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Title: Anarchism in Germany Author: Jesse Cohn Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Germany, history Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0056 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
The writings of German anarchists such as Max Stirner (a.k.a. Johann
Kaspar Schmidt, 1806–56) and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) have had a
profound impact on anarchist movements from New York to Paris, Moscow,
Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires. Even as exiles or emigrants, anarchists from
Germany left their mark on history, as in the United States, where they
accounted for five of the eight sentenced to death for the Haymarket
bombing of 1886, or in the East End of late Victorian London, where
Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958) became a preeminent leader among the Jewish
immigrant workers. Within Germany, anarchist ideas – if not a coherent
anarchist movement – predate the foundation of the German nation-state.
While perhaps prefigured by the premodern popular movements of the
Reformation as well as by ideas emerging from Enlightenment rationalism
and Romanticism alike, anarchism in Germany first appears within the
Young Hegelian circle, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were forced
to grapple with the ideas of three of the most important figures in
early anarchist history: Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, and
Mikhail Bakunin. From abroad, Proudhon found sympathizers in Young
Hegelians Arnold Ruge (1802–80) and Karl Grün (1817–87), who introduced
his ideas to Germany. Stirner, a sometime contributor to Marx’s
Rheinische Zeitung, went perhaps farthest of all the Young Hegelians in
overturning the master philosopher’s thought in his book Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own, 1844), where he set the singularity
of the individual ego (der Einzige) in place of the abstract
universality of Hegel’s “Absolute.” As for Bakunin, it was in Dresden,
writing for Ruge’s newspaper, the Deutsche Jahrbúcher, in 1842, that he
penned his memorable line, “Die Lust der Zerstörung ist zugleich eine
schaffende Lust” (“the passion for destruction is a creative passion,
too”), a maxim he tested in the streets a few years later during the
revolutionary conflagration of 1848–9.
The first attempts at organizing an anarchist movement in Germany were
halting, coinciding with a disastrous experiment in the tactic of
“propaganda by the deed,” which meant bombings and assassinations.
Failed anarchist plots to assassinate the Kaiser in 1878 (in Berlin) and
1883 (at Niederwald) gave the government license for a crackdown, and
German anarchist organizations were largely destroyed. By the end of the
nineteenth century, Ernst Viktor Zenker observed that the spread of
anarchism there had been hampered not only by state repression, but by
“the strength of the party of Social Democracy.” The German working
classes appeared to place more hope in the reformist Sozialdemokratische
Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) (SPD), newly
legalized in 1890, than in a seemingly apocalyptic promise of
revolutionary change. Nonetheless, the gradualist ideology of the SPD
did not satisfy everyone, and a new generation of anarchists emerged
from an anti-parliamentarist faction, “Der Jungen” (Youth), expelled
from the party in 1892. At the same time, a revolt was brewing among
members of the SPD-affiliated trade unions, called Lokalisten
(Localists), who advocated a federalist organizational structure over
strong centralized control. Influenced by revolutionary syndicalist
currents, they broke away in 1897 to form an alternative labor
federation, the Freie Vereinigung deutscher ewerkschaften (Free
Association of German Unions) (FVdG) in 1903.
In the decades immediately prior to World War I, Stirner’s individualist
anarchism was newly championed by John Henry Mackay (1864–1933), while
Proudhonian mutualism was revived by Landauer’s Sozialistischer Bund
(Socialist Federation), intended to foster cooperative alternatives to
capitalism and the state. Along with fellow declassé intellectuals such
as Erich Mühsam (1878–1934), Benedikt Friedländer (1866–1908), and Senna
Hoy (a.k.a. Johannes Holzmann, 1882–1914), they broadened the concerns
of German anarchism beyond class struggle per se to struggles against
anti-Semitism, militarism, heterosexism, and conventional sexual mores.
However, anarchosyndicalists such as Peter Ramus (a.k.a. Rudolf
Grossman, 1882–1942) criticized these forms of anarchism as irrelevant
to proletarian concerns. In 1903, seeking closer ties to the workers’
movements, militants formed an Anarchistische Föderation Deutschlands
(German Anarchist Federation) (AFD).
The SPD’s increasing nationalism and militarism prompted further
upheavals within German socialism. Left-wing socialists and communists
allied with the FVdG, which survived World War I in clandestine form,
launched a revolution in 1918–19 based on workers’ spontaneous
self-organization into directly democratic Räten (councils, analogous to
the Soviets created in Russia in 1917). While broader than any one
ideology, several of the revolution’s phases featured notable anarchist
participation, such as that of Landauer, MĂĽhsam, and Ernst Toller
(1893–1939) in the Bavarian Räterepublik (Council Republic) of 1919.
During the chaos following the 1919 defeat of the Räterepubliken,
anarchists continued to organize. At a September 1919 congress, the FVdG
reconstituted itself as the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (Free
Workers’ Union of Germany) (FAUD), Germany’s first anarchosyndicalist
union, and was quickly joined by members of the AFD. In 1920 FAUD
militants entered an anti-Fascist militia, the Rote Ruhrarmee (Red Army
of the Ruhr Region), to help fight off a right-wing coup. At the same
time, anarchists such as Milly Witkop-Rocker (1877–1955) were part of an
effort within the FAUD to organize women workers, founding in DĂĽsseldorf
in 1921 a Syndikalistische Frauenbund (Syndicalist Women’s Union) (SFB).
Incorporating some of the strengths of the old Sozialistischer Bund (as
well as the French idea of Bourses du Travail or Arbeitsbörsen, workers’
cultural centers), the FAUD extended its efforts beyond the workplace,
sponsoring communes, cooperatives, newspapers, and libertarian schools,
and fighting for access to contraception and abortion. Perhaps most
ambitiously, FAUD leaders were instrumental in building a new global
organization named, after the example of the first International
Workingmen’s Association, the Internationale Arbeiter Assoziation
(International Workers’ Association) (IWA). At the same time, however,
local struggles for political survival grew desperate; while continuing
to participate in strikes and food riots, the FAUD had shrunk from a
peak of over 100,000 members in 1919 to a mere quarter of that size in
1925.
In the last years of the Weimar Republic, FAUD militants formed
anti-fascist street-fighting groups called Schwarzen Scharen (Black
Crowds). However, the FAUD’s decline proved irreversible. In 1933 the
burning of the Reichstag provided the Nazis with an excuse to clamp down
on left-wing opposition. Prominent anarchists such as MĂĽhsam were jailed
and killed, while others, such as Rocker and Augustin Souchy
(1892–1984), managed to escape the country; others joined underground
resistance movements, like Düsseldorf’s Schwarzrotgruppe. Attempts of a
few surviving FAUD activists to revive the anarchosyndicalist movement
both in East and West Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s proved
unsuccessful.
Interest in anarchism experienced a certain revival in the 1960s,
especially among students and intellectuals, albeit often overshadowed
by neo-Marxist tendencies. Despite the anti-authoritarian and even
anarchist sympathies of prominent activists of the generation of 1968
(such as Rudi Dutschke, 1940–79), elements of the Außerparlamentarische
Opposition or “extra-parliamentary opposition” (like West Berlin’s
Kommune 1, 1967–9) and some of the urban guerilla organizations (such as
the Bewegung 2. Juni or June 2^(nd) movement, ca. 1972–80, and
Revolutionäre Zellen/Rote Zora, ca. 1975–95), no large-scale anarchist
organization would reemerge in Germany until 1977, when the Freie
Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union (Free Workers’ Union) (FAU), intended
as a successor to the old FAUD, was founded.
In 1972, inspired by the Swiss journal Anarchisme et Nonviolence, the
first issue of the anarcho-pacifist Graswurzelrevolution (Grassroots
Revolution) appeared in Augsburg; it has since become the anarchist
journal with the highest circulation in the German-speaking countries.
In the late 1970s and 1980s Horst Stowasser’s Projekt A sought to bring
anarchists out of the “self-imposed ghetto” of sectarianism to engage in
concrete, small-scale initiatives. The mid-1980s also saw the emergence
of the Autonomen, a political subculture with strong anarchist
tendencies. In its early years the militant politics of the Autonomen
strongly revolved around the defense of squatted houses and youth
centers. Resistance to neo-Nazism, in the form of “Antifa” (antifascist)
politics, remains an essential part of the Autonomen movement to this
day.
Anarchist ideas and practices have continued to gain currency within the
“Sponti” (spontaneous) left since the 1970s, producing new forms of
movement that may be called anarchic, if not necessarily anarchist.
Suspicious of the very idea of “revolution” as a future event to which a
vanguard holds the key, these new anti-authoritarians prefer to change
life here and now through tactics of playful disruption that enlist
“non-activist” bystanders.
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Rediscovered Minority Tradition. In van der Linden, M., & Thorpe, W.
(Eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective.
Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Carlson, A. R. (1972) Anarchism in Germany. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press.
Degen, H.-J. (2002) Anarchismus in Deutschland 1945–1960: die Föderation
Freiheitlicher Sozialisten. Ulm: Klemm & Oelschläger.
Goyens, T. (2007) Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in
New York City, 1880–1914. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press.
Graf, A. G. (2001) Anarchisten gegen Hitler: Anarchisten,
Anarcho-Syndikalisten, Rätekommunisten in Widerstand und Exil. Berlin:
Lukas.
Katsiaficas, G. N. (2006) The Subversion of Politics: European
Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life.
Oakland: AK Press.
Löwy, M. (1992) Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in
Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Lunn, E. D. (1973) Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of
Gustav Landauer. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nettlau, M. (1996) A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press.
Whimster, S., (Ed.) (1999) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. New
York: St. Martin’s Press.
Zenker, E. V. (1898) Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist
Theory. London: Methuen.