My grandfather Kostja

My grandfather Kostja Zetkin had an extremely interesting life. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time talking to him when I visited him at his home in British Columbia when I was younger, by that time he would speak mostly German to me with a big smile on his face completely forgetting that I didn’t understand a word he said. He was my step-grandfather as my grandmother Gertrude married him well after my father had been born.

This is a picture of Kostja as a young man on the left and as a much younger man on the right with his girlfriend Rosa Luxemburg. Kostja’s mother was Clara Zetkin, one of the leaders of the Weimar Republic and a staunch working-class feminist and advocate for women’s rights.

Clara’s protégé was Rosa, a well-known socialist leader in her own right, whose power became so threatening to the enemies of Weimar, that she and her cohort were executed by the German Freikorps and thrown into the Berlin Canal.

The Zetkin name also became so toxic by the 30s that Costa and my grandmother had to flee the country and begin a long journey to freedom and eventually to America and then Canada.

Kostja is one of those people I wish I could’ve spent more time with and learning about. Funny enough there was a German movie made about Rosa Luxembourg a number of years ago, Kostja was one of the main protagonists and her lover, but strangely enough they killed them off halfway through the film, which I found odd as I knew him well into his 90s.