Flowers For Rosa

In April 1915, confined to a Berlin women’s prison for her anti-war activities, the socialist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg wrote to a friend and lover that she’d entered one of the flowers he’d sent her into her herbarium. “That was a greater snowdrop — Leucojum vernum,” she informed him; it was distinguishable from the lesser snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, by the shape and number of leaves. No mere hobby spawned of boredom, botany was an enduring interest of Luxemburg’s, along with geology. The greater snowdrop went into the eleventh of a series of identical notebooks she’d begun years earlier, carefully identifying and labeling hundreds of plant specimens. In prison, she managed to set up a table specifically for the purpose of preserving flowers that arrived in letters or grew on the prison grounds.

Piercing the empty days and hours of her sentence, the catalog of flowers was part of Luxemburg’s connection to another type of time, a world of growth cycles and biological activity that enraptured her. “An entire generation of blossoms under my watchful gaze opened themselves up to life, then faded and died,” Luxemburg wrote in 1917 from Wronke, a prison where she was allowed to wander the grounds and even keep a small garden. Her letters contain entire paragraphs describing the minute activities of birds, ants, and wasps, as well one account of dragging a chair outside and sitting motionless for hours, watching the changing sky. Luxemburg knew enough about bird migrations and flowering patterns to direct people where and when to observe particular species on her behalf. “Hurry up,” she wrote to a friend, urging her to visit the Berlin Botanical Garden, “since these are the last days for most of the songbirds; at the end of August — beginning of September, they leave for the south again.”

In the spring of 1917, Luxemburg was transferred to a prison in Breslau. There, she was allowed less movement and there was less to look at anyway. “There is no chance of ‘discovering’ anything here in the great paved courtyard,” she complained to a friend. But a letter dated barely two weeks later mentions two little strips of sad and trampled grass. Within them, she’d already identified a handful of species, including yarrow and hawkweed, whose tiny yellow flowers had attracted cabbage butterflies. One of the last specimens in the herbarium she plucked from the prison courtyard: three leaves from a Verbascum lychnitis, white mullein, a short-lived weed that takes root in disturbed areas.

Luxemburg the revolutionary and Luxemburg the botanist may seem hard to square at first. Indeed, when she wrote to a friend that she felt more at home in a garden plot than in a party congress, she sounded apologetic, adding, “Surely I can tell you this, since you will not immediately suspect me of betraying socialism!” But seen from another angle, such squaring might not be necessary. When, in The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg defends the “unobstructed, effervescing life” that flourishes only under conditions of freedom and which can so easily be killed by bureaucracy, it’s hard not to think of the plants and animals she ardently portrays in her letters. When she says that a bird song sounds the same twice only to a “crude and indifferent ear,” or crosses out and corrects her own notes in the herbarium, one sees her insistence on faithful observation of the social and political world as it really is, in all its living detail. And when she describes the way a bird song implies its entire life and habitat — “the whole interests me, not some torn-off detail” — she could just as easily be describing her political position against her shortsighted, reformist contemporaries.

The tenderness with which Luxemburg preserved these flowers, described a rainstorm, or chronicled the behavior of a favorite titmouse might offer a clue regarding what one biographer called her “militant optimism.” In the herbarium pages, as in her letters, there is no separating analysis and learning from a kind of amor mundi, a never-ending love affair with complexity and the desire to do justice to it. If the manifold shapes that life takes on can elude abstraction or even total description — whether in the garden plot or the mass strike — this is not only not a source of frustration, but a reason to celebrate. “Dear God! How beautiful the world is, and life!” she wrote to a friend from Wronke, after listing out, in affectionate detail, the activities of townspeople she could see from the prison.

There are only four entries in the final volume of the herbarium. The last one, a few pages after the prison yard mullein, includes leaves from three not-yet-labeled plants. After that, Luxemburg was released from Breslau and assassinated by a right-wing paramilitary group a few months later. Her flower-filled notebooks did not come to light again until 2009, when someone discovered them in a box in the Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw. Looking at the specimens now, I’m struck most by one thing most of all: how much of their color has survived the intervening century. To find the flowers beautiful, as she did, feels like a form of time travel, connecting the unfulfilled promise of her work to the demands of the present. Snowdrops still grow in the fields, and the time is still waiting to be seized. “This day is a gift to you like a rose in full bloom,” Luxemburg wrote to a friend, “lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.”

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist and the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

The images above are reproduced from Rosa Luxemburg, Herbier de Prison, edited and introduced by Muriel Pic and published by Heróes Press in 2023. The names and descriptions are taken from Luxemburg’s own inscriptions beneath the pressed plants, translated from the French edition.