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Title: Arthur Lehning Obituary Author: Nick Heath Date: April 8, 2000 Language: en Topics: Biography,Obituary,anarchist activists,anti-war Source: Freedom, April 8, 2000 (vol. 61 no. 7, page 6)
Arthur Lehning was born on 23rd October 1899 at Utrecht in Holland. He
studied economic science at Rotterdam then at Berlin. From an early age
he got to know the ideas of antimilitarism, anarchism and syndicalism.
At the beginning of the '20s he first read a work by Bakunin. He met
Rudolf Rocker in Berlin and got to know Alexander Berkman and Emma
Goldman who had come there from Russia. He joined the defence committee
for the anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries who were being
persecuted and imprisoned in the Soviet Union.
In 1922 he became the Berlin correspondent of the Anti-Militarist
Anarchist Bureau (IAMB) founded in 1921 in the Hague, and became friends
with Georg Friedrich Nicolai, antimilitarist, professor and head doctor
of the Charity hospital in Berlin. In 1923 Mussolini was only just
preparing for his rise to power, Hitler's Munich putsch had not happened
and already Lehning was writing an article 'The Roots of German
Fascism'. He also brought out his first pamphlet Social-Democracy and
the War, a fierce critique of German Social-Democrat involvement in
World War One, which he compared to Marx's support of the
Franco-Prussian War. He developed and supported the theory of the
General Strike as a weapon to halt war, and advanced the need for the
creation of factory and workplace committees to take over production. He
was convinced that an antimilitarist general strike in all countries
involved in a war would unleash the social revolution. Whilst not a
pacifist, his strong support of antimilitarism had strong connections
with the Dutch Tolstoyanism and pacifist anarchism as most importantly
represented by Bart de Ligt and Clara Meijer-Weichmann.
Lehning was also involved in organising activities for
anarcho-syndicalism, joining the International Workers Association
founded in 1922 which gathered the anarchosyndicalist organisations at a
world level. From 1927-1934 with Albert de Jong, Augustin Souchy and
Helmut Rudiger he ran the press service of the International
Anti-militarist Commission, a fusion between the IWA-AIT's
antimilitarist committee and the IAMB.
The bulletin they produced contained information about antimilitarist
struggles and was distributed to 800 papers and magazines. Fierce
debates took place within the Commission over the means of defending the
revolution. Lehning and de Jong rejected the idea of forming militias,
counterposing the ideas of the strike, the boycott, non-payment of
taxes, passive resistance and refusal to collaborate. The great majority
of the IWA-AIT disagreed with these views and called for armed defence
against fascism in Italy and Germany.
Between 1932 and 1935 he worked on the Secretariat of the IWA-AIT
alongside Rocker, the Russian Alexander Schapiro and Augustin Souchy. He
visited Spain where the anarchist movement was very strong, and it was
to Madrid and then Barcelona that the secretariat was transferred, with
the rise of Hitler and the destruction of the German workers' movement.
Lehning gave one more public meeting between the taking of power by the
Nazis and the Reichstag fire, before fleeing to Holland.
Here he set up the International Institute of Social History in
Amsterdam which gathered together many archives from the workers'
movement and the international anarchist movement. He had special
responsibility for the south eastern Europe and anarchist collections.
Alongside his anarchist activity, Lehning was involved in cultural
activity from 19231933. In Paris in 1924, he discovered the Cubists, the
Constructivists, the Expressionists and the Futurists. Enthused by art
and literature he set up an artistic review "i 10" between January 1927
and June 1929, influenced by and influencing the Bauhaus and De Stijl
artistic currents. He was its sole editor. The review attracted an
awesome range of collaborators, like the artists Mondrian, Lissitsky,
Kandinsky, J.P. Oud, the founder of De Stijl, and Moholy-Nagy who wrote
on film and photography. Edited in French, English, German and Dutch the
magazine opened its pages to all the new artistic currents. Lehning
believed that a total revolution in culture and everyday life was
necessary to ensure a successful revolution. Dadaists like Arp and
Schwitters wrote for it, as did Marxian philosophers like Ernst Bloch
and Walter Benjamin, writers like Upton Sinclair, architects like Le
Corbusier and Gerrit Tietveld, Helene Stocker, a champion of women's
rights, and anarchists like Rocker, Nettlau and de Ligt. The magazine
was heavily involved in mobilising support for the condemned
Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.
From April 1939, the International Institute of Social History was
forced to move, and Lehning worked for its Oxford branch to where the
most sensitive files had been transferred after the Munich agreement.
In 1957 he returned to Germany. He continued to work for the Institute,
editing the collected works of Bakunin, which were published in France
in 1976 under the title Archives Bakounine. For the French publishing
house Spartacus he wrote Anarchisme et Marxisme dans le Revoution Russe
in 1971. He also brought out the book Michel Bakounine et les attires in
1976. Many of his major scholarly articles were collected together in
the hook From Buonarotti to Bakunin in 1970.
He survived the twentieth century by one day, dying on 1st January 2000
in Le Plessis, France.