Anarchism's Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914

Abstract

Anarchism's Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914 Elun Gabriel The centers of anarchist activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included Italy, Spain, France, and the United States. The German anarchist movement was small, even in comparison to other nations that were not major anarchist centers. Contemporaries and scholars had until recently mostly agreed on the cause: anarchism was simply unable to compete with German Social Democracy, whose explosive growth beginning in the 1870s reflected the organization and self-awareness of an advanced industrial proletariat. For Social Democrats and many scholars, even those of a non-Marxist stripe, this situation represented the inevitable triumph of mature, class-conscious socialism over the undisciplined and utopian impulses of prepolitical workers.1 Once socialism had developed into a mass movement, only the detritus of the lumpenproletariat, petit bourgeois reactionaries, and decadent elites embraced anarchism. In the late 1960s and 1970s German anarchism finally began to receive a modicum of scholarly attention.2 The small body of scholarship produced since has shown that a German anarchist movement (really, movements) did in fact exist throughout the era of the German Empire (1871-1918) among the handful of anarchists committed to "propaganda of the deed" active in the 1880s, within a circle of cultural and intellectual anarchists in the following decade, and in the form of anarcho-syndicalism after the [End Page 33] turn of the century. Several German anarchist leaders, intellectuals, and artists also received scholarly attention as individual thinkers.3 This scholarship did much to illuminate the social and intellectual history of German anarchism, but did not significantly alter the conventional understanding of German anarchism as an atavistic expression of protest destined to be eclipsed by Social Democracy. And for most of the past thirty years, little scholarship has explored the German anarchist movement further. Scholarship on anarchism outside of Germany has, however, flourished. Although this literature is far too diverse to summarize easily, I would like to draw attention to three aspects of it that help illuminate the approach I take in this article. First are works that have filled out our understanding of the development, growth, and decline of anarchist movements within particular national contexts, highlighting both their intellectual and social development, and crucially, not presuming their inevitable failure based on anarchism's backwardness or utopian folly. These works tend to focus on the writings and organizational activities of prominent theorists and leaders, with particular attention to the ideological and tactical debates, as well as ongoing contests with and persecution by state authorities, that shaped the movements.4 A second genre of anarchist scholarship that has been especially lively and fruitful includes biographies of major figures such as Peter Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus, and Carlo Tresca.5 Though each of these anarchist leaders followed a unique trajectory, what becomes clear from their biographies is the deeply transnational character of the anarchist milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although not unique to this movement, the diasporic dimension of anarchist politics and culture was probably more extensive than for any other political movement of the era. Anarchist leaders were at various times hounded out of most European countries, moving often among those nations in which they were not being persecuted at a given time or settling in the least hostile abodes for revolutionaries, the United Kingdom and the United States. At the same time, the anarchists' profound distrust of national political institutions (such as parliaments and legal systems) left them less inclined than state-oriented socialists to anchor their thoughts and activities within a single national context. The transnational character of European and American anarchism has been a central feature not only of anarchist biographies but of much other recent scholarship on anarchism.6 A third, less developed, area of recent anarchist scholarship concerns culture, [End Page 34] both the culture of the anarchist movement (as distinct from the activities of prominent leaders and journalists) and the relationship of anarchists to the broader cultures in which they lived.7 For instance, Tom Goyens' Beer and Revolution, a study of the social and cultural practices of German-American anarchists in and around New York City, provides a rare window...