Re-lecture

• Kemmerer, Alexandra

Abstract

<it>Rosa Luxemburg is not a marginal, but a marginalized protagonist in the history of 20th-century political thought. In this essay, strategies of marginalization employed by Luxemburg’s editors in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in their 1951 edition</it> Rosa Luxemburg, Ausgewa&x0308;hlte Reden und Schriften <it>(Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Speeches and Writings), published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Institut beim ZK der SED in Berlin are revisited and deconstructed. A bold strategy of infantilization was employed in order to marginalize this political thinker and save only the historical icon, a female patron saint of the revolution, for collective memory. Whilst the GDR struggled hard to come to terms with Luxemburg’s legacy, she was almost forgotten in the</it> Bundesrepublik<it>. Only when her incisive comment about the freedom of dissent from ‘The Russian Revolution’ was reappropriated as the slogan of the Eastern German Civil Rights Movement did Luxemburg re-enter public memory in the West. The revival of scholarly interest in Rosa Luxemburg that we currently see holds promise not only for radical thinkers, but also for international lawyers and historians. But, in a strange continuation of patterns of historical bias, her marginalization continues – this time from a transnational perspective. A fresh engagement with Luxemburg requires and allows for a more nuanced image of a theorist of revolution.</it>