This article, by Rosa Luxemburg, was published on May 4, 1899 in the Leipziger Volkszeitung (LVZ) newspaper. The LVZ was associated with the German Social Democratic Party. From 1898 to 1902, Luxemburg published over 90 articles in that publication. Her topics covered topics such as militarism, social reform and revolution. But, as this article demonstrates, she was also able to turn her attention to the miseries and pain of individuals in the working class.
So far as I know, the article has not previously been translated into English. The translation was prepared for Hard Crackers. The original German version is available at https://rosaluxemburgwerke.de/buecher/band-1-1/seite/467.
ย —John Garvey
In Schonhauser Allee, Number 54, on the 26th of March, the merchant Wilhelm Histermann killed his 8 and 6 year old daughters Margarete and Erna at the age of 38 and then hanged himself. In a letter that he left on the table, he said that the hardship and inability to work as a result of increasing blindness forced him to forego this world, that he hoped to find a better one and that he would take the children with him to a better afterlife, so as not to impose on anyone the burden of their preservation. The bodies were picked up from the showhouse, the letter was transferred from police custody to the court.
Berlin local note
Another one fell, and what a Polish proverb says applies: Until the sun rises, the dew eats our eyes.
At the moment when he was wrestling with the idea of death and murder, a mixed chorus of human voices came to him through the open window. down in the courtyard the lieutenant’s boy was patting the carpet and flirting with the landlord’s red-cheeked maid. The plumber in the house next door was hammering monotonously like a woodpecker with a bright metallic sound. A barrel organ began the drinking aria from โTraviataโ and suddenly interrupted it with the porter’s harsh reprimand. The rattle of the horse-drawn tram passing by came into the room from the street. City life gasped and rumbled all around. In the same town, on the same street, in the same house, wall to wall, just a step away, people were swarming, everyone was busy going about their daily business, everyone was following their life companion, and not a soul cared about the crime. With their own human lives struggling to die, no one took a look at the misery, at the demise of three living beings. Only a thin wall, just a few steps, separated the unfortunate man from his fellow human beings, and yet between him and them lay an unbridgeable abyss. They were the same people, they spoke the same language, were from the same country, and yet if they were from the other part of the world, a different race, if they were from the Moon, it couldn’t be more foreign, more indifferent, more unknown to them. โSocietyโ, the combination of individual people into a โhigher unityโ, the โorganic wholeโ was at that moment a bold lie, a phantom, it did not exist, it was not there. The fading human life with its terrible torment trembling all alone, connected to no one, encompassed by no whole, articulated and associated with no one, separated from everyone and abandoned, dependent on himself, in the middle of the crowd of people like a drowning man in a distant ocean, like a little dust swirling in the air. A splinter that had fallen away from all of humanity, he struggled in loneliness, in spiritual and physical darkness, and died helplessly in his unlimited โindividual freedomโ, fallen, free in the fight for existence, collapsed, a great lord, a cultured man, together in his miserable bed, dying on a garbage heap like a dog rejected by everyone.
And only after the terrible crime against nature, when the child murder and suicide took place, did โsocietyโ become truth, fiction become reality. It advanced gravely, the โsocietyโ with a policeman’s uniform and a saber, it asserted its right as the โwholeโ, as the โhigher unitโ: it took possession of the human corpses, it recorded the triple life drama that was being played out and opened an investigation to pass judgment on the crime that had occurred.
When the ancient slave, crucified by his master, writhed in unspeakable agony, when the serf fell under the rod of his overseers or collapsed under the burden of work and poverty, there at least lay man’s crime against man, society’s crime against the individual, exposed, terrible in its nakedness, outrageously blatant in its brutality. The crucified slave, the martyred serf, died with a curse on his lips, and his dying gaze, full of hatred and proclaiming revenge, fell on his tormentors.
Only bourgeois society spread the veil of invisibility over its crimes. Only it broke all bonds between people and left the individual to his fate, his misery and his ruin, only to remember him after his dehumanization – mental or physical, through murder or suicide. Only it forced people to disembowel themselves and murder their children – in the bright sunlight, in the middle of a noisy market street, in the middle of the monotonous, dull rumbling and rattling of everyday life, which doesn’t last a second with the fallen man, not a glance at his corpse appreciated. Only bourgeois society has taken the shudder away from their mass murder because it has made it commonplace, dulling the senses of both the victims and the tormentors, the drama of human existence through human triviality, the scream of a perishing man through the aria of the barrel organ, the corpse of a fallen man covered by the dust of the big city.
And as for us, don’t we skim with a bored look everyday the mixed news on the penultimate page of our daily newspaper, that big garbage bin in which the waste of civil society – theft, murder, suicide, accidents – is dumped every day? Don’t we go to work and go to bed from work in dull calm? And don’t we silently believe it because the hairdresser tells us in a nasal voice that there’s been a break-in in the house opposite, because the electric trains rattle through the street with mechanical regularity, because the trees and the grounds are budding and blooming as if everything would be in perfect order, because every evening at the opera the performance goes on quietly, don’t we ourselves secretly believe that the story could continue at this pace for a while, that nothing special would happen and that at best we can still have our drink in peace and quiet?
And yet at every moment, somewhere next to us, a victim falls, through no fault of his own, helpless, abandoned, with a terrible riddle in his heart, with a terrible question on his lips, with an astonished, hopeless look at the million-headed and yet headless people, with a million beating and yet heartless hearts, encompassing millions of human and yet inhumans, deaf, blind monstersโcivil society!
There is an eerie Slavic folk tale about Wij, which goes like this: There was once a human- inhabited place in which evil spirits had taken up residence. Invisible and flitting among the people like light shadows, they wreaked havoc, desecrated and killed and drank human blood. Their crimes were innumerable and terrible, so terrible that no one dared tell them to one another, and those to whom they were told in whispers had their hair turned white with horror and they themselves became old men. And there was no remedy, no salvation against the evil spirits, since you couldn’t see them and couldn’t hit them, even if you felt them around you and felt their scary flight, their terrible touch. Then it was said that only one thing could break the power of the evil spirits, if the Wij, the iron man who Lived hidden in the deepest depths of the earth, with long eyelids that reached to the ground, would see and show the evil spirits. They went looking for the Wij, found him and led the Iron Man with a heavy step and closed eyes to the abode of the evil ones. โLift my eyelids,โ Wij said, his voice like the creaking of rusted iron. With difficulty one lifted his heavy iron eyelids, which hung down to his feet, he looked up and pointed with his iron finger at the evil group of spirits, which at the same moment became visible and fell broken to the ground with frightened flapping of their wings.
The โiron manโ, that man of iron muscles, the iron plow, the iron hammer, the Iron wheel – the man of work has been found, he has emerged from the dark ground of the earth, where society has banished him, to the sunny surface of the earth. All you have to do is lift his heavy eyelids so that he can see and stretch out his iron hand so that the invisible evil spirits that have plagued humanity for thousands of years fall helpless to the ground.
Leipziger Volkszeitung.
No. 101 from May 4, 1899