Rosa Luxemburg, the petite, fashionably attired, University educated economist, was a passionately committed Marxist, eloquent public speaker and polemicist, selfless advocate of better working conditions for the masses, anti-war agitator, and co-founder of the Communist Party in Germany. She was murdered by military order on January 15, 1919.

Rosa Luxemburg was also a staunch friend, ardent lover, devoted to her cat Mimi, a botanist and artist; she loved poetry and English literature, longed for a stable home life with husband and child. Her uneasy balancing act of public commitment, private pleasures, and unfulfilled yearnings is recorded in an a chronological pattern of biographical, geographical, and cultural evidence blended with the biographer’s speculative, intuitive understanding of her subject’s inner life as she recreates the frenetic, exciting, dangerous public life and fleeting loves of an unusually strong, emancipated woman, feared by the political and military powers of the Weimar Republic but revered by its working poor and still honored on the anniversary of her death each year in Berlin.