💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › erich-muhsam-articles.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:40:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Articles
Author: Erich Mühsam
Date: 1927–1930
Language: en
Topics: Germany, Sacco and Vanzetti
Source: Retrieved on June 27, 2011 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120320113018/http://erichinenglish.org/articles.html

Erich Mühsam

Articles

“Sacco and Vanzetti”, Fanal , Vol.1, No.8 (May 1927), pp.125–6

“Sacco and Vanzetti”

In these parts the judges are called Jürgens, Nieder or Vogt, in the

U.S.A the workers delight in their kin, who go by names like Thayer, for

example. Mr. Thayer is thirsting for blood — or rather for electricity,

since in modern America (unlike us) they no longer chop off heads if

they seethe with unpopular views of life. For seven years now the

anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti have been sitting in prison,

condemned to death for robbery-murder. Seven years long they have been

waiting from day to day for the repealing or the carrying out of the

sentence. Throughout seven years proof upon proof has been piling up

which have long ago destroyed any possibility that the two strike

leaders could have had the slightest thing to do with the robbery-murder

which has been laid at their feet. The man who in fact committed the

murder has been tracked down and has confessed to the deed. No matter:

Mr. Thayer has conclusively confirmed the death sentence in his judgment

on this final appeal, and each new dawn leaves us in doubt whether or

not our comrades Sacco and Vanzetti are still among the living. In

November it will be 40 years since comrades Parsons, Spieß, Schwab,

Fischer and Singg [sic: Lingg] were dragged to the gallows; those who

reached this judgment and had it carried out knew just as well that

those anarchist strike leaders had nothing to do with tossing the bomb

in the Chicago Haymarket, as Mr. Thayer knows today that Sacco and

Vanzetti should do penance for a crime that they have not committed. But

should the responsible authority make no use of its right of pardon,

then even so things will turn out just as in Chicago 40 years ago: it

will be regrettably determined that the innocence of the executed could,

unfortunately, be proven after the fact, and that the means of reviving

the dead has unfortunately not yet been discovered. But the augurs will

grin because the anarchists erroneously executed as robbers and

murderers will organize no more strikes in the future, just as the

Chicago victims omitted to do after their deaths. The representative of

the land of the free and the brave in Berlin, Ambassador Schurmann,

refused to receive a deputation of the peace federation, namely the

pacifists Ludwig Quidde, Helmut v. Gerlach and Helene Stöcker, who were

to communicate to him that the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti would be

looked upon by every decent person as a heinous judicial murder. Mr.

Schurmann shows his solidarity with Mr. Thayer; let us show our

solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti.

“Save Sacco and Vanzetti!” Fanal , Vol.1, No.9 (June 1927), p.144

“SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI!”

The lives of the comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, condemned to death 7 years

ago, are in the greatest danger! Unless the revolutionary

world-proletariat prevents it, the sentence will be carried out in early

July! Workers! Use the means available to you to fight against the

intended crime of America capital! Boycott the United States! Don’t buy

any goods imported from North America!

“American Import”, Fanal , Vol.1, No.10 (July 1927), pp.155–6

“American Import”

Two American sportsmen have proven to the Royal-Prussian Minister of

Finance Oskar Hergt, currently Attorney General of the German republic,

that his opinion expressed in 1917, that “the Americans can’t swim, they

can’t fly, they won’t come!” — was inaccurate. In the next war they

won’t just swim over, like the last time, but fly over as well, and the

German cities will be smashed or incinerated by certified American bombs

with certified American poison gas. It was all cheerful celebration as

Messrs. Chamberlin and Levine demonstrated the new achievement by

example of their trans-oceanic flight. There wasn’t a delicacy they

weren’t fed, even Herr Noske was served up to them in Hannover in

person, for mutual admiration. From what we are told, they want to visit

Munich, as well — or had they already there? — , where the financial

sponsor and passenger on the undertaking will likely have to assume a

pseudonym. It will take a while before any streets are named after him,

at any rate: there will be a Leviné Street in Munich later anyhow, once

the future and then final Bavarian Soviet Republic remembers deeds and

heroes whose significance is greater than any ever so impressive

sporting act of bravery. (Is it, by the way, generally well known in the

German Republic at whose expense the firing squad execution of comrade

Eugen Leviné occured, ordered by the Social Democratic government of

Hoffman-Schneppenhorst-Segitz? Well, the expenses for the execution were

recovered from the widow of the man they had murdered on the spot; she

had to pay for the bullets with which they killed her husband). Yes,

thus leads an accidental identity of names to all sorts of

reminiscences, and it is just a shame that Mr. Chamberlin is an ‘a’ too

poor to compare with the famous family, of which several members have

already professionally employed the possible practical applications of

technical inventions in means of transportation for the purpose of mass

murder.

Incidentally: the Norwegian workers have proposed boycotting every

American import from the United States, in protest against the

miscarriage of justice that’s been carried out against comrades Sacco

and Vanzetti for 7 years now and to avert their murder by the State. It

now seems that the affair is to be reexamined by a special committee.

The lives of the revolutionaries have been likely extended thereby, but

by no means saved. The suspicion that this committee will orient itself

according to the same bought witnesses and informants as the previous

courts, and that the whole reexamination will be a mere farce, in order

to quiet the uproar with proof that anarchists are simply robbers and

murderers, — this suspicion appears now quite justified, especially when

one knows the traditions of political justice in general, particularly

in America. The boycott of North American imports is precisely now more

imperative than ever. This boycott should not be limited to the import

of goods, but be extended to the entry of persons. The proletarians of

Berlin, however, spurred on by the drunken enthusiasm of the Vorwärts,

roared their cheers and hurrahs upon the arrival of the two aviators at

the tops of their lungs alongside the militarists, the petty bourgeois

and the sporting industrialists. If they had to be present for the

arrival of the trans-Atlantic flight, then they should have greeted

Judge Thayer’s fellow countrymen with the menacing cry of “Sacco and

Vanzetti!”, rather than with cheers and good wishes. Wherever they eat

breakfast and stand at attention, wherever they drive up and are sung

to, the names of the two men slanderously condemned to death out of

political infamy must ring in their ears. Let war speculators and those

who worship world records celebrate their Chamberlin and Levine; it is

appropriate for the working class to remember their comrades Sacco and

Vanzetti — and to let the bourgeoisie take note of it!

“Cultural Highpoints”, Fanal , Vol.1, No.11 (Aug. 1927), pp.173–174

“Cultural Highpoints”

Once again the cursed lack of space prevents treatment of a number of

cultural highpoints worthy of attention. In Germany one can confidently

skip over Harry Domela and proceed to the order of the day. We already

knew that counts, students, officers, hoteliers, judges and lackeys of

all sorts hereabouts hurl themselves after food like Ludendorff at the

Munich Officers’ Hall as soon as things start to smelling

Hohenzollerish, and it’s hardly surprising that a petty con artist can

easily surpass all the pillars of society in intelligence, without

thereby himself needing to be all too intelligent. — What’s more painful

is not being able to dedicate an extended treatment to the bone finds in

the Ulap territory. I must limit myself to stating that it appears to me

to be absolutely proven that these human remains have their origin in

the Noske murders of 1919. Even if it were true that no boots or

clothing were found on them (wherefore the Vorwärts in its enthusiasm

indicates that the dead succumbed to their wounds in 1813 in the French

hospital and died as well 60 years later from cholera), it should

perhaps be remembered that the White Guards, for example in Munich,

slaughtered hardly a comrade from whom they didn’t rob not only watch

and finger rings but also suits and shoes. Such requisitions were known

to go unpunished (my own claims for compensation for that which was

plundered after my arrest during a ‘house search’ — the lawmen didn’t

leave me and my wife a single sock behind — were rejected with the

justification that the robbery was committed by government troops on

duty, wherefore the state and the city are not required to provide

compensation); so the nakedness of the bones, on which nevertheless were

found remnants of field-gray fabric and individual sailors’ buttons, is

no more astonishing. It’s only astonishing that the Marloh trial seems

to be already completely forgotten. Otherwise, the attempted denial of

any possibility that 8 years ago in Berlin unknown corpses had been

dispensed of in secretly dug mass graves would be too ridiculous to be

tried. The living can be temporarily silenced in the prisons, but — the

Vorwärts might take note — no Noske can forbid the dead to speak any

more. And their speech testifies loud and clear to the culture of our

time.

Sacco and Vanzetti, too, will let their voices ring out over the world,

louder still from the grave than from prison, if the American

executioners should really dare to murder them. Will they? Today it is

said that the condemned have been transferred to the death cells,

tomorrow, that new exonerating evidence has come to light, — and now we

hear that Vanzetti has gone on hunger strike. At the same time, August

10^(th) is given as the date on which the electric chair is to go into

operation. What is true? It is true that American culture presents the

spectacle of the greatest judicial infamy known thus far from any era

and any from country. For a full 7 years now they have been playing with

lives of two people just as an eight year-old boy would likely play with

the life of a fly for half-an-hour: you must die, you murderers, you

bandits — you will die next week. Now, it’s true, we don’t yet know

exactly whether you are murderers and bandits or just anarchists; so we

want to let you live another couple of weeks. So, next month you’ll

definitely buy it; well then, we’re going to give you another

postponement. It’s been going on like this for seven years now! If

humanity had just a shred of imagination, then no people in the world

would tolerate a government in their country that continued to maintain

any form of relations with the United States, then no worker anywhere

would volunteer to load or unload an American ship, then every European

would avoid personal contact with American vacationers as if they were

lepers and would demand that they prove what they have already done to

protest the slow murder of two revolutionaries in their own country,

before anyone should offer them a piece of bread to eat and a chair to

sit in. Yes, if people had imagination...

“The Lessons from Boston”, Fanal , Vol.1, No.12 (Sept. 1927),

pp.178–184

“The Lessons from Boston”

Sacco and Vanzetti have fallen for the Proletariat. Their names live.

The harvest that they have sown will rise up. Woe to the murderers!...

The world revolutionary situation which 13 years ago became acute with

the Vienna ultimatum to the Belgrade government has in the racing

transformation of its modes of appearance reached a phase which shows

the battle energy of the reaction at its highest intensity, while at the

same time, however, it visibly suggests the renewed high tide of

revolutionary destructive power. We contemporaries of the tremendous

events from which the history of the next centuries will take its entire

content tend, at the ebbing away of that swell of intense struggling by

the one or the other side, to the resigned opinion that now for a long

time victory and defeat have been decided. We are too excitedly

preoccupied with the experiences of the hours and days to be able to

discern the racing tempo of the fateful march of time by the standards

of historical perspective. Yet how unjustified, even laughable, is the

skeptical mode of reasoning: Mussolini’s sham economy in Italy has

prevailed now for over five years already, which is proved by the

continual consolidation of the fascist terror, — becomes immediately

apparent when for comparison one consults the chronological sequence of

well-known historical occurrences from the distant past. The events of

the great French Revolution appear to us like a cataract of sudden

precipitous eventualities, and yet it took from the storming of the

Bastille (July 14, 1789) over three years until the Republic was even

proclaimed (September 21, 1792). The aim herein was merely the removal

of the symbol characterizing the feudal regime which had already

collapsed into ruins, whereas Fascism is the new, ambitiously conceived

attempt to maintain the capitalist economy (which though not yet crushed

is staggering about with multiple lesions) by the primitive methods of

the ancient tyrants, modernized only in terms of technical procedure.

Through 7 years the servants of American justice tortured in prison the

two anarchists slandered as robbers and murderers, over 6 years long

hung the Damocles sword of the final death sentence over their heads,

until it was carried out. But even in the country which has so far

remained almost entirely directly unaffected by the disruptions to the

foundations of society caused by the world revolution now underway, the

traditional brutality, unscrupulousness and swaggering arrogance of the

democratic billionaires’ functionaries retreated again and again over

the course of years before the protest of the entirety of laboring

humanity. Do these 7 years not show perfectly clearly that nothing which

moves or excites us, which disheartens us or gives us hope, nothing

which today is history, can be regarded as concluded and stabilized? The

Sacco and Vanzetti case is older than all of fascism.

Since the death of the two men was decided upon, who had won for

themselves at strikes the trust of the Massachusetts workers, who had

uncovered and made the object of revolutionary demonstrations the

scandalous deeds at the court jail in New York City, the physical

torture and murder of their comrade Salsedo; since the dastardly outrage

was undertaken, to doom these fighters to the electric chair for their

views like highway robbers, the social world outlook has changed a

hundred times over in all countries and corners of the globe. Wars have

been waged in Russia and the Balkans, in Poland, Syria and Marokko,

revolutions have been carried out, colonial peoples have risen up; the

effects of the World War assumed unanticipated forms: the currencies

failed, entire peoples, above all the German, let themselves be cleaned

to the bone by individual big-time hustlers, profiteering schemes of

insane dimensions sprouted up, then collapsed, corruption, murderous

betrayals, the unleashing of all brutality and insanity illustrate

everywhere the social and political situation. Alienated from the truth

and blind to reality one celebrates the paper assurances of a

constitution strung together from paragraphs of criminal code, pale with

fear of revolution, which must serve to conceal capital’s most odious

violations against the proletariat. Pre-March [Vormärzlich: i.e. the

historical period from 1815 to the March revolution of 1848] conditions

are to be newly consolidated through elimination of jury courts,

reintroduction of censorship, depriving the youth of their rights,

handing over the schools to the church, limiting and endangering the

right to strike and unionize, imposition of military influence on the

public educational institutions, and every form of most audacious

reaction and fear mongering, and since this has lasted now a while

already, — at any rate a part of the time that Sacco and Vanzetti had to

await the execution of their sentence — , the whole world believed that

the conflict had been settled, the League of Nations was the foundation

of eternal relations between states, the storm had settled and God had

ordained that the day after tomorrow was to be the day before yesterday

once again. Bucharin himself 2 years ago already fatalistically

acquiesced and conceded to the Communist parties that capitalism is to

be regarded as provisionally stabilized and that they were to act

accordingly, which in truth they faithfully did. Actually, this error

bordering on madness only accomplished that the structure of capitalism,

ripe for collapse, was propped up again by Russia, while the communists

in other countries who are directed from there concerned themselves with

the fresh wallpapering of the building’s interior.

The tragedy of Boston is, considered in the context of the world

revolutionary ferment, of immeasurable significance. The American rulers

are (this they have proven countless times, ever since they have sensed

the mere stirring of self-defense among the proletariat) without the

slightest moral scruple. In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jimmy Higgins,

100%: The Story of a Patriot; in Jack London’s The Iron Heel one gets to

know the gentlemen quite well. The murder of the 5 anarchists in Chicago

on November 11, 1887 despite all world-wide protest, the use of torture

in judicial examinations, the crass acts of violence even against

foreign populations which resist being bled dry by dollar capital — the

mass murder with aerial bombs in Nicaragua just within the last few

weeks provides an example — and the infamous torment of Sacco and

Vanzetti, who for 7 years weren’t informed whether or not they would be

allowed to see the next week, prove the land of the highest technical

civilization to be simultaneously the land of the lowest ethical culture

in the world. This excess of moral depravity, however, finally

accomplished with the extreme hideousness of its cunning a moral triumph

of humanity which is without parallel in modern history. The work force

of all the world’s nations, regardless of political points of view, and

in their train broad circles of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals

gathered into a wild uproar of outrage against a barbarity which people

could not tolerate who think not only materially, but concede a share in

decision making to feeling and conscience. This act of world solidarity

with two revolutionary proletarians is an unspeakably consoling event in

a time which cannot find the natural path toward workers’ liberation

only because the freedom movement in itself is almost hopelessly

splintered and the vast majority of active revolutionaries is in the

embrace of a false and fatal theory which replaces solidarity with

discipline, initiative with the command of centralized authority, free

will with compulsion. For the first time we have experienced an actual

unity among those who generally perceive value in their very disunity;

but the unity arose from the only place it can arise: not from science

and materialist insight, which for various temperaments are always an

object of contention, but rather from the natural human feeling of

people united in distress and outrage.

The American rulers have nonetheless paid no attention to the unified

voice of humanity. It is certain that they had fully intended to carry

out the judicial murder already on August 10^(th). But if the

postponement had been the capitulation of barbarism to humanity, then it

would have expressed itself in a different form than that 40 minutes

before the appointed time the victims, already prepared for the

executioner, were returned from the death cell to their prison hole,

without even rescinding the death sentence, just with a new date set for

12 days later. No, the thugs of the land of the free and the brave won’t

let themselves be moved by appeals and protests to abstain from

committing a crime. I have the certain conviction that the postponement

to which they once again consented was occasioned by no other feeling

than fear. In particular, it was the fear of the rich American

bourgeoisie which tripped up the executioner, the fear for their lives

and safety. As the fate of their friends appeared finally sealed, Sacco

and Vanzetti’s comrades turned to the last available tactic, that of

organized terror. Bombs in subways, bombs in churches, bombs in court

buildings — and the exploding of these bombs, mingled with the outraged

cry of protest of the whole humanly feeling world — that extended the

anarchists’ lives a couple of days.

It is an old Social Democratic custom to dismiss every act of individual

terror as the work of provocateurs. The members of the Communist Party

appear in this to want to obey the Social Democratic masters. In their

papers can be read on the one hand that the police improvise bomb

attacks to arouse antipathy towards Sacco and Vanzetti, on the other

hand that the propertied public throughout all America is running about

white as ghosts, smelling dynamite everywhere. The meaning of the

attacks is so clear that one would have to be almost embarrassed to give

further explanations. The comrades who turned to such means obviously

intended to intimidate the authorities and the public. A bomb tossed

amidst these excited circumstances speaks such a clear language that it

has no need of an interpreter. It says: comrades Sacco and Vanzetti are

still alive, they can still be saved; hear how I threaten, see how I

destroy — take care! If you kill the anarchists anyhow, you will thus

learn that there are weapons more terrible still, still more devastating

means, to blow apart your rotten order. What is happening now is a

revolutionary warning — take care not to commit deeds which compel

revolutionary vengeance!...The murder has been committed! Woe to the

murderers!

The whole proletarian world has correctly understood the bombs, only the

German Marxists remain skeptical, pedantically raise their finger and

say: provocateurs or lunatics! We reject individual acts of terrorism,

they further lecture, for only red mass-terrorism is justified. It is

hardly worth it to refute the nonsense which lies in the distinction

between individual- and mass-terrorism. Is the atrocity committed

against Sacco and Vanzetti by the American system of class-justice

individual- or mass-terrorism? Individual organs of class carry it out

in the name of class. It is no different with the bombings in New York

and Philadelphia. To generally contest the effectiveness of separate

terrorist acts, however, is no less absurd when it comes from supporters

of the Russian revolution, which never would have occurred without the

terrorist preparations since the 70’s, just as it is absurd when it

happens in Germany, where the national reaction never would have been

able to regain power even temporarily, had not the O.C. and other

terrorist organizations effected the most thorough intimidation first of

the proletariat, then of the republicans, through individual murders

(which, committed in the name of their class, were naturally acts of

mass-terrorism as well).

The United States of North America gave with their entry into the World

War the decisive final impulse to the outbreak of world revolution in

the sense of open civil war. The case of Sacco and Vanzetti drew the

United States into the realm of civil war, and the bombs of the

anarchist friends of the condemned were the expression of the will not

to surrender the initiative in this war to the counterrevolution alone.

As in all countries, the Yankee reaction used the justice system as its

primary weapon in the civil war against the claims of the exploited to a

right to life and freedom. But the thorough and shamelessly excessive

abuse of the justice system in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti opened the

eyes of exploited humanity, and so began the counterattack with the cry

for justice which filled the world, accompanied by the thunder of

exploding bombs.

When in Vienna on July 15^(th) the defrauded and downtrodden

proletariat, its sense of justice offended and its most basic rights

threatened, went out into the streets, then flashed the warning light of

the central courthouse torch over the thrones of the world’s rulers: you

disgrace justice in order to secure your power as slave holders. See

then that not only hunger creates and brings forth revolutions. You call

upon justice against us, so we reach for righteousness and go into

battle under its banner. The Austrian proletariat faces hard days ahead.

The humiliating betrayal which the German worker had to endure already

in 1919, has over there only just now come to completion. But the hard

days will not last forever. The torch [Fanal] of July 15^(th) cannot be

extinguished again, and history has reached a furious pace. The

struggles in Vienna and the world-wide appeal to Boston show — in spite

of everything — the revolution of the proletariat on the march. Their

battle cry, however, — bourgeoisie, dictators, exploiters, rulers,

judges, heed the warning — their battle cry is not bread and not money;

their battle cry is righteousness!

“Proletarian Theater”, Fanal , Vol.2, No.1 (October 1927), pp.23–4

“Proletarian Theater”

The Piscator Theater has opened. One of the best directors in German

performing arts has been given the opportunity to develop his craft, and

he is not the type who wishes to set art to the side as self-satisfied

and divorced from life, but rather, like an agitator, he wishes to

exploit it as a means to improved and elevated life, what’s more, in the

sense of proletarian revolutionary tendency. A great many reasons to

actively promote and support Erwin Piscator, and, I confess, when asked

whether I would like to belong to the theater’s dramaturgical advisory

board, I very gladly accepted. I only hope that we dramaturges of the

Collective soon get more to do, instead of, as up to now, seeing

ourselves used as merely decorative bearers of program-heralding names

and held responsible for sins of deed and omission, during the

commission of which we had not been consulted at all.

One of our sort can undertake what he will: it is always wrong. So, I

will once again be accused of something like betrayal of the

proletariat, of the revolution and of who know what else, because I did

not refuse Piscator my cooperation. This is no proletarian theater,

therefore I am to keep my hands out of it. Do we not want to first

entirely withdraw from capitalist society, before we at all dare to

touch anything, anywhere? Little brother, I know myself that the

Piscator Theater is no proletarian theater. I know just as well as any

of you that private capitalist money made it possible to play comedy at

Nollendorfplatz, that there rent, salaries, furnishings, management,

duties and all sorts of other things must be accounted for, that

therefore the prices are just as high as elsewhere, that also in

Piscator’s agreement with the Volksbühne, by which anyhow attendance by

workers, too, is made possible, nothing extra-proletarian can be

discerned that other Berlin stages could not offer just as well.

A proletarian theater presumes the theater attendee’s right to determine

the repertoire and conditions of attendance, furthermore the exclusivity

of proletarian influences, that is, those oriented towards

class-objectives. A later task of the proletarian theater would be

integration of the stage and the pit, creation of mass theater in

reconnecting to the stagecraft of the Greeks. The amateurish attempts by

workers] theater groups in this direction are to be much welcomed;

however, they naturally do not come close to fulfilling their purposes,

and they cannot fulfill them, as long as the entire work, including that

which requires the abilities of a qualified expert, weighs on the

shoulders of amateurs. The proletarian theater, born by the proletariat

alone, from the proletariat alone, through the proletariat, working for

the proletariat, is unrealizable within the capitalist environment. What

can be achieved today is piece-work towards the preparation of future

mass art.

Such piece-work can on the one hand be achieved by proletarian theater

associations through collective invention of an effective agitatorial

chorus, practice in speaking and moving choruses, working over gripping

scenes from dramatic skits already extant or invented with the

collaboration all participants, open-air rehersals and the like. A

different part of such piece work, however, falls to the professional

artists who by disposition belong to the revolutionary proletariat. They

can pursue their craft outside of capitalist conditions just as little

as any of us. So they will have to make use of the capitalist

opportunities which present themselves to them. That is what Piscator is

doing with the socialist and communist actors and assistants of his

theater. For this those of us who he has gathered about himself as

advisors make ourselves available.

Technically and directorially, the first performance presented much,

very much, from which the proletarian theater will have to learn. It has

become clear that dramatic art — and this goes, as Meisel’s music also

confirms, for every art — by the media of which it avails itself, is

compelled to dispense with characters mirroring the fates of individuals

and to become the reflection of lived experience which has become welded

together. Industrial technology has become an indispensible medium of

art, which limits the path of all art to those forms of expression which

correspond to the momentary social conditions. Technology as an organ of

artistic spirit forces the spiritualization of technology through art.

To have recognized this reciprocal relationship and as director to have

brought it to living representation is Piscator’s artistic and

paedogogical merit. The creation of a synthesis of art and life will be

denied his efforts in a capitalist theater establishment just as much as

it will be that proletarian theater making ever so valuable piece-work.

That is utopia, which will become reality when there is no longer any

proletariat, when the creative power of culture-generating artistic

individuals has melded into a unity with the creative power of the

culture-generating collective spirit. For myself, since I do not know

how one can withdraw from capitalist society, I intend to dedicate my

revolutionary passion to smashing capitalist society and in the meantime

to using my love for art and the theater so that, as I suppose, I can

thereby promote revolutionary spirit and prepare future human existence.

Whoever enlists my help to that end, I will help him.

“A Sacco-Vanzetti Archive”, Fanal , Vol.2, No.7 (April 1928), p.163

“A Sacco-Vanzetti Archive”

Hamburg anti-authoritarian comrades want to collect all material

relating to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. They are looking for flyers,

meeting announcements, newspaper notices and articles, totally

regardless of political direction or organization, which have to do with

the affair. They are interested in achieving an objective archive. They

would also like information about any brochures, newspaper articles and

flyers there are, especially from the early days of the judicial crime.

The Hamburg comrades expect that they will be informed of or receive all

available material. The address is: Willi Schumann, Hamburg,

Detmerstraße 12III.

It is to be hoped that the comrades’ wishes will be met by all and that

in this way an archive will be assembled which will facilitate the task

of revolutionary historical research in making the most disgraceful deed

ever committed by capital against the proletariat serve the

enlightenment of future generations.

“Memorial Days”, Fanal , Vol.2, No.11 (August 1928), pp.248–9

“Memorial Days”

...

In August the workers of the world commemorate the outbreak of the World

War, which should have led them to understand the state as the

instrument ensuring capitalism’s ability to make its competitive

struggle for the distribution of markets and economic spheres of

interest between staked out borders as a struggle for divine goods. As

long as there are states from which the workers ever hope to draw

advantage, whatever the reform in bureaucratic methods, it will always

be popular for the imperialists to wage national wars. Therefore, aside

from all deeper reasons of piety, offended human dignity, revolutionary

class solidarity, the proletarians of all countries have special reason

to closely connect the memory of the War’s insane mass murder with the

memory of the historically most significant murder thus far committed

against the proletariat in the class war. On August 23^(rd) is the

anniversary of the completion of the crime against our comrades Nicola

Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Here capitalism felled two revolutionary

workers who sought to harm its privileges. For their destruction it used

the state with its moral prerogatives in monopolized role as guardian

and avenger of human life and guarantor of property and law. Sacco and

Vanzetti were anarchists; they recognized in the state the weapon of

wealth against poverty. Therefore they had to be assailed as criminals

against man’s naturally inborn morality, therefore they were made out to

be common robbers and murderers; therefore the state in the service of

capital played itself up in their case with special pathos as guardian

of the most sacred human right, the peaceful life of its citizens;

therefore they were dragged through the torments of a terrible

seven-year physical and spiritual agony, therefore despite all world

protest roasted alive on the electric chair. The struggle against

capitalism, exploitation, poverty, war and every sort of public

injustice was directed against the place where all institutions of the

current social order culminate, moreover against the only place which is

immediately open to attack and explosion, against the state. Therefore

the state was used in order that with one of its institutions of

privilege, the judiciary, it might carry out the defense that alone was

sufficient to protect American dollar interests from the danger of

anarchism, the extermination of the lives of two active anarchists under

the pretext of the necessary security which even the majority of the

proletariat still wishes to believe legitimately guaranteed by the

state. The state mania of the labor parties has been answered in the

Sacco and Vanzetti case. May all the commemorative celebrations on

August 23^(rd) be conducted from the standpoint which guided the two

murdered comrades in their entire life’s struggle: the state is the

enemy!

The state is the enemy, — and whether we attack class justice or war

mongering, exploitation or reaction in any form whatever, — war on

injustice or war on war: revolutionary struggle of the proletariat can

only be — war on the state!

“Murderer State”, Fanal , Vol.3, No.3 (Dec. 1928), pp.60–65

“Murderer State”

Don’t worry, Mr. Prosecutor — this time we’re not referring to your

Jacubowski-State; naturally I’m only referring to America. Still,

authorities which think it worthwhile to maintain their monopoly on the

right to kill people might humbly ask themselves whether the examples of

political judicial murders (of which here only a couple, due to class

malice intentional, miscarriages of justice will be selected) could

suggest also to European critics comparisons and increased vigilance

closer to home. In Germany, at any rate, in the years 1919, 1920 and

1921 there were not a few proletarian revolutionaries sentenced to death

and executed by Ebert’s special courts, whose actions would appear in

light of objective examinations essentially different from how

monarchist, counterrevolutionary, anti-Semitic, anti-labor officers and

jurists, in unappealable proceedings, saw fit to regard as proven.

Nevertheless, there still sit in German prisons today masses of

condemned from such surrogate courts, and the republic on its 10^(th)

birthday (which its Social Democratic Chancellor completely forgot to

officially celebrate) saw no occasion to amnesty the victims of this

political special judiciary, not even to investigate whether their deeds

or better yet their state beatings were worthy of punishment. May the

inmates of the German prisons be convinced that that which the state

leaves out is capable of private operation; the memory of Herr Friedrich

Ebert will live on not only in monuments which the beneficiaries of his

revolutionary betrayal wastefully erect to him, it should also be

preserved in documents which will make clear to posterity what he wished

to have understood by unity and justice and freedom. — But this is

America’s turn.

On November 11^(th) 41 years had gone by since Chicago was the scene of

that vile act of state which, until August 23, 1927, the day of Sacco

and Vanzetti’s death, was considered by the working world to be the

archetype of political murder by the instrument of state justice. If

something violent should happen during a political clash or rally, then

the state uses its laws which assign to it the punishment of those

convicted of committing illegal acts, in order to convict and condemn

not the actual culprits but where possible the visible prominent

representatives of an undesirable idea. Thus, in 1887 the authorities,

contrary to their better knowledge, simply accused the best known

agitators from the anarchist movement of the bomb explosion during a

demonstration in the Chicago Haymarket, and effected their murder. The

Spanish parson’s justice [Pfaffenjustiz] used the same procedure against

the pioneer of the modern school system, the anarchist Francisco Ferrer,

who was accused of originating the acts of violence which occurred

during the revolutionary unrest in Barcelona in the summer of 1909 and

in November of same year was shot dead on Monjuich. We have seen this

method applied in Germany in the case of Max Hoelz. The only act of

violence during the Middle German Uprising (the Mitteldeutscher Aufstand

of March 1921) to which a bourgeois fell victim was attributed to the

military commander of the proletarian armed engagements personally,

manslaughter converted during a tumultuous hearing into murder and the

death penalty against Hoelz in fact requested. The threat of a general

strike by the Berlin proletariat saved his life. The shooting of Hess

was considered a mortal blow, and with this mortal blow the life

sentence to penal servitude for Hoelz justified. — In the War period

fell the similar business of San Fransisco 1916, which became known in

Europe only much later and placed the names of our anarchist comrades

Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings at the center of a revolutionary

protest movement. I touched on the case several times in my

Sacco-Vanzetti drama “Reasons of State” [Staatsräson]. It became known

to wider cirles when in the last months new calls by their American

friends went out to the international working class to help these

victims of the American class-justice expediency who had been

“reprieved” to a life in prison to finally to return to the light after

12 horrific years. At one of the numerous demonstrations which had to

prepare America’s entry into the War, and which in California assumed

forms which were especially vile and hostile to workers, a bomb had been

tossed. Mooney and Billings were the best known and most active

promoters of the anarchist idea in the Californian war-resisters’

movement. They were therefore charged with the deed using faked films

and witnesses bribed to perjury and naturally condemned to death. The

execution would have doubtless followed, if the then President Wilson,

much in contrast to the behavior of his successor Coolidge in the case

of Sacco and Vanzetti, full of outrage at the details related to him by

trustworthy individuals about how the verdict was reached, had not

beseeched the Governor of California to prevent this crime for the sake

of the honor of all America. Wilson never received an answer from the

honorable Governor to multiple letters on the matter; his urgent

requests to reverse the judgment remained unconsidered, — but Mooney and

Billings are at least still alive, and we have hope to see them again

still living return to their comrades, thanks to the energetic efforts

of their defenders and friends, who the brave fighter against state

injustices, Karin Michaelis, has now joined with all the warmth of her

passionate human heart.

The atrociously disgraceful act committed against the revolutionary

workers Sacco and Vanzetti represents not only a peak in the series of

nefarious deeds of the sort favored in all the cases sited, of falsely

accusing politically known people with acts of political violence, — it

discovered for this process the infamous innovation that unpolitical

crimes are laid at the door of undesirable political activists in order

to be able to masacre them for self-serving robbery-murder and at the

same time besmirch their revolutionary cause before the proletariat.

After seven years of inconceivable torment, the two anarchists fell

victim to this system of state intrigue, of state purchase of perjured

witnesses, of state abetting of the true robber-murderers, of state

forgery of documents and mishandling of evidence and of state slander

and were burnt to death on the electric chair in honor of the American

dollar oligarchy, without it having been possible here or in any of the

other depicted cases in America or Europe for the state to manage to

convince any unbribed contemporary of the guilt of its object of

vengeance.

In all cases in which the state, making criminal use of its judicial

apparatus, has destroyed revolutionaries, the revolutionary friends of

its victims have managed to prove that a serious investigation of the

cases brought to judgment would have made possible the conviction of the

true culprits. The executed anarchists of Chicago were famously later

completely vindicated. The proof that Ferrer had absolutely nothing to

do with the violent actions in Barcelona could be drawn out into the

minutest detail. In the case of Max Hoelz, during the course of the

subsequent investigation by his defenders and friends a comrade

incriminated himself as Hess’s shooter and his statements have held up

against a review of the facts. (In my opinion, though, Friehe’s

confession was meaningless for exculpating Hoelz. Hess was hit by so

many bullets, that the act of single individual is entirely out of the

question here. In the excited confussion of events a whole bunch of Red

Guardists shot, Friehe as well surely among them. But what is certain is

that precisely Hoelz, who was condemned as the killer, on psychological

and technical grounds cannot have been any of these shooters.) Yet we

know how it was done at the time: after the military leader of fighting

had already been arrested, a competition was announced for witnesses who

could make incriminating statements against him, which means the same

thing as the statement of a judge which was picked up a listening device

by Mooney and Billings’ defenders just before their trial: “Whether

guilty or not, Mooney must be rendered harmless.” A great many similar

declarations made by judicial figures of their attitudes became known in

the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

This year, however, in the Mooney-Billings affair — I quote now Karin

Michaelis verbatim — “something has transpired which certainly stands

unique in the legal history of all nations: All judges, all police

officials, all lawyers who were involved in the case have come together

in order to admit openly and honestly that they had been duped: in the

name of their conscience and their country’s honor, as well as in the

interest of faith in justice which has suffered so severely, they seek a

pardon for the two men condemned to life in prison.” It should be noted

that according to California law it is impossible to reopen proceedings

which have been definitively closed, so that only a “pardon” can help, a

state of “justice” which likely still finds its equivalent only in the

efficacity of the Bavarian “People’s Courts” [Volksgerichte]. In her

reports, which first appeared in the “Frankfurter Zeitung” (from

September 16 of this year), Karin Michaelis related precise information

about how the conviction came about, how the chief witness for the

prosecution committed perjury in order to make money by his testimony

and himself bribed people in order to gain support for his perjury. When

the jury foreman who had announced the verdict against Mooney had

convinced himself of the villainy of the chief witness, he, again

entirely differently from later the scoundrel Thayer who condemned Sacco

and Vanzetti, stepped to the forefront of those demanding the reopening

of the proceedings. But the Governor of California, Richardson, in whose

hands the fate of the two anarchists rests, appears to be a worthy

brother in office to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts. Perhaps it will

become necessary to unleash a world-wide movement of the sort we

experienced on behalf of our comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, only stronger,

so strong that even the foundations of American dollar-justice will be

devastated by it.

But hardly had we absorbed the enormous shock of the fact that, 12 years

after their crime, those guilty of Mooney’s and Billing’s fate are

showing remorse and asking the murderer state to free them from the

burden of their guilt, — there falls another bright beam of light into

the already long since illuminated chamber of horrors in which the state

murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, no longer to be made good, was committed.

It is well known that Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted for a

robbery-murder committed together in South Braintree, convicted and

after 7 years executed. This robbery-murder, which the two anarchists

first learned of from the newspapers, had been committed on April 15,

1920. On December 24, 1919 in Bridgewater a similarly conceived robbery

took place for which, before the joint trial with Sacco, Bartholomeo

Vanzetti alone was hauled before Judge Thayer and on August 16, 1920

sentenced by him to 15 years incarceration. On November 18, 1925, over 4

years after the death sentence was pronounced, almost 2 years before it

was carried out, the Portugese Celestino Madeiros confessed to having

taken part in the robbery-murder in South Braintree and at the same time

stated that Sacco and Vanzetti were completely uninvolved. The state’s

attorneys were thereby faced with a completely transformed legal

situation. They did what the reasons of state demanded of them, they

paid no attention at all to the statement of the confessing culprit and

upheld the death sentence against the anarchists. Now it turns out that

the trial against Vanzetti stemming from the Bridgewater attack was held

at a time when Thayer and his people already knew who they should have

brought before the court, had they wanted to avenge the crime and not

murder anarchists. A certain Jimmy Mede already had knowledge of the

true course of the robbery attempt at the time of the trial against

Vanzetti and, himself an inmate of the jail, wanted to get Vanzetti

discharged. Judge Thayer’s chauffeur prevented him from doing so with

the threat that he would lose out on his own pardon if he did not keep

his mouth shut. Later, Mede attempted to prevent Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s

execution by visiting Governor Fuller shortly before and telling him

what he had to say. He intimated to him that he should not carry his

information to the state police, as well, the effect of such

explanations would only bring embarassment. Mede kept fighting for the

truth after the anarchists’ death and has now brought things to the

point that one of the participants in the Bridgewater crime, Frank

Silva, has confessed his crime and named three further participants. It

is now established then that Thayer and the Prosecutor Katzmann, with

the premeditated intention of committing a judicial murder, engineered

both trials out of political reasons and conducted them contrary to

their own knowledge of the facts up to double murder of the

revolutionary workers. My supposition that the Bridgewater trial had

been held first in order to afterwards be able to have one of the two

comrades appear as an already previously punished felon, and thus to

create documents which would make it credible that Sacco and Vanzetti

were capable of every common crime, is thus after the fact proven to

have been correct (compare “Reasons of State” [Staatsräson], 3^(rd)

Scene, closing conversation between Katzmann and Thayer). Never has the

state been so manifestly exposed as an assassin than in this case. For

anarchists, the exposing of the murderer state is no surprise. To the

murdered, however, let us pledge what John Henry Mackay cried in 1887 to

the anarchists of Chicago:

Know: not in vain as pathbreakers

Did you open the doors to the future!

Know: We the living will be the avengers

Of your sanctified deaths.

Henry G. Alsberg, et al. Alexander Berkman sixtieth birthday

celebration, November twentieth, nineteen thirty, Central Opera House,

New York City. New York: Martin Press, 1930 [n.p.]

...

We print a few of the many letters received by the Committee. Lack of

space prevents printing more.

...

Alexander Berkman was forced to leave his native Russia because he loved

Liberty;

Alexander Berkman was forced to leave his adopted America because he

loved Liberty;

Alexander Berkman was hunted down, persecuted, driven from pillar to

post in many countries because of his love for Liberty.

But Alexander Berkman not only loves Liberty; Liberty also loves him.

His home is the hearts of all the peoples everywhere, although he is not

persona grata with the rulers and governors of the States.

Every human who loves Liberty loves him.

We celebrate Alexander Berkman’s sixtieth birthday because we are the

comrades of his ideology and the admirers of his work and his great

soul.

There will come a time when humanity will celebrate this brave man,

Alexander Berkman, as the pioneer and great champion of its happiness;

A time in which all mankind will come to admire and love him.

That time will be when Liberty has become Truth, the time of Anarchy.

Erich Mühsam.

Berlin, Germany.

[NB! There is no indication in the original publication that Mühsam’s

letter was translated from the German. After a 13-page introduction by

Henry Alsberg, there are reproduced (in the following order) letters

from Errico Malatesta, Max Nettlau, Erich Mühsam, Augustin Souchy, and

Bertrand Russel.]