freikorps. Street violence grew between these groups, with the Socialist leaders now in government actively encouraging the Freikorps to ‘keep order’.

Unable to co-operate with these SPD ‘moderates’, the USPD left the coalition government. Turning on their former comrades, Socialist leaders Ehbert and Noske now backed by the former monarchists and the army high command, openly called for the crushing of the Left organisations – particularly the Spartacist League, which although not uncritical of the Bolsheviks, had been inspired by the Russian Revolution and re-launched itself as the German Communist Party.

On January 5th the government ordered the removal from office of the Berlin police president, a member of the dissident USPD. In response the USPD, the Communists and the shop stewards movement jointly organised a strike and demonstration of 500,000 in the capital. Critically at this point Karl Liebknecht and the Communist leadership called for an insurrection to seize power.

Rosa Luxemburg argued against them, claiming such a move was not only premature but also potentially disastrous when the forces of the right were gathering strength. In the end she threw herself in her with her comrades; arguing that events were now in motion and that standing on the sidelines would be a worse mistake than waiting for the right moment.

Days later, at Noske’s orders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were taken prisoner by the Freikorps and summarily executed: Liebknecht’s body was dumped anonymously at the city morgue and Luxemburg’s was found months later in the Landwehr canal.  In Berlin the conflict on the streets continued, but by February the Freikorps had regained control  – 30,000 of them had entered the city and 3,000 workers had been killed.

The consequences of defeat were enormous. In Germany whilst the Communists were to steadily gain support until another unsuccessful revolution in 1923, the Left were bitterly divided. Most importantly the Far Right had been accepted by the weakened ruling class as the maintainers of order and as a bastion against revolution. Over the following years the Freikorps morphed into the Brown-shirts of the Nazi party.

For Europe as a whole, the failure of revolution in the West isolated the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and accelerated its degeneration.  And Rosa Luxemburg’s murder robbed the revolutionary movement of a leader who was developing a Marxism distinct from the Bolshevik model that reflected the different traditions of the western working class movement. Never fully developed, her theory of ‘revolutionary spontaneity’ is still debated amongst Marxists to this day.

After 1945 her memory was ironically appropriated by the Stalinist East German state – a regime she would have detested. Wary of the danger of elevating the role of ‘the party’, she believed unswervingly in the working class’s ability to repeatedly assert its own revolutionary potential – even in the face of defeat. Famously on the evening of her murder, almost certainly knowing that the rising had failed and that she personally faced death, she wrote:

“The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built…Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”

Centenary commemoration
13 January 2019 Berlin | Luxemburg-Liebknecht Demonstration | We say: In spite of all!
Details…

Red Rosa

Source: New Statesman

Rosa Luxemburg was killed in Berlin on 15 February 1919, her mutilated body was thrown into a Berlin canal. In 2015, John Berger wrote this letter to her.

You often come out of a page I’m reading – and sometimes out of a page I’m trying to write – come out to join me with a toss of your head and a smile. No single page and none of the prison cells they repeatedly put you in could ever contain you.

I want to send you something. Before it was given to me, this object was in the town of Zamosc in south-east Poland. In the town where you were born and your father was a timber merchant. But the link with you is not as simple as that.

The object belonged to a Polish friend of mine called Janine. She lived alone, not in the elegant main square as you did during the first two years of your life, but in a very small suburban house on the outskirts of the town.

Janine’s house and her tiny garden were full of potted plants. There were even potted plants on the floor of her bedroom. And she liked nothing better when she had a visitor than to point out, with her elderly working woman’s fingers, the special particularity of each one of her plants. Her plants kept her company. She gossiped and joked with them.

Although I don’t speak Polish, the European country I perhaps feel most at home in is Poland. I share with the people something like their order of priorities. Most of them are not intrigued by Power because they have lived through every conceivable kind of power-shit. They are experts at finding a way round obstacles. They continually invent ploys for getting by. They respect secrets. They have long memories. They make sorrel soup from wild sorrel. They want to be cheerful.

You say something similar in one of your angry letters from prison. Self-pity always made you angry and you were replying to a moaning letter from a friend. “To be a human being,” you say, “is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful, yes, cheerful in spite of everything and anything, because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”

In Poland during recent years a new trade has developed and anyone who practises it is called a stacz, which means “taking the place”. One pays a man or a woman to join a queue and after a very long while (most queues are very long), when the stacz is near to the head of the queue, one takes his or her place. The queues may be for food, a kitchen utensil, some kind of licence, a government stamp on a document, sugar, rubber boots . . .

They invent many ploys for getting by.

In the early 1970s, my friend Janine decided to take a train to Moscow, as several of her neighbours had done. It was not an easy decision to take. Only a year or two before in 1970 there had been the massacre of Dzank and other seaports, where hundreds of shipbuilding workers on strike had been shot down by Polish soldiers and police under orders from Moscow.

You foresaw it, Rosa, the dangers implicit in the Bolshevik manner of arguing with all reasoning, you already foresaw it in 1918 in your commentary on the Russian Revolution. “Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”

Janine took the train to Moscow to buy gold. Gold cost there a third of what it did in Poland. Leaving the Belorussky Station behind her, she eventually found the backstreet where the prescribed jewellers had rings to sell. There was already a long queue of other “foreign” women waiting to buy. For the sake of law and order each woman had a number chalked on the palm of her hand which indicated her place in the line. A cop was there to chalk the numbers. When Janine eventually reached the counter with her prepared roubles she bought three gold rings.

On her way back to the station she caught sight of the object I want to send to you, Rosa. It cost only 60 kopeks. She bought it on the spur of the moment. It tickled her fancy. It would chat with her potted plants.

She had to wait a long while in the station for the train back. You knew, Rosa, these Russians stations that become encampments of long-waiting passengers. Janine slipped one of her rings on to the fourth finger of her left hand, and the other two she hid in more intimate places. When the train arrived and she climbed up into it, a soldier offered her a corner seat as she sighed with relief; she would be able to sleep. At the frontier she had no problems.

In Zamosc she sold the rings for twice the sum she had paid for them, and they were still considerably cheaper than any which could be bought in a Polish shop. Janine, after deducting her rail fare, had made a little windfall.

The object I want to send you she placed on her kitchen windowsill.

The goal of an encyclopaedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, and to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier . . .

Diderot is explaining in 1750 the encyclopaedia he has just helped to create.

The object on the windowsill has something encyclopaedic about it. It’s a thin cardboard box, the size of a quarto sheet of paper. Printed on its lid is a coloured engraving of a collared flycatcher, and underneath it two words in Cyrillic Russian: SONG BIRDS.

Open the lid. Inside are three rows of matchboxes, with six boxes to each row. And each box has a label with a coloured engraving of a different songbird. Eighteen different songsters. And below each engraving in very small print the name of the bird in Russian. You who wrote furiously in Russian, Polish and German would have been able to read them. I can’t: I have to guess from my vague memories of sporadic birdwatching.

The satisfaction of identifying a live bird as it flies over, or disappears into a hedgerow, is a strange one, isn’t it? It involves a weird, momentary intimacy, as if at that moment of recognition one addresses the bird – despite the din and confusions of countless other events – one addresses it by its very own particular nickname. Wagtail! Wagtail!

Of the eighteen birds on the labels, I perhaps recognise five.

The boxes are full of matches with green striking heads. Sixty in each box. The same as seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour. Each one a potential flame.

“The modern proletarian class,” you wrote, “doesn’t carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern worker’s struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight.”

On the lid of the cardboard box there is a short explanatory note addressed to matchbox-label collectors (phillumenists, as they are called) in the USSR of the 1970s.

The note gives the following information: in evolutionary terms birds preceded animals, in the world today there are an estimated 5,000 species of birds, in the Soviet Union there are 400 species of songbirds, in general it is the male birds who sing, songbirds have specially developed vocal chords at the bottom of their throats, they usually nest in bushes or trees or on the ground, they are an aid to cereal agriculture because they eat and thus eliminate hordes of insects, recently in the remotest areas of the Soviet Union three new species of singing sparrows have been identified.

Janine kept the box on her kitchen windowsill. It gave her pleasure and in the winter it reminded her of birds singing.

When you were imprisoned for vehemently opposing the First World War, you listened to a blue titmouse “who always stayed close to my window, came with the others to be fed, and diligently sang its funny little song, tsee-tsee-bay, but it sounded like the mischievous teasing of a child. It always made me laugh and I would answer with the same call. Then the bird vanished with the others at the beginning of this month, no doubt nesting elsewhere. I had seen and heard nothing of it for weeks. Yesterday its well-known notes came suddenly from the other side of the wall which separates our courtyard from another part of the prison; but it was considerably altered, for the bird called three times in brief succession, tsee-tsee-bay, tsee-tsee-bay, tsee-tsee-bay, and then all was still. It went to my heart, for there was so much conveyed by this hasty call from the distance – a whole history of bird life.”

After several weeks Janine decided to put the box in her cupboard under the stairs. She thought of this cupboard as a kind of shelter, the nearest she had to a cellar, and in it she kept what she called her reserve. The reserve consisted of a tin of salt, a tin of cooking sugar, a larger tin of flour, a little sack of kasha and matches. Most Polish housewives kept such a reserve as a means of minimal survival for the day when suddenly the shops, during some national crisis, would have nothing on their shelves.

The next such crisis would be in 1980. Again it began in Dzank, where workers went on strike in protest against the rising food prices and their action gave birth to the national movement of Solidarnosc, which brought down the government.

“The modern proletarian class,” you wrote a lifetime earlier, “doesn’t carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory: the modern workers’ struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight.”

When Janine died in 2010, her son Witek found the box in the cupboard under the stairs and he brought it to Paris, where he was working as a plumber and builder. He brought it to give it to me. We are old friends. Out friendship began by playing cards together evening after evening. We played a Russian and Polish game called Imbecile. In this game the first player to lose all his or her cards is the winner. Witek guessed that the box would set me wondering.

One of the birds in the second row of matchboxes I recognise as a linnet, with his pink breast and his two white streaks on his tail. Tsooeet! Tsooeet! . . . often several of them sing in chorus from the top of a bush.

“The one who has done the most to restore me to reason is a small friend whose image I am sending enclosed. This comrade with the jauntily held beak, steeply rising forehead and eye of a know-it-all is called Hypolais hypolais, or in everyday language the arbour bird or also the garden mocker.” You are imprisoned in Poznan in 1917 and you continue your letter like this:

This bird is quite an oddball. He doesn’t sing just one song or one melody like other birds, but he is a public speaker by the grace of God, he holds forth, making his speeches to the garden, and does so with a very loud voice full of dramatic excitement, leaping transitions, and passages of heightened pathos. He brings up the most impossible questions, then hurries to answer them himself, with nonsense, making the most daring assertions, heatedly refuting views that no one has stated, charges through wide open doors, then suddenly exclaims in triumph: “Didn’t I say so? Didn’t I say so?” Immediately after that he solemnly warns everyone who’s willing or not willing to listen: “You’ll see! You’ll see!” (He has the clever habit of repeating each witty remark twice.)

The linnet’s box, Rosa, is full of matches.

“The masses,” you wrote in 1900, “are in reality their own leader, dialectically creating their own development procedure . . .”

How to send this collection of matchboxes to you? The thugs who killed you, threw your mutilated body into a Berlin
canal. It was found in the stagnant water three months later. Some doubted whether it was your corpse.

I can send it to you by writing, in this dark time, these pages.

“I was, I am, I will be,” you said. You live in your example for us, Rosa. And here it is, I’m sending it to your example.