The statue of the socialist revolutionist Rosa Luxemburg stands in Rosa Luxemburg Platz, a public park that was named in her honor. Rozalia Luksenburg (1871-1919) was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. While in high school, she became involved with socialist circles and became a leading figure in various workers’ strikes. Her political activities drew the attention of the tsarist authorities, and at 18, Luxemburg fled to Switzerland. There, she attended the University of Zurich, from which she later received a Ph.D., becoming the first woman to be granted a doctoral degree in Economy. Though leaving Poland at a young age, Luxemburg continued to support her motherland’s independence. She was a founding member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, which later became the Polish Communist Party, and she established the socialist paper Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers’ Cause). In 1897, Luxemburg moved to Berlin and married a son of family friends to become a German citizen. She became a dominant figure in the socialist movement and promoted Marxist ideas primarily by pen, publishing hundreds of articles on the subject. Upon the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1905, Luxemburg went to Poland to join the fight against the Russian regime and spread her ideas through articles, brochures, and speeches, arguing that a revolution could happen only through mass workers’ strikes. Again, she became wanted by the authorities, who arrested her for three months. After her release, Luxemburg returned to Germany and taught Marxism and economics at the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s Berlin training center. In 1914, as a reaction to WW1, Luxemburg and fellow revolutionist Karl Liebknecht founded the socialist and anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), and its newspaper, The Red Flag, in which she continued to call for a general strike. As a result, the two activists were imprisoned for two and a half years. Straight out of prison, she and Liebknecht established the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Under their leadership, the Spartacus League took part in the second revolutionary wave in Berlin – an armed uprising between the German government and the communist and socialist movements. Two weeks later, on 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were abducted and murdered by German officials. Her body was thrown into the river, found, and brought to burial only four months later. Anke Besser-Güth created the Rosa Luxemburg statue in 1974. Initially, it stood at the former location of the district school of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (also known as the East German Communist Party) at Südpark. However, executives of the GDR regime of East Germany opposed the location and the interpretation of the statue, and they relocated it to its current site, which today is at Rosa Luxemburg Platz. The Bronze statue depicts Luxemburg sitting down with a book in her hand. The book symbolizes freedom of thinking and the courage to think differently. More places to visit while in Erfurt are the Old Synagogue, the oldest synagogue preserved in Europe, the Gothic St. Severi Church, The Museum of Thuringian Folklore, and the Andreasstrasse Memorial and Educational Center. Read more...