Roses Are Red: The Peculiar Remembrance of Rosa Luxemburg in Lyric Poetry

Abstract

This article investigates how Luxemburg has been remembered in lyric written in German. Not seeking to calibrate her legacy as such, it rather explores how poets have represented and imagined her: the moments they select to encapsulate her significance, the actions and locations with which they associ- ate her, and their visions of her physical body. It traces patterns of remembrance in the inspired by Luxemburg's assassination, elucidating the contribution of lyric as quite distinct from the various modes of commemorative prose writing or the rituals and monuments marking her memory. It defines, for the first time, a corpus of poetry that was produced between 1919 and 1999 and extends from utterly forgotten texts to those in canonical oeuvres. This par- ticular corpus, although continuing the long tradition of elegy and commemora- tion composed by German-language poets, also suggests a potential flaw in lyric remembrance. The inquiry opens with a consideration of the minimal elements required to evoke Luxemburg in a poem and the function of venue and location in signalling both the murder and its German significance. In examining a range of poems in widely differing lyric modes, it then reveals how con- sistently the historical woman's life and work have been passed over. Rather, she has been evoked in crime poems that explore the status of her murder as an open secret. Whereas these poems single her out as the victim of a very particu- lar, yet representative, crime, in others the associative work of the lyric entwines her with the beloved of the love poem tradition. These two clusters of poems do not overlap, but the female bodily presence imagined in both raises questions regarding the interplay of gender and memory in poetry. For both, the monikers Germans used for her during her lifetime rote Rosa and die blutige - undergo a radical expansion, with red signalling not only (and often scarcely at all) her commitment to communism but rather blood sacrifice and the romantic red rose. The interplay of gender and memory is especially fore- grounded where the killing is commemorated using the voices of those responsi- ble for it. Equally, it is foregrounded where the crime poems have been superseded by love poems. While pinpointing the emotional polarity between these two clusters within the corpus of poems, their elucidation here also