Roses Are Red: The Peculiar Remembrance of Rosa Luxemburg in Lyric Poetry

This article investigates how Rosa Luxemburg has been remembered in lyric poetry written in German. Not seeking to calibrate her legacy as such, it rather explores how poets have represented and imagined her: the moments they select to encapsulate her significance, the actions and locations with which they associate her, and their visions of her physical body. It traces patterns of remembrance in the poetry inspired by Luxemburg's assassination, elucidating the contribution of lyric poetry as quite distinct from the various modes of commemorative prose writing or the rituals and monuments marking her memory. It defines, for the first time, a corpus of "Rosa poetry" that was produced between 1919 and 1999 and extends from utterly forgotten texts to those in canonical oeuvres. This particular corpus, although continuing the long tradition of elegy and commemoration composed by German-language poets, also suggests a potential flaw in lyric remembrance. The inquiry opens with a consideration of the minimal elements required to evoke Rosa Luxemburg in a poem and the function of venue and location in signalling both the murder and its German significance. In examining a range of Rosa poems in widely differing lyric modes, it then reveals how consistently the historical woman's life and work have been passed over. Rather, she has been evoked in crime poems that explore the status of her murder as an open secret. Whereas these poems single her out as the victim of a very particular, yet representative, crime, in others the associative work of the lyric entwines her with the beloved of the love poem tradition. These two clusters of poems do not overlap, but the female bodily presence imagined in both raises questions regarding the interplay of gender and memory in poetry. For both, the monikers Germans used for her during her lifetime - "die rote Rosa" and "die blutige Rosa" - undergo a radical expansion, with red signalling not only (and often scarcely at all) her commitment to communism but rather blood sacrifice and the romantic red rose. The interplay of gender and memory is especially fore-grounded where the killing is commemorated using the voices of those responsible for it. Equally, it is foregrounded where the crime poems have been superseded by love poems. While pinpointing the emotional polarity between these two clusters within the corpus of Rosa poems, their elucidation here also highlights what they share: namely the peculiar depoliticizing of this most political victim.

Rosa Luxemburg's decayed corpse was found in the Berlin Landwehrkanal in 1919, five months after she had been assassinated at the age of forty-eight. Around this time, the popular ditty "Es schwimmt eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal / Lang, lang ists her," circulating on the streets and in the cafe-bars of Berlin, became inextricably linked to her death. To a catchy tune, both the extant lyrics and various, more explicit adaptations were used to mock Luxemburg. Over half a century later, in Nicolas Born's eight-line poem "Leiche im Landwehrkanal," another waterborne corpse prompts an epitaph of sorts that tangentially refers to the famous communist:

Leiche im Landwehrkanal

Elisabeth S. ist tot.Ausgerechnet kurz vor ihremfumfzigsten.In der Zeitung standsie wäre vermutlich freiwillig tot.Außerdem trug sie einengewöhnlichen Namenund hatte nichts zu tunmit Kommunisten.

(Born 346)

By the 1970s, this poem can be sardonic about the memory of Luxemburg, her evocative first name, and the communist fascination for her. Born's later woman in the canal is being memorialized ex negativo, as the antithesis of her much-commemorated precursor: no one knows or cares who Elisabeth S. is. As the mocking ditty became in 1919 a murder song attached to Luxemburg's death, so various poems find her death echoed in turn by female corpses in postwar waters. Referencing the reception of Luxemburg's assassination in Born's poem is made possible because of the new victim's gender, age, and location. Little is required (perhaps the title phrase alone in this case) to refer to Luxemburg in poetry.

It was always thus: decades earlier, Iwan Goll...