Liberating Society From The State

And Other Writings: A Political Reader

Plot

Erich Mühsam (187S-1934), poet, bohemian, revolutionary, remains one of Germany's most renowned and influential anarchists. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he challenged the conventions of bourgeois society at the turn of the century, engaged in heated debates on the rights of women and homosexuals, and traveled Europe in search of radical communes and artist colonies. He was a primary instigator of the ill-fated Bavarian Council Republic in 1919, and held the libertarian banner high during a Weimar Republic that came under increasing threat by right-wing forces. In 1933, four weeks after HitlerÆs ascension to power, Mühsam was arrested in his Berlin home. He spent the last sixteen months of his life in detention and died in the Oranienburg Concentration Camp in July 1934. Mühsam wrote poetry, plays, essays, articles, and diaries. His work unites a burning desire for individual liberation with anarcho-communist convictions, and bohemian strains with syndicalist tendencies. The body of his writings is immense, yet hardly any English translations have existed. This collection presents not only Liberating Society from the State: What is Communist Anarchism? MühsamÆs main political pamphlet and one of the key texts in the history of German anarchism, but also letters, unbending defenses of political prisoners, passionate calls for solidarity with the lumpenproletariat, recollections of the utopian community of Monte Verita, debates on the rights of homosexuals and women, excerpts from his journals, and essays contemplating German politics and anarchist theory as well as Jewish identity and the role of intellectuals in the class struggle. An appendix documents the fate of Zenzl Mühsam, who, after her husband's death, escaped to the Soviet Union where she spent twenty years in Gulag camps. Book jacket.