Born to a Jewish family in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, Luxemburg became involved in radical politics at an early age via the Proletariat party, and fled to Switzerland in 1889.

She helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party in 1893, and in 1897 was awarded a Doctor of Law in political economy from the University of Zurich, becoming one of the first women in Europe to do so.

[9] Abraham built a successful timber business there, based in Zamość and Warsaw but with links as far away as Danzig, Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg; although coming from humble origins, he became a wealthy businessman with transnational connections who could afford to provide for his children an education abroad in the German Empire.

[9] Rory Castle writes: "From her grandfather and father [Rosa] inherited the belief that she was a Pole first and a Jew second, with her emotional connection to the Polish language and culture and her passionate opposition to Tsarism being of central importance.

At this school, the children were only permitted to speak Russian.,[17] but Róża attended secret circles in which the works of Polish poets and writers were studied; officially this was forbidden due to the policy of Russification against Poles being pursued in the Russian Empire at the time.

If she were to be recognised, tsarist authorities would imprison her, but the October/November political strike, part of the upheaval in Russia with particularly active elements in Congress Poland, convinced Róża that she was needed in Warsaw instead of Berlin.

[24] Although only the closest friends and comrades of Jogiches and Luxemburg knew of their return to the country, the Okhrana, thanks to a mole recruited by the tsarist authorities within the senior SDKPiL leadership, came to arrest them on 4 March 1906.

As Irene Gammel writes in a review of the English translation of the book in The Globe and Mail: "The three decades covered by the 230 letters in this collection provide the context for her major contributions as a political activist, socialist theorist and writer."

[32] According to Gammel, "In her controversial tome of 1913, The Accumulation of Capital, as well as through her work as a co-founder of the radical Spartacus League, Luxemburg helped to shape Germany's young democracy by advancing an international, rather than a nationalist, outlook.

[40] She added: "The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress.

[44] This took place during the early days of the German Revolution that began with the Kiel mutiny, which sparked the establishment of workers' and soldiers' councils across most of Germany to put an end to World War I and to the monarchy.

The SPD leaders tried to prevent the establishment of a Räterepublik (council republic) like the soviets of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 by pushing for early elections to a constituent assembly to determine Germany's future form of government.

She further expressed shame that her former colleague and friend, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had agreed to head the Cheka, the then Soviet security agency, and asked Radek to convey her opinions about all these matters to the Politburo in Moscow.

Luxemburg spoke at the founding conference of the German Communist Party on 31 December 1918: The progress of large-scale capitalist development during seventy years has brought us so far that today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all.

[50] On 8 January, Luxemburg's Red Flag printed a public statement by her, in which she called for revolutionary violence and no negotiations with the revolution's "mortal enemies", the SPD-led Republican Government of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann.

[52] In response to the uprising, Luxemburg's former student, German Chancellor and SPD leader Ebert ordered the Freikorps to suppress the Soviet-backed attempt at revolution, which was successfully crushed by 11 January 1919.

[55] The unit's officer commanding, Captain Waldemar Pabst, with Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, questioned them under torture and then, following an alleged telephone call to Defense Minister Gustav Noske, issued orders to summarily execute both prisoners.

Tomorrow the revolution will "rise up again, clashing its weapons," and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!The executions of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were the beginning of a new wave of paramilitary warfare in Berlin and across Germany.

In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel in 1962 and again in his memoirs, Captain Pabst alleged that Defence Minister Noske and Weimar Republic Chancellor Ebert had both covertly approved of his actions, but his account has not been confirmed, nor has his case been examined by the Parliament or Courts of Germany.

In 1993, Gietinger's research on his access to the previously restricted papers of Pabst, held at the Federal Military Archives, found him as central to the planning of the murder of Luxemburg and the shielding of those who had acted under his orders from subsequent criminal prosecution.

[64] According to Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky, in retaliation for Liebknecht and Luxemburg's murder, Soviet Premier Lenin issued orders to Gregory Zinoviev for the immediate arrest and summary execution of four Grand Dukes from the recently deposed House of Romanov, all of whom were uncles of the Nicholas II, the last Tsar.

But all the more imperious therefore becomes our duty to shield Rosa's memory from Stalin's calumny that has been caught by the hired functionaries of both hemispheres, and to pass on this truly beautiful, heroic, and tragic image to the young generations of the proletariat in all its grandeur and inspirational force.

This demonstration takes place on the second weekend of the month in Berlin-Friedrichshain, starting near the Frankfurter Tor and then to their graves in the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde, also known as the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Socialist Memorial).

To carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat and a socialist revolution in a single country surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule and in the fury of the bloodiest world war in human history – that is squaring the circle.

Any socialist party would have to fail in this task and perish – whether or not it made self-renunciation the guiding star of its policies.Bolshevik theorists such as Lenin and Trotsky responded to this criticism by arguing that Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to Russia of 1917.

[83] The Accumulation of Capital was harshly criticised by both Marxist and non-Marxist economists on the grounds that her logic was circular in proclaiming the impossibility of realising profits in a close-capitalist system and that her underconsumptionist theory was too crude.

[97] In 1919, Bertolt Brecht wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honouring Luxemburg and Kurt Weill set it to music in The Berlin Requiem in 1928: Red Rosa now has vanished too, And where she lies is hid from view.

The commission came about through the offices of Eduard Fuchs, who showed a proposal featuring Doric columns and medallions of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, prompting Mies' laughter and the comment "That would be a good monument for a banker".

Following the 1989 Peaceful Revolution and German reunification, CDU delegates on the Berlin city council recommended renaming all streets and squares honoring Marx, August Bebel, Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin.

The examiners decided to look for a surviving blood relative and in July 2009 the German Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that a great-niece of Luxemburg had been located – a 79-year-old woman named Irene Borde.