A room of her own

This is the room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in which Julian Assange has lived and worked for a year.

This is the room in which Edward Snowden is living in limbo in the  Moscow Airport Transit Lounge.

[This post was moved from tumblr, when I stopped posting there; originally posted on July 2, 2013]

Following a video project that “brought to life” the militant Ulrike Meinhof, one year ago I started research on a related project about Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) – “Red Rosa,” the Marxist theorist, economist, philosopher and socialist revolutionary. This is an image of her prison cell in the Wronki Fortress, where she spent 1916-1917, one of the more humane prison spaces she inhabited. 

I could not do my research without the renewed interest in Luxemburg that generated recent translations into English of her voluminous letters andwritings, nor without the well-known biography on Luxemburg. But although there are many mentions and details of her prison stays in her these books, I could not find a timeline of the dates that Luxemburg spent in jail. DId I, not being an academic, miss something? I had to cobble together a timeline as best I could, because prison time was something Luxemburg accepted as a fact of life for a leader of the international socialist movement, or for anyone committed to the “cause.” 

26 August, 1904-24 October 1904 – Berlin-Zwickau Women’s Prison (a sentence commuted by one month, against Luxemburg’s protests, by an amnesty declared to commemorate the coronation of Friedrich August von Saxe ). Sentenced for insulting Emperor Wilhelm II in a public speech.

4 March 1906 – end of June 1906 – Incarcerated in Pawiak Prison, then moved to the notorious Citadel fortress, both in Warsaw. Sentenced for possession of illegal literature and correspondence with the Social Democratic Party of Germany. 

18 February 1915-18 February 1916 – Royal Prussian Prison for Women, Berlin

10 July 1916 – end of October 1916 – Royal Prussian Prison for Women, and 1 1/2 months in a dark tiny, unlit cell in the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz, Berlin.

End of October 1916 – 21 July 1917 – Wronki Fortress, near Poznan, in Prussian-annexed Poland.

22 July 1917 –  8 November 1918 – transferred to Breslau Prison to see out her term.

For the above four, jailed without trial for, amongst other similar offenses, giving a public speech urging German workers not to take up arms against workers of other nationalities, and for accusing the German military of maltreating soldiers and abusing them physically and psychically.

In effect, Luxemburg spent her years in prison due to a lack of laws protecting freedom of speech. But as dehumanizing and weakening as these stays were, she retained citizenship and access to at least a semblance of due process through her lawyers; she was in the limbo of prison cells, but not the limbo of placeless non-citizenship and non-residency.