- Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). Born in Poland into a liberal Jewish intellectual family. She became interested in politics in her early teens and later was influential in the socialist movement, but met much resistance for being young, foreign, and a woman. Her interests included Russian literature and natural sciences; she was also a painter and a musician and spoke and read many European languages. Although she was small and frail, her spirit was strong. She was a great writer and orator and supported herself as a journalist. She was imprisoned twice, and there she wrote many letters. She often wrote she would have liked to have been a biologist had she not been born in a period of international upheaval. On Jan. 15, 1919, counterrevolutionary troops raided her home, and she was taken to their headquarters along with Karl Liebknecht, her co-founder of the Spartacist Party, where she was hit to the ground and shot in the head. Her death ended any possibility of giving effective battle to the Bolsheviks. During her life she wrote 700 books, pamphlets and articles about the political situation of her time.
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