As an historical figure Rosa Luxemburg has a negligible presence. She left nothing behind in the way of a new and different life. She founded no movement, let alone any state. Even Leon Trotsky, with his meagre, humiliating end, claims his place as a fallen Titan of the twentieth century.
Her pull as an icon, a figure of ideology is much greater. Those who encounter her find her bewitching (a loaded adjective to use for a woman, but it’s to the point). The Drowned Girl song, by Bertolt Brecht is a good example. It was taken from a poem written by Brecht in the aftermath of the Spartacus Days and reworked into a later play. Though not directly about her I think it’s still telling she was made into the drowned girl.
In the month before the revolution that toppled the Kaiser and ended the war, political prisoners were released as the pressure rose. Her jailers only dared release her on November the 8th, the night before the movement took Berlin. No photos exist (as far as I know) of her final two months. She was forty-eight but appeared frail and had completely white hair. Luxemburg is simply not remembered as old. She is forever a young woman, new to the party but besting the elders and generally shaking things up.
She was a woman who thrived in a male-dominated environment. Even now people tend to be familiar when referring to her. It goes Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky… Rosa, Red Rosa, Bloody Rosa, but almost always Rosa. She was a martyr too, to a gang of men no less.
The fact she has no concrete legacy gives her little definition. It means she can be pressed into many meanings. There is a feminist Rosa Luxemburg, an anarchist Rosa Luxemburg even an anti-communist Rosa Luxemburg (it’s a difficult job, but you can press her theses on the Russian revolution into Cold War service).
Luxemburg is the meaning of her message, the value and detail of which is often overlooked. She is a true icon in the McLuhanite sense.