A Rose for Red Rosa: On the Corpse of Rosa Luxemburg
A response to a prompt from Brandon Shimoda:
3. Briefly describe a grave you have visited of a person to whom you are not related (i.e. a poet, writer, artist, activist, elder, historical figure, friend). For example, describe one thing that you saw there.
🌹 a red rose for Red Rosa 🌹 Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg at the Lichtenstein Bridge over the Landwehr Canal on the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten Park, where Rosa’s body was thrown into the canal on the night of January 15, 1919. It was not her grave. A grave is a site where the energies generated by ritual acts hover, where the living can’t help but gather to practice a kind of sociality that pays no heed to the border between life and death. What is this need for the emblazoned name to mark the void left in the wake of the departed? Psychoanalysts will tell you, the mind does not know negatives.
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Rosa Luxemburg was a communist revolutionary, a Polish-born German (secular) Jew also known for her piercing analysis of the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and war, which she described in her masterwork The Accumulation of Capital. Her haters will tell you she was too hasty in her attempt to launch a revolution in Germany, that she didn’t understand Volume II of Marx’s Capital, that the underconsumptionist theory of crisis leads you to crude Keynesianism. Her defenders will tell you she was a martyr who uncovered capitalism’s drive toward territorial expansion and prophesied the rise of Nazism in a pamphlet that argued: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.” (Are we at the same crossroads now? The question terrifies me.)
She was one of “history’s vanquished”—a revolutionary spark snuffed out by the proto-Nazi Freikorps at the behest of Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader and German Chancellor Friedrich Ebert.
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The corpse of Red Rosa does not rest in the grave that bears her name. We know this because the corpse they pulled out of the Landwehr Canal and buried under her name “did not agree with the anatomical peculiarities of Luxemburg’s body”—she had congenital hip dysplasia, a condition that caused her legs to be of different lengths. She walked with a limp and had a gold tooth. She was shot in the head before she was tossed into the canal 101 years ago. When the canal thawed, a waterlogged corpse was fished out of the water and buried under her name. How could the forensic examiners have possibly mistaken the even-legged corpse for hers? Fritz Strassmann, one of the examiners, had even written the definitive textbook on performing autopsies.
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Do not read about what happens to a waterlogged corpse. (Which I did, when I learned, one week ago, that my ex-girlfriend’s corpse was fished out of the Connecticut River. Her body had to be identified by her dental records.)
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Rosa once wrote: “My tombstone may have only two syllables on it: ‘tsvee tsvee’ (zwi zwi). That’s the call of the tomtits, and I can imitate it so well that they come running here right away. It’s usually a clear, fine sound, as sparkling as a steel needle. But imagine! For some days now there’s been a very small warble in this tsvee-tsvee, a tiny chest-note. And do you know what that means? That is the first rustling of the coming spring.”
Instead, her tombstone unceremoniously reads: “murdered Jan 15, 1919.”
If only a grave of onomatopoeias could be erected for dear Rosa! Tsvee tsvee. Her senses were heightened by the isolation she endured as a political prisoner. A head full of chirps and brain blooms. It wasn’t just the song of the tomtits she loved, but everything that signaled the coming of spring: most of all the flowers. Of all the flowers, she loved the snowdrop most. During her intermittent stints in prison she found comfort in studying botany and assembling her herbarium. Her friends would bring her plant specimens. She would put them in her herbarium, marking down both their German and Latin names, occasionally making errors that autodidacts are prone to making (like mispronouncing a word because you’ve only ever read it in a book).
From Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium Can the revolutionary also be a lay botanist? What is the disjunction between the avatar of the revolutionary and their sensuous mode of inhabiting the world? And why was I surprised that someone who was so perspicacious on matters of political economy could harbor such an intense love of flowers?
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While passing through Berlin for a poetry reading I went to a memorial for Rosa Luxemburg beneath the Lichtenstein Bridge, where her body had been dumped into the canal. All I saw: the rifle butt to the head, the fear, the shot, the splash. The scene ricocheted across a century and exploded in my brain as shrapnel. I had brought a red rose with me. I threw the petals into the water and wept.
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We still don’t know what happened to the corpse of Rosa.
“rumors had long been circulating at the Charité that the body of Red Rosa never actually left the hospital”
In the cellar of the hospital’s medical history museum, a preserved corpse—missing its head, feet and hands—was discovered by forensic pathologist Michael Tsokos around a decade ago. It dated to the period when Rosa was executed and showed signs of being waterlogged. Tests concluded that the corpse belonged to a woman who died between age 40 and 50 (Rosa was 47 when she was murdered) and had legs of different lengths.
The torso “had been kept on display in the pathology department of Charité Hospital as a classic example of a water corpse or ‘floater’ until 2007.”
It was used to teach medical students about a natural mummification process where the fat of the corpse is transformed into adipocere or “grave wax.”
Submerged in an anaerobic environment, the corpse undergoes a chemical process that turns it into a lump of soap.
Was the soap-torso Rosa’s? In the absence of definitive proof, it was interred at an unknown location.
(Full post curated by Brandon: https://future-feed.net/the-afterlife-part-4-the-ancestors-reside-in-the-answers-themselves)
