The Polish-Jewish economist who became the sharpest mind of the German left, against the war, against the reformists in her own party, and against Lenin's dictatorship, and who was murdered in Berlin in January 1919.
The fork
August 1914. Her party, the Social Democrats, votes for the war credits, and the international socialism she believed in collapses in an afternoon. She spends most of the war in prison.
What they wanted
A revolution made by the workers themselves, not by a party on their behalf. Of the Bolsheviks she writes that freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently.
What it cost
Freed by the revolution of November 1918, she helps found the Communist Party of Germany and backs a rising in January she thought premature. Freikorps volunteers, hired by the new republic's Social Democratic government to put down the left, beat and shoot her and throw her body into the Landwehr Canal.
The fight
A democrat among revolutionaries, or a revolutionary who happened to lose? East Germany made her a saint and censored what she wrote about Lenin; Peter Nettl wrote the life before the saints took over.