Paul Frölich and Rosa Luxemburg

Paul Frölich’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg is an engrossing and informative read. Far shorter than the perhaps better-known two-part work by J.P. Nettl, the work is no less important for understanding Luxemburg’s life, times, and massive theoretical contributions. I’ve never fully appreciated the importance of Luxemburg’s work until now: it’s one thing to know the laudatory quotes (Frantz Mehring called her “the best brain after Marx,” and Lenin likened her to an eagle sorrowing over all her detractors) and another experience the full power of her thought. Frölich follows Luxemburg’s life from her early years in Poland to a seasoned revolutionary at the end of World War One. Along the way, he describes many important events taking place in European socialism such as the revisionist dispute surrounding Edward Bernstein and the parliamentary entryist debate surrounding Alexandre Millerand. Massive events of world importance loom overhead, including the first and second Russian Revolutions and the betrayal of Social Democracy in 1914. Luxemburg penned insightful analyses of every important event, and Frölich provides a summary of each of her most important works (including Reform or Revolution?, The Mass Strike, and the Junius Pamphlet).

Briefly on Paul Frölich. Born in Leipzig in 1884, Frölich joined the SPD (his parents were party members) in 1902 when the party had 300,000 members and garnered 30% of the vote in Reichstag elections. He later become a member of the Left Radicals grouping that included Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Radek. After the betrayal of Social Democracy in voting for war credits in 1914, he broke with the SPD right and center and was a founding member of the German Communist Party in 1918. He was a member of the Party’s central committee and the editor of the party newspaper. He was imprisoned in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power and fled to France a year later where he began working on Luemburg’s biography in the later 1930s. The work was published in 1940. He lived in the United States during World War Two and later settled in West Germany where he rejoined the SPD. He died in 1953.