EUROSOLAR President Professor Droege pays tribute:
Today 105 years ago the Jewish Russian-Polish and naturalized German anti-war activist working to prevent World War I, women’s rights advocate and labor movement leader Dr. Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison about her horror about the violence against nature brought by human ‘civilization’. *
Wronke, May 2, 1917
(…) What am I reading? Mainly natural science: plant geography and animal geography. Yesterday I was reading about the cause of the dwindling of songbirds in Germany: it is the increasing rational forestry culture, garden culture and arable farming that are destroying all their natural nesting and feeding conditions: hollow trees, wasteland, undergrowth, withered leaves on the garden soil – step by step. I felt so much pain when I read this. It is not about the song for the people that I am concerned with, but the image of the silent inexorable demise of these defenseless little creatures hurt me so much that it made me cry. It reminded me of a Russian book by Prof. Sieber about the demise of the redskins in North America, which I still read in Zurich: they are being pushed off their soil step by step by the cultured people in exactly the same way and are being abandoned to a silent, cruel demise.But of course I am sick that now everything shakes me so deeply. Or do you know? I sometimes have the feeling that I am not a real human being, but also some bird or other animal in human form; inwardly I feel much more at home in such a piece of garden as here or in the field among bumblebees and grass than – at a party congress. I can tell you all this: you will not immediately smell betrayal of socialism. You know, I will still hopefully die on the post: in a street battle or in the penitentiary. But my innermost self belongs more to my favourite bird, the cole tit, than to the “comrades”.
* Rosa Luxemburg directed this letter to Sophie Liebknecht, the Russian-born socialist and feminist, second wife to Dr. Karl Liebknecht, anti-militarist and original member of the Social Democratic Party from 1900. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in 1919 on higher orders by a military riflemen division occupying Berlin. Luxemburg and Liebknecht became martyrs for socialism in Germany and throughout the world.
The Solar Age is focused on the preservation, and restoration of a nature that is whole again. EUROSOLAR’s Regenerative Decade calls for immediate action to focus collectively and comprehensively on this unprecedented task.
