ABSTRACT
But what is the meaning of love and how is it related to politics and narratives? These are some of the questions that I want to explore in this chapter by following lines of Luxemburg’s letters to her lover and comrade Leo Jogiches. Despite their personal character, Luxemburg’s letters to Jogiches are political narratives par excellence; and yet it took years for these letters to be read and recognised as such. Luxemburg was demonised after her murder both by her former socialist comrades as well as by the black forces that dominated the European political terrain in the interwar and post-war periods. But while the anti-Luxemburg campaign was in full swing, the publication of her prison letters created ‘an event’ that was to break the silence and oblivion that had followed her murder (Cedar & Cedar, 1923). Arendt has argued that the poetic beauty of these letters was catalytic in destroying ‘the propaganda image of bloodthirsty Red Rosa ’ (1968, p. 36). But these letters also gave rise to a similarly problematic discourse of Luxemburg as ‘a bird-watcher and lover of flowers, a woman whose guards said good-by to her with tears in their eyes when she left prison’ (1968, pp. 36-7). This is the nature of political narratives after all: they are always in an agonistic relation with their times, they always carry ambiguous meanings and set in motion effects that can never be predicted or controlled. Reading political narratives thus involves an understanding of their conditions of possibility, which is what I want to do next by looking at biographical traces of the Luxemburg-Jogiches relationship, ‘one of the great and tragic love stories of Socialism’ according to her biographer (Nettl, cited in Arendt, 1968, p. 45).
