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
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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.
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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, 'Flowers for Rosa: Rosa Luxemburg found freedom pressing flowers in prison', Lux Magazine, https://lux-magazine.com/article/flowers-for-rosa/
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