SOURCE: "Rosa Luxemburg," in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, Random House, 1967, pp. 193-203.

Lichtheim was a German-born social historian and authority on Karl Marx. In the following essay, which was originally published in Encounter in 1966, he considers Nettl's portrait of Luxemburg and her contemporaries, and applauds the moral rigor of Luxemburg's work despite its technical flaws.

In the mythology of revolutionary socialism, east and west of the great divide, the name of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) is indissolubly linked with that of Karl Liebknecht: victims of the Spartacist rising in January 1919 whose brutal suppression by soldiers nominally responsible to a Social-Democratic government sealed in blood the wartime split of the German labor movement. Nor is this familiar assessment confined to Communist literature. In Western historiography too, their names invariably appear as though joined together by history's decree. Every study of the Weimar Republic opens perforce with an...