Rozalia Luksenburg was born to a Jewish family in Zamość, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in Warsaw. Her parents supported the Jewish Reform and Polish national movements, raising her as Pole first and a Jew second. From 1884 to 1887, Luxemburg attended the all-girls gymnasium, a Russian school, where she was among the few Polish students who got accepted and one of the only Jewish children. There, she participated in secret study circles that studied Polish writers and poets and became a member of an illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party. As a result of her continued involvement in the proletariat after graduation, she became wanted by the tsarist police and lowered her profile. In 1889, at 18, she fled to Switzerland and studied politics, economics, history, philosophy, and mathematics at the University of Zurich. In 1897, Luxemburg became one of the first women in the world to receive a Ph.D. While in Zurich, she continued her social activism and befriended many leading figures of the Russian social democratic movement. With her fellow activist and long-time friend, Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, which later merged into the Communist Workers Party of Poland. Luxemburg and her party opposed the Polish Socialist Party, which supported Polish independence, arguing that nationalism is a concession to the bourgeoisie, and advocated for socialist internationalism. By 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany and married a family friend’s son to receive German citizenship. She settled in Berlin and became a leading member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The following year, Luxemburg published the brochure Social Reform or Revolution? in which she attacked Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism theory, defending Marxist orthodoxy and the need for revolution to achieve international socialism. Luxemburg returned to Warsaw after the Russian Revolution of 1905 to join the fight against the Tsar. She wrote for the SDKPiL’s illegal newspaper Czerwony Sztandar (The Red Banner). Within two years, she published over 100 articles, speeches, and brochures supporting the revolution and advocating for mass strikes, stating that this was the most essential and powerful tool for the proletariat to achieve socialist victory. Her actions led to her arrest by the tsarist authorities on March 4th, 1906. After three months, Luxemburg was released and went back to Berlin. There, she taught at the Social Democratic Party school and continued to promote her socialist agenda. In 1913 she published Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital), claiming that imperialism results from capitalism’s expansion into underdeveloped regions. In 1914, Luxemburg co-founded with Karl Liebknecht the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a movement dedicated to ending WWI through revolution and forming a proletarian government. She also established the league’s newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). Through the Spartacus League, Luxemburg aimed to lead Germany’s proletariat into an anti-war general strike. She got arrested again, this time for two-and-a-half years, during which she continued writing articles smuggled out of prison and published by her fellow activists. After her release in November 1918, Luxemburg immediately returned to work on promoting the revolution and co-founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on January 1st, 1919. Four days later, a second revolutionary wave broke in Berlin, and Luxemburg, through the Red Flag, encouraged the rebels to occupy all positions of power, for which she received the vilified nickname of “Bloody Rosa.” On January 15th, 1919, German Cavalry Guards abducted Luxemburg and Liebknecht and questioned them under torture before killing them and throwing the bodies into the Landwehr Canal. Their assassination inspired a new wave of violence across Germany, and the authorities killed thousands of revolutionaries and civilians. Four months later, Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s bodies were found and brought to burial at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin. Read more...

Born Johanna Arendt to a Jewish family in Hanover, Prussia (today Germany) and was raised in Königsberg. Though her family was secular, she received religious guidance and attended a Reform synagogue. Growing up, she independently learned philosophy and ancient Greek and read all Goethe scriptures. At 15, after leading a boycott on a teacher, she got expelled from school and moved by herself to Berlin, where she took audited courses at the University of Berlin. At 18, she began her formal higher education at The University of Marburg, studying German literature, theology, and philosophy. She developed a romantic relationship with her 35 years old professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she was involved for the rest of her life, even though he supported the Nazi Party. In 1925, when she was only 19 years old, Arendt wrote The Shadows, her first autobiographical piece, in which she explored her insecurities regarding her Jewishness and femininity. In the following year, she transferred to the University of Heidelberg, completing her thesis on the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine in 1929. In that same year, she began a relationship with philosopher Günther Stern, and the couple married within a few months. They moved from one place to another, trying to find Stern an academic position while writing and publishing together numerous articles. In 1931, after returning to Berlin, Arendt began working as a newspaper writer while researching the writer and socialite Rahel Varnhagen. She became more involved in politics, studying political theories, especially intrigued by Jewish politics, which inspired her to write The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, Arendt, as a Jew, suffered discrimination and was prevented from making a living. Her husband was prosecuted for being a Communist, fled to France. She stayed in Berlin and became an activist. After she got arrested for researching and gathering evidence of anti-Semitic propaganda at the Prussian State Library, she also left the county, first to Switzerland and then to reunite with her husband in Paris. She decided to commit herself to “the Jewish cause” and worked for several Jewish refugee organizations. In 1936, at the age of 30, Arendt and her husband divorced, and soon after, she met and married poet Heinrich Blücher. In 1940, they escaped Nazi-occupied France and immigrated to the US. Settling in NYC, Arendt began publishing a weekly column at a Jewish-German newspaper, in which she wrote about refugees, anti-Semitism, and different aspects of Zionism. After the war, she worked as an editor at Schocken Books and as a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations. In 1951, at 45, Arendt published her first significant work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argued that Fascism and Communism share historical and intellectual origins. In her next book, The Human Condition, she examined the vita active (active life), defending the classical social ideals of work, citizenship, and political involvement, and opposing the obsession with basic welfare. In 1963, Arendt published her most recognized, controversial, and criticized work – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of essays that she wrote when covering the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. In the book, Arendt argued that Eichmann, who was responsible for the transportation of many Jews to concentration camps during the holocaust, is not a monster nor a sadist, but an ambitious bureaucrat that his actions derived from his devotion and dedication to the Nazi movement. He was, in her words, “terrifyingly normal.” She was grappling with the question, ‘Can one do evil without being evil?’ Her critics did not accept her thesis that one could have a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil motives. In all of her writings, Arendt challenged traditional conceptions, provoking new ways of thinking, even if debatable. She wrote not as a historian or philosopher but as a theorist that relied on facts to examine human political tendencies when given freedom and power. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Arendt held teaching positions in various institutes, including the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton. Throughout her life, she published more than 20 books and hundreds of articles and essays. She died of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69. Read more...