Hello, my name's David Rumserman and this is past, present future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today in our season of live podcasts recorded at the Regent Street Cinema in London,

it's another film of ideas.

I'm going to be talking to the writer and philosopher, Lear Ippie, about the film of the life of the revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg. It is in some ways, although only in a few ways, a conventional

biopic. But this is also a film about philosophy, about revolution,

and also about the impossibly blurred line,

particularly in the life of a revolutionary between the personal and the political.

Once again, I'm very conscious that the conversation that you're going to hear is in front of an audience, all of whom have just watched the film, Rosa Luxembourg, and you listening probably, I might say almost certainly, it's Christmas Eve, haven't just watched it.

So I want to say a little bit about the film that we are discussing.

It came out in 1986. It's a West German film. It was directed by the feminist filmmaker,

Margarita von Trotta. It stars Barbara Sukova, a German actor who won the Cannes Best

Actress Award, as it used to be called back then, in 1986.

As I suggested, it is a biopic. It's the story of a life. It does not tell that life

exactly chronologically. It starts in the middle in 1906, and it goes backwards as well as

forwards, backwards to the origin of Rosa Luxembourg's revolutionary activities

and also to her childhood, her upbringing in Poland. She was Polish, not German. And she came

from a pretty bourgeois background. One of the themes of the film is her lingering attachment to

the bourgeois world. Rosa Luxembourg wanted some of the trappings of a bourgeois life,

a husband, children, a family, a home, at the same time as all her life being devoted to the

overthrow of the form of economics and politics that made bourgeois life possible, she wanted

to emancipate the world from from the things she grew up in

without ever quite losing her attachment to it. But the film mainly projects forward, and particularly

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