Hanns Heinz Ewers (ed.). Führer durch die moderne Literatur. 300 Würdigungen der hervorragendsten Schriftsteller unserer Zeit. Unter Mitwirkung von Victor Hadwiger, Erich Mühsam, René Schickele. Berlin: Globus, 1906; reprint: Hannover: Revonnah, 2005, p.127:

ERICH MÜHSAM, geb. 1878 in Berlin, lebt ebenda. Eine rechte Zigeunernatur, trat er 1904 mit einem Gedichtbande Die Wüste zuerst vor die Öffentlichkeit. Neben vielen unausgeglichenen, oft sehr mäßigen Arbeiten enthät dieser Band eine Reihe von Gedichten, die eine starke Originalität und ein kräftiges Temperament erkennen lassen. Er wandte sich bald der Bühne zu mit dem Lustspiel Die Hochstapler, dessen frischer, antibürgerlicher Inhalt so recht dem kampfesfreudigen, skeptischen Temperament des Verfassers entspricht.
Dr. B. 

ERICH MÜHSAM, b. 1878 in Berlin, where he resides. A true gypsy at heart, he first came before the public with a book of poetry, Die Wüste. Along side many uneven, often very middling works, this volume contains a series of poems which demonstrate a strong originality and a powerful temperament. He soon turned to the stage with the comedy Die Hochstapler, the fresh, anti-bourgeois content of which so truly corresponds to its author's feisty, sceptical temperament.
Dr. B. 

[transl. C.R. Edmonston]


[This Dr. B., i.e. Dr. Walter Bläßing, was in fact a pseudonym which recurs throughout Hanns Heinz Ewers' book as the name of the author of many of the author-appraisals which it contains; we may assume in this case that Mühsam himself, who wrote many of these appraisals, is in fact the true author of this brief portrait — see Jürgen Peters's introduction to the 2005 edition, p.11.]



-----------------------------



[The San Fransisco anarchist journal MAN! had a presence in Germany from it's very first issue, as is clear from the following letter:]



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.1, No.3 (March 1933), p.3:


FROM GERMANY
  It is with the greatest of pleasure that we received the first issue of your well-fitted journal "MAN!"...Our best wishes are with you and your work...We think that it is far easier to sell a well-illustrated journal as yours is...if the pictures are so good as your of Malatesta or Godwin in the first issue.
  Could you be so kind as to send us now and in the future matrices or used copperplates by mail?  After using them, we shall return them to you or send them to other comrades lacking in such things.  With best greeting,
	Freie Arbeiter, Germany.	ERIC MATISZIG.

MAN! will gladly furnish our Comrades in Germany with cuts appearing in its pages.  All other Anarchist organs of Europe can arrange with the FREIE ARBEITER for their use of the same cuts.  Every Anarchist publication is invited to exchange with MAN!



[That MAN! was in correspondence with several German-language anarchist periodicals both at home and abroad can be seen from a list which they printed in the same issue and which included the following titles:]



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.1, No.3 (March 1933), p.7:


WE EXCHANGE WITH—
  ...
Erkenntnis und Befreiung. Kierling bei Wien, Schubertgasse 42, Oestreich. [sic]
Der Freie Arbeiter. Berlin 54, Sophienstrasse No. 23, Germany.
Der Funk. 80 Fifth Ave., New York.



[Below an article profiling Robert Reitzel, “M. G.” comments briefly on contemporary developments in Germany:]



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.1, No.7 (July 1933), p.5:


SPARKS
  ...
  Socialist and Communist members of the Reichstag joined the German Fascist Nazis in the approval of Hitler's recent speech.  Thus did the unison into an holy trinity become an established fact....The Bolshevik Government has likewise signed a treaty with the very Government that burned publicly the books of the theoreticians of Socialism, as well as of any other Libertarian idea, in addition to the murdering, torturing and persecution that it inflicted upon those who refuseed to barter away their conscience.  The very same “idealistic” Bolshevik Government has also most unscrupulously signed a treaty with the blackest of all Fascist regimes—that of Mussolini.
  ...
M. G.



[MAN!'s first mention of Erich Mühsam follows three pages later in the Freie Arbeiter's unhappy response to the offer which had been extended in Vol.1, No.3 (March 1933), p.3 (quoted above):]



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.1, No.7 (July 1933), p.8:


THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT

Germany
  We thank you sincerely for your kind letter, but to our greatest regret it is quite impossible to make use of your matrices.  Exchange them please with papers of other, more fortunate countries than Germany now is.
  Living under the regiment of pure fascist terror, we can't print; impossible even to speak aloud.  Germany is now nothing but a goal [sic: gaol] for revolutionaries, as well as for Jews.  You will know something from the press, but you can by no means imagine the whole tragical truth.  Till now, about 15,000 men are arrested; most of them have been cruelly beaten, even so well known men as the communist leader Kasper, the Communist attorney Litten, the Anarchist poet Erich Miihsam [sic], the pacifist writer Ossietsky, others, unknown by the great world, have even been tortured to death.  It is impossible to utter a free idea.
  The publishing firm of Asy Ltd., the company which prints and sells books depicting a free view of life, was cleared by the fascist police without any legal reason, the books to the value of several tens of thousands of marks were simply stolen by the chiefs of these people.  Among them are the works of Dr. Max Nettlau, which as is well know, are of purely historic character, also biographies such as those of Rocker's “Johann Most,” Berkman's “Prison Reminiscences,” also novels and short stories, nay even poems as the little book “Storm” by Mackay.



[Though naturally critical of the Hitler regime, MAN! had harsh words for the German anarchist movement, as well, which had been faulted in the previous issue for its excessive faith in Syndicalism:]



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.1, No.5/6 (May-June 1933), p.4:


IN RETROSPECT	(by Marcus Graham)

Dictatorship on the Saddle

  Germany, the country that was to lead mankind into the socialist millenium via the ballot box—having millions of supporting voters—has born some very cankerous fruit ever since the onward march of deceit was begun in 1914 by the leaders of Marxian-Socialism.  Aside from their support given to the Kaiser during the entire duration of the war, they have worked hand in hand with President Von Hindenburg, and brought also to an early death our own comrade Gustav Landauer.  It is also the Marxian Social Democracy that brought forward henchmen like Noske, Herbert, Scheideman, and now, the blackest of them all—Adolph Hitler! (Marxian socialism should also be given credit for the Pilsudskis, MacDonalds, Mussolinis, Lenins, and Stalins.)
  All this cannot cause any surprise to the Anarchist school of thought.  The soul-essence of Marx's “Das Kapital” has laid the foundation for all the treachery that has and is being committed against every fundamental principle of Freedom, Justice, and Equality.  For, from the blackest to the reddest of the triumphant rulers, each proudly claims to have reached the present attitude via the school of Marxian-socialism.  Had Marx himself not proclaimed that (the end justifies the means”?  How faithfully his disciples have and are practicing it!  Can then any one of our Libertarian school be surprised to witness the treacherous surrender of the Socialist-controlled labor movement to the Nazis-Fascist regime?  Or, should we be astonished at Hitler's truthful declaration that “...the State needs the Church” and will henceforth absorb it?  Need we be astounded at the Nazis' imitation of the Czaristic methods in staging pogroms on Jews in order to cover their own misdeeds, and thereby making a scapegoat of the unfortunate Semites?
  Regretably, the Anarchist movement in Germany has been very negligible.  Many of our comrades were drawn into the Sydicalist movement, erroneously choosing that as the shortest road for attaining our ideal.  At one time the Syndicalist movement of Germany claimed tens of thousands of supporters.  If the movement were only a fraction of what it has been claimed for, it would not have submitted as easily as it seemingly did.  A virile Anarchist movement such as we had in Italy during the rise of black fascism at least fought to the best of its abilities against the monster.  It lost the battle, but with honor, refusing to surrender.
  Seemingly, the world finds itself today embroiled by all sorts of dictatorships:  Communist dictatorships, Socialist dictatorships, Fascist dictatorships, Republican and Democratic dictatorships.  They all embrace one central idea:  ruling over the oppressed and exploited.  Freedom, justice, equality of opportunity for every living soul, an end to every form of exploitation, all this receives nothing but sinister ridicule and reninciation from any of the dictatorships.  It could not be otherwise, since they all maintain themselves in power only by force and coercion.
  Out of it, the blackest page in the history of civilized man, will eventually rise the cry of humanity for liberation from every sort of dictatorship.  Man will not forever remain in the straight-jacket patterned for him by capitalism or Marxian-socialism.  The present order of injustice will reach the beginning of its end, at the very height of triumph.  To hasten this end every rebel fighting for real freedom has an herculean task to perform, a most gladdening task just the same.  For, victory shall bring about the dawn of the Day of Liberation and Happiness for every human being alike.



[MAN! continued to report on Mühsam's fate:]



“The Nazi Regime at Work: Erich Muhsam” MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.2, No.3 (March 1934), p.99 [also at: http://web.hamline.edu/personal/jgeorge/erich.html]:


The Nazi Regime at Work 

Erich Miihsam [sic]

Erich Mühsam was arrested February 28th, 1933 at dawn.  The Social-democrat and Stalinist night of ignominy had just descended upon the German proletariot, like a heavy tomb-stone.  It was the advent of counter-revolutionary terror, ushered in by the victorious hordes of the swastika.

The prisoner Mühsam was a symbol, his name recalling the Sovietic revolution of Bavaria.  There was Mühsam a helpless hostage — and in the back-ground the shadows of the massacred revolutionists: Eissener, Landauer and Levine.

In 1924, a strong agitation had freed him from the fortress in which he was serving a term for the crime of having participated in the proclamation of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria, and as soon as he was set free he resumed the fight.  A very suggestive orator, in numerous and well attended lectures, he was fostering the same work of propaganda and libertarian agitation which he had carried on in Munich from 1911 to 1914 thru' his magazine "Cain" and then in Berlin from 1926 to 1933 with another publication called "Fanal."

Mühsam, like everyone else endowed with a strong personality, represented and partly built a movement of his own which, nevertheless, was also flowing in the stream of German Anarchism.

The influence exerted by Mühsam thru' his literary lectures, his poetical and dramatic works, went far beyond the usual circle of comrades: a collection of his poems met a great success and the Berlin public welcomed with very live interest the presentation of his dramatic works “Judas” and “Reason of State.”  It was, therefore, natural for Hitlerism to see in this man an enemy to be feared.

From the very moment of his arrest, Mühsam has gone thru' the most terrible “Via Crucis”.  After breaking his teeth with musket blows; stamping a swastika on his scalp with a red-hot brand; subjecting him to tortures which caused him to be taken into a hospital, even now the fascist hyenas of the Sonninburg concentration camp continue their beastly attacks upon this defenseless man.  The last news are really atrocious: the Nazi forced our comrade to dig his own grave and then with a simulated execution made him go thru' the agony of a doomed man.  Although his body has been reduced to a mass of bleeding and tumefied flesh, his spirit is still very high: when his traducers tried to force him to sing the “Horst Wessel” (the Nazis anthem) he defied their anger by singing the International.

Eight months of physical and mental tortures are an excessive burden for a man of 65 years of age, fatigued by an intense life and dejected by the spectacle of a shameful ruin.  Mühsam is in grave danger: if the unbearable tortures will not put an end to his life he will be driven to suicide.  Men of the moral and intellectual caliber of this comrade of ours are not so numerous and, for the sake of our own cause, we must do the utmost to save his life.

How?  We must promote a prompt and energetic international campaign and to this end our press must be used as a means and a spur.  Wherever possible, demonstrations should be staged against German Embassies and consular offices.  It is necessary, it is a moral duty to save the life of Erich Mühsam!

The C. Pisacane Group of Paris.



MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.2, No.8 (August 1934); reprinted in: Marcus Graham (ed.). MAN! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries. London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974, pp.481-85 (with illustration of Mühsam by D. C. [D. Chan] on p.482) (Copyright © 1974 by Marcus Graham & Cienfuegos Press) [also at: http://web.hamline.edu/personal/jgeorge/erich.html]:


Erich Muehsam
(1868-1934)


When the official report of July 11th by the Nazi regime of Germany told of Erich Muehsam having hanged himself while in “protective custody”, many of us feared that his death came about in a more terrible manner.  These fears were borne out by the following wireless message from Prague to the New York Times.  It reads as follows:

“Prague, July 20th — Details of the killing of the poet Erich Muehsam in a German concentration camp were given tonight by his widow, who has just reached Prague from Germany.

“Herr Muehsam went through a Cavalry of Nazi concentration camps, passing through the three most notorious between February of last year and the slaying on July 10th, last.  He was in the Brandenburg, Sonnenburg and the Oranienburg camps.

“His widow declared this evening that, when she was first allowed to visit her husband after his arrest, his face was so swollen by beating that she could not recognise him.  He was assigned to the task of cleaning toilets and staircases and Storm Troopers amused themselves by spitting in his face, she added.

“On July 8th, last, she saw him for the last time alive.  Despite the tortures he had undergone for fifteen months, she declared, he was cheerful, and she knew at once when his “suicide” was reported to her three days later that it was untrue.  When she told the police that they had “murdered” him, she asserted they shrugged their shoulders and laughed.  A post mortem examination was refused, according to Frau Muehsam, but Storm Troopers, incensed with their new commanders, showed her the body, which bore unmistakable signs of strangulation, with the back of the skull shattered as if Herr Muehsam had been dragged across the parade ground.”

What could one say that would put to shame a regime that takes the greatest children of its land and tortures them to death in the most degrading, sadistic, inquisitory manner imaginable?  The heart and mind revolts at the thought of the ordeals that the murdered Erich Muehsam had to undergo in the hands of these inhuman swine that are now reigning supreme in Germany!  And of our many other comrades still in their claws — what of them?  Protests?  They are of no avail — as far as these madmen and imbeciles are concerned.  One can only have one hope:  that the present fight between these despicable beasts will hasten on a real Social Revolution that will drive them into the oblivion that they rightfully deserve.

            *            *            *

Erich Muehsam was one of the outstanding modern revolutionary poets in German literature.  From his early youth he turned to socialism and soon enough reached anarchism, to which ideal he dedicated his talent and soul.

In addition to his poetic creations that appeared in several volumes, he also wrote plays.  One of these, an exposure of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, was played with great success in every part of Germany.  It also received high praise as a literary work from many critics.

After the end of the world war he was very active, together with comrade Gustav Landauer, in  the uprising of Bavaria during 1919, and also was a member of the Red Workers' and Soldiers' Council that existed in Munich for a short period of the same year.  When the revolt was crushed by the Social Democratic rulers, Muehsam was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment.  After serving five years he was freed in the amnesty granted at that time.  Once again he became very active in the anarchist movement.

Muehsam also published and edited two journals that exerted great influence.  One was Kain (Munich, 1911-1914, 1918-1919), and Fanal (Berlin, 1924-1926).

Comrade Muehsam was about to escape from Germany when the Mad Dog of Europe, Hitler, came to power.  He was, of course, one of the first victims of the Nazis.  And from their claws he never emerged alive!

Erich Muehsam's name will assume a most glorious place in the blackest page of the history of Germany.  Out of the scores of authors that have succumbed to the Nazi rule, Muehsam's trying ordeal bespeaks of the outraged conscience of Germany.  It should also serve as an awakener and inspiration to those who have lost themselves that the real artist can be and is a revolutionist as well.

The anarchist movement has received a great blow in the loss of Erich Muehsam.  But it is proud of his association with our ideal and manner in which he defied the enemy of liberty unto his death.



“The Nazi Beasts” MAN!: A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. Vol.3, No.1 (January 1935) [source: http://web.hamline.edu/personal/jgeorge/erich.html]:


“The Nazi Beasts”

A report comes from Munich that the murderer of Erich Meuhsam, Eicke, former commander of the concentration camp Dachau, has been elevated to the rank of Nazi inspector of all concentration camps, and right-hand man of the S. S. storm troops police chief, Himmler.

Together with the recognition of Eicke's services in doing away with the bitterly hated Muehsam, the following details show the manner in which the murder of the well-known anarchist writer was committed.  Meuhsam was taken to the administration building.  He was tortured and beaten until he lost consciousness.  Then an injection was administered, which killed him.  The body was taken to a closet in the rear of the building and hung on a rafter so as to create the impression that Meuhsam had committed suicide.  The men who aided the murdered [sic] Eicke are the storm troop leaders Ehrath and Konstantin Werner.



-----------------------------



W.R. “Erich Mühsam” Freedom. Anarchist Fortnightly. Vol.8, No.17 (23 August 1947), p.6:


Erich Mühsam


This article on Erich Mühsam has been sent to us by a German comrade who himself underwent ten years' confinement in Nazi concentration camps for his anarchist opinions.  For obvious reasons, as he is still in Germany, we cannot give his full name.

Twelve years ago the following report appeared in the official German press:  “The social-democratic (sic) writer Erich Mühsam, know for his activities in connection with the Munich hostage murder, who was in custody, has ended his life by committing suicide.”

Those of us who knew Mühsam knew also that a vile murder had been committed.  A few months later, we received a detailed report, which appeared in the illegal newspaper The Black Front, concerning the occurrences immediately preceding Mühsam's death.  Whoever has been in custody in Germany knows what was meant by the official report “Committed Suicide”.

Mühsam's Death

I would like to reproduce an account given to me by a friend of mine who shared Mühsam's imprisonment.  He wrote:

“With Erich Mühsam I often talked, and came to like him very much.  In the prison of Sonnenberg he was never left alone.  He had to live through dreadful days there; nearly every day he was beaten.  One day Mühsam and the former deputy to the Berlin Diet, Kasper, had to dig their graves in the middle of the prison court-yard with large coal shovels.  While both comrades were being tortured in this way, we other prisoners had to form a circle round them.  It nearly broke our hearts.  One of our comrades said to the cruel S.A. bandits:  ‘You criminals, here is my breast—shoot me.  You are sadists and not human beings.’  This comrade was immediately taken away.  When Mühsam and Kasper had finished the digging they were told:  ‘We won't shoot you to-day; that death would be far too easy.’  After this occurrence Mühsam endeavoured to get a transfer from Sonnenberg.  A short time afterwards his death was reported in the press.  Tortured to the point of desperation, and then a cowardly murder, this was the fate of our comrade Erich Mühsam!”

Mühsam had won our hearts, and it was a precious surprise for me when at Christmas, 1945, my wife gave me a picture of him.  To avoid unnecessary danger I used to remove this picture from the wall in special circumstances and hide it behind the chest of drawers.  But once, after the visit of my comrade Otto Schuster, who had come to see the picture, I got so annoyed at this game of hiding that I swore not to remove the picture any more.  The next day my fate was sealed.  The secret police arrived, and their first move was towards the picture.  “Who is this?” was their first question.  “A good friend of mine,” I replied.  The official was not satisfied with this, and went to my neighbors to see what he could find out.  His success was nil, and he had to be content with “A good friend of mine.”  With the picture and some books under his arm, he climbed with me into the car, for a journey which was to end only in May, 1945.  Mühsam played a fateful role in my trial, and to-day I am still grateful to the judge who recited Mühsam's poem, “Long live the noble warrior tribe!”  If I say to-day that Erich Mühsam's life was a deciding factor in my own, I am not exaggerating.

Many a comrade could not understand why Mühsam preferred to remain in Germany although he was already in possession of a ticket for abroad.  Erich hated nothing more than avoiding danger, when his conscience opposed it.

Let us remember the usual criticisms of the bourgeois and even left-wing press about his person, which found expression in the most contemptuous terms, such as “coffee-house philosopher” and “ideal anarchist”.  Not even with the report of his death did they honour the truth, but instead transformed im into a “social-democratic writer”.  A social democrat of all things—when he had poured out his scorn at them in his poem, “The revolutionary”.

We old comrades knew the circumstances that sealed his doom.  The Munich hostage murder, of which Mühsam could not approve, was revenged on his person.  As always, it was the tragedy of anarchist fighters to pay other people's bills.

The Münich Rising

For taking part in the Munich rising, he was sentenced to a long term of hard labour, of which he served more than four years.  Part of his sentence was remitted under the amnesty.

The Red Aid had a valuable co-worker in Mühsam.  In Max Holz's fight for liberty, in the campaign against the official murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, everywhere, when it was a question of mobilising the workers in the fight for socialism, he stood in front.

Whoever had the opportunity of hearing Mühsam speak will never forget the experience.  At anti-militarist meetings he castigated most strongly the position of the social-democrats.

Later, his plays appeared, first Judas, the history of a betrayal, and then his well-known play on Sacco and Vanzetti.  In reading his magazine Fanal, one learned to value the realism of his articles, and there was no problem he could not tackle in a masterly fashion.  One of his last works was The Liberation of Society from the State, in which, as a pupil of Gustav Landauer, he contributed valuably to the discussion of the problem of socialism and the state.  In an article called Bismarxism, he pointed out the devastating consequences of the Marxist dogmas.  At his 50th birthday there appeared a volume called Collections, which gave a valuable survey of his literary and poetic works.  Erich Mühsam was a courageous fighter in the struggle for freedom and against the oppression and exploitation of the international proletariat.  To work in his spirit should be our future task.

On Bravery

I will conclude by quoting some of Mühsam's own words on the subject of bravery:

“It is not he who is forced into danger that is brave, nor he who runs towards danger wantonly, but only who takes on himself because of his beliefs what his conscience demands.  Therefore do not praise dangerous deeds, and the glory of an upright conscience will arise.  The bravery of unconditional acknowledgement does not need any danger, just as it will not allow itself to be frightened by it.  Whoever seeks danger for worldly honour is brave because he fears the judgment of the world.  The truly brave man does not fear any judgment but that of his own conscience.  Bravery is ruthless right-doing, it is unquestioning submission to self-recognised morals.  Whoever obeys an external moral code, whoever follows commands which crush his own consciousness of good and evil, is not brave, even if his deeds are equal to those which the world praises as heroic.  To fight without the motive in one's heart, only to avoid recriminations and punishment, is to be brave because of cowardice, it is to shield the lack of courage with courage.

“The courage of death, which dares everything even when there is no prospect of saving life, has nothing to do with bravery.  Not for the sake of living or dying is it seemly to be brave, but for the sake of conscience and humanity.

“When the time comes—and it must come, for it is dawning already and the world is pregnant with it—the time when the fight of the people is for moral values and their consciousness supplies the weapon, only then can bravery come to its true recognition.  Because then it will be revealed that the fighting man is only brave when the cause for which he fights is at the same time his own personal cause and that of humanity.”

W.R.



-----------------------------



Otto Weber. “The Death of Erich Mühsam” Freedom. Anarchist Fortnightly. Vol.8, No.21 (18 October 1947), p.7:


The Death of Erich Mühsam


We recently printed an account by a German comrade of the life of Erich Mühsam, the German-Jewish anarchist.  We reproduce below the detailed story of his death, movingly told by another of his fellow prisoners.

I was with Erich Mühsam in Oranienburg Concentration Camp from May 1934 until the day of his death in July 1934.

We were billeted in the same barracks.  It was an old brewery.  We slept on straw palliases in the over-crowded room.  Mühsam was a quiet, modest and friendly fellow prisoner.  In any spare time we had we would hold political discussions or play chess, which he loved passionately.

At the time of the Röhm putsch, our camp was suddenly encircled by SS men who disarmed our SA guards who were suspected of being in sympathy with Röhm.  The SS men, who came from Dachau, took over the camp.

After they had been there for a few days, they called Erich Mühsam before the Camp Commandant.  When he returned, he told his most trustworthy friends that he had been given three days, during which time he must hang himself, or else he would be hanged.  The news spread like wild-fire through the camp, and, with the increasingly bad treatment, our tension became unbearable.
But nothing happened.  Mühsam kept cheerful, amiable and calm.

On the evening of the third day, the SS man on duty appeared at our “cage”.  The room orderly reported all present except Mühsam.  Mühsam stood in the big barb-wired yard cleaning an SS uniform.  We all saw him through the windows of the barracks.  There was a new rope slung between two posts on which hung some SS uniforms which Mühsam was brushing.  He should have been inside with all the rest of us.  The SS men ordered us to go to sleep and lock the door.  The night passed restlessly for us all, and few could sleep.  There was whispered conversation and we were all waiting for something to happen.

We were told to get up next morning, but no-one was permitted to leave the barracks-room.  Mühsam had not returned and the excitement grew.  After about half-an-hour, the man on duty appeared and informed us that Mühsam had hanged himself in the lavatory.  He addressed the Jews who were isolated in a corner of the room and said:  “Which of you from Sodom and Gomorrah volunteers to cut Mühsam down?”

All the Jews went, and I went with them.  We were shocked by what we saw.  At the back of the room over the furthest seats a rope was fastened to a beam—the same rope that had hung between the two posts in the yard the evening before.  On this rope Erich Mühsam was hanging.  His face was peaceful.  His mouth and eyes were closed (a proof that he had been killed and then hanged).  His body was taken off and placed in a shed.  What happened to it later, I do not know.

After a few days, we were to be transferred from Oranienburg to Lichtenburg.  Hundreds of us were standing together ready to be transported on lorries, and with us were the SA and SS.  One of the prisoners cried loudly and clearly for everyone to hear “One minute's silence in memory of our comrade Mühsam!”  There was a dead silence and no-one moved.  Neither the SS nor the SA dared to do anything or to make any remarks.

Otto Weber.
Remschied.



-----------------------------



Margarete Buber-Neumann. Under Two Dictators. Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. London: Pimlico (Random House), 2008, pp.130-134:
Copyright © The Literary Estate of Margarete Buber-Neumann 2008 (first published in English in 1949 by Victor Gollancz in the U.K. and by Dodd Mead in the U.S.A.). Translation © Edward Fitzgerald 1949.

[Margarete Buber-Neumann describes her 1940 return from Siberia to Moscow's Butyrka prison:]

...We soon recognized old friends and acquaintances.  There was Roberta Gropper, Hilde Löwen, Zensl Mühsam, Carola Neher, Valy Adler, Betty Olberg, and others we had not met before.  There were twenty-three of us, and we had all been brought back to the Butirka from camps and prisons all over Russia.  We three were the first to come from a Siberian concentration camp.
  ‘What on earth's happened here in the Butirka?’; I asked in wonderment.  ‘Proper beds; proper bed linen; nobody bothers to speak in whispers; here you are all prancing around in the night and there's no one to interfere; no one lets down the hatch and bellows.  What's it all about?’ [p.131]
  No one knew any more than I did.  They were just happy that it was so, and left it at that.  Zensl Mühsam was the Cell Senior and she gave us each a bed.  We were dog-tired, but it was very late before I got to sleep.  This was what I had dreamt of:  a bed with a real matress and proper bedclothes...
  We were woken up at six o'clock instead of the usual half-past four...
  ...The wardress opened the cell and led us to the washroom, where we were left to our own devices for the best part of an hour.  No one bothered us.  Then we went back to the cell and a little while afterwards breakfast was served.  I say deliberately:  breakfast was served.  It was handed in on separate clean enamel plates for each of us.  There was both black and white bread, butter, two boiled eggs each and China tea.
  Zensl Mühsam saw the look on my face.  ‘That shakes you, doesn't it?’ she enquired.  ‘We must be important prisoners of State.  You needn't pinch yourself; you're awake.  But don't ask me what's happened.’...[p.132]
  ...I don't think any cell in the Butirka ever held such a merry company.
  Carola Neher was in prison garb.  Compared with our camp rags, it was almost elegant, and the elegant Carola wore it with an air.  It consisted of a blue flannel blouse with red lapels, a dark blue skirt and a short jacket.  As she had been doing a hard labour term, her lovely hair had been shaven off, but it was just long enough again now to stay down.
  At midday dinner was served...
  We had plenty of time to exchange our stories.  Carola had been longest in prison, having been arrested in the autumn of 1936.  She had been a top-line star in Germany and tremendously popular with her public.  However, she had always been anti-Nazi, had worked with Bert Brecht and when the Nazis came to power in 1933 she had, like so many others, gone first to Prague.  In Prague she had met and married a German engineer from Romania.  He was a Communist and burning to go to the Soviet Union and help in the building up of Socialism.  As soon as things could be arranged, they had left for Moscow, where Carola had begun to work in films and on the wireless.
  She and Zensl Mühsam were mixed up in the same ‘case’.  They both came from Munich, and whilst they were in Prague they had met an old Munich acquaintance, Erich Wollenberg, who had held a high command in the Red Army, but who by that time had broken with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.  Neither Carola nor Zensl belonged to the Party, so they were not subject to the Party discipline, which would have prevented their associating with Wollenberg.  Wollenberg gave Carola the address of a friend of his in Moscow, and Carola got in touch with the man when she arrived.  That and her association with Wollenberg was the cause of her arrest.  The GPU indictment turned her into a secret courier of the ‘Trotskyite’ Wollenberg, and she had been sentenced to ten years' hard labor.  During the period she spent on remand in the Lubianka, she had attempted to take her life by slashing her wrists with a piece of metal she had got hold of.  Her husband had also been arrested; why she did not know.  But her greatest sorrow was that she had never [p.133] been allowed to see her little son again.  He was a year old at the time of her arrest.
  Carola showed me a photo of him and a letter from the woman in charge of the children's home in Kazan where he was being kept.  It showed a sturdy little fellow quite naked and hugging a teddy bear.  The letter was charming and Carola would read it again and again.  It described the child's character and his ways, and said he was very intelligent and lovable.  It was the letter of a woman with a heart and it greatly consoled Carola.  She described the long and wearisome struggle she had had with the prison authorities before she had succeeded in finding out anything about him and getting permission to receive this letter and photo.
  The only trouble in our cell was the children.  Quite a number of our cell mates had left young children behind, and many of them were not so fortunate as Carola, who at least knew where her little son was.  Hilde Löwen had a three-year-old daughter of whose fate and whereabouts she was totally ignorant; and it was the same with Klara Vater.
  Zensl Mühsam had the darkest forebodings.  ‘Who knows what the GPU has in mind with us.  It's quite possible they intend to make some sort of bargain with Hitler and hand us all over.  I'll throw myself under the train first.  I won't let them take me back to Nazi Germany alive.’
  Zensl's husband, the famous anarchist, Erich Mühsam, was murdered by the Nazis in Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934.  He was slowly tortured to death.  Zensl had left Germany the same year to lecture abroad about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and prisons.  She had made it her mission to tell the world the truth about National Socialism it was so unwilling to hear.  In Prague she had worked together with the Communist Red Aid, which had assisted her to get her material published.  The leader of the International Red Aid, Stassova, then invited her to go to Moscow.  Zensl, who had joined the Communist Party, had not been spoiled by it.  She was an upright character who spoke her own mind once she had made it up.  She lived in Moscow as Stassova's guest and had a room in the Hotel Novaya Moskaya.  She had not been in Moscow long before many things became clear to her, and then she did not hesitate to criticise openly.  The end, of course, was inevitable.  From being an honoured guest, she became a prisoner.  Before the examining magistrate, she found herself faced with the same indictment as Carola:  allegedly she was a secret courier of the ‘Trotskyite’ Wollenberg.  Then after a few months in prison she was suddenly released.  The news of her arrest and imprisonment had become known abroad and caused a disagreeable amount of publicity and a great number of protests.
  Zensl was even allowed to return to her room at the Novaya Moskaya.  By this time she had only one thought:  how to get out.  She wrote to [p.134] her sister in the United States, and they succeeded in getting an entrance permit for her.  Whilst she was still waiting for a Russian permit to leave, the GPU arrested her for a second time.  They were more expeditious on this occasion, and within a week or so she had been sentenced by a Special Commission to eight years' forced labor in a camp.  She was sent to a camp in European Russia, where, according to her account, conditions must have been better than in Karaganda.  The women were chiefly engaged in sewing.
  Zensl was about sixty, but she was slim and upright and she moved like a young woman.  Her grey hair was worn in a neat plait round her head.  Her spirit was completely unaffected by her experiences and she never complained about her fate.  Her calm bearing was an example and a strength to us all.  Her husband still played a tremendous part in her life, and his name was constantly on her lips:  ‘Even then Erich said...’ ‘If Erich were alive...’  And she told us calmly of his sufferings in Oranienburg and of her constant attempts to secure his release which had ended only on the day they had led her in to see his dead body.

Copyright © The Literary Estate of Margarete Buber-Neumann 2008. Translation © Edward Fitzgerald 1949.



-----------------------------



“Zensl Mühsam” Freedom. Anarchist Fortnightly. Vol.11, No.15 (22 July 1950), p.3:


Zensl Mühsam


The international Anarchist movement has for some years been concerned with the fate of Zensl Mühsam, and an agitation for her release has gone on continually.  Zensl was the companion of Erich Mühsam, the well-known German Anarchist who was a victim of Hitlerism.  After Erich Mühsam was taken into concentration camp, Zensl escaped from Germany and was given sanctuary in Russia.  She was promised that an edition of his works would be published there, and was persuaded to go by several such offers.  On arrival, little has been heard of her except that she has been under arrest as a “deviationist”.  In 1936, a letter was received from her by the late Emma Goldman—it stated that she was well, but it was all typewritten—including the signature!

A short report appearing in the German Zeitung Ohne Namen (the weekly organ of the union of concentration camp prisoners of the Nazi regime) will therefore be of interest.  This comes from a comrade of the “Heimatlosen Linken”, who was for three years from 1938 to 1941 a prisoner in Soviet custody on political grounds and then in a German jail.  He reports that he met Zensl Mühsam.  He states that she was bad in health, “living in miserable conditions in a small room, whose furniture consisted of bed, table and chair.  Frau Mühsam has not changed in her appreciation of the truth.  The Societ authorities know that she will certainly report on conditions in Russia when she is at liberty again, and so they will never let her go.  At present, she is believed to be detained in Ivanovo.”



-----------------------------



J.T. “Erich Mühsam,” Anarchy 54. Vol.5 No.8 (August 1965), pp.255-6:


[p.255]  Margarete Buber, in her book Under Two Dictators, about her experiences in Russian and German concentration camps, from Karaganda to Ravensbrück, describes her meeting with Zensl Mühsam:

“Zensl was about 60, but she was slim and upright and she moved like a young woman.  Her grey hair was worn in a neat plait around her head.  Her spirit was completely unaffected by her experiences and she never complained about her fate.  Her husband still played a tremendous part in her life, and his name was constantly on her lips....And she told us calmly of his sufferings in Oranienburg and of her constant attempts to secure his release which had ended only on the day they had led her to see his dead body....
“Zensl's husband, the famous anarchist, Erich Mühsam, was murdered by the Nazis in Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934.  He was slowly tortured to death.  Zensl had left Germany the same year to lecture abroad about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and prisons....In Prague she had worked together the Communist Red Aid, which had assisted her to get her material published.  The leader of the International Red Aid, Stassova, then invited her to go to Moscow.  Zensl, who had joined the Communist Party, had not been spoiled by it.  She was an upright character who spoke her own mind once she had made it up.  She lived in Moscow as Stassova's guest and had a room in the Hotel Novaya Moskaya.  She had not been in Moscow long before many things became clear to her, and then she did not hesitate to criticise openly.  The end, of course, was inevitable.  From being an honoured guest, she became a prisoner....”

After  the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, Margarete Bubere and other German prisoners in Russia were handed over to the Nazis, and the same would probably have happened to Zensl Mühsam, but for the Nazi invasion of Russia.  She was released from prison after the war and was later sent back to East Germany, severely ill.  Given medals and a state pension as a “veteran anti-fascist militant”, her name was used on various manifestoes of Ulbricht's government.  When she died in 1962, the obituaries in the East German press did not mention that she had [p.256] spent many years in Soviet prisons and concentration camps.

Erich Mühsam was born on April 6, 1878, in Berlin, the son of a Jewish chemist who move shortly afterwards to Lubeck.  In his early twenties he met Gustav Landauer, the major influence in his life, and became known as a poet and a violent critic of Prussian militarism.  In 1908 he settled at Munich, writing for the satirical journals Simplizissimus and Jugend and in 1911 started a review Kain which was closed down in August 1914.  During the First World War he was arrested and imprisoned at Traunstein for inciting strikes in munition factories.  Kurt Eisner, the independent socialist, imprisoned for the same reason, was released on November 3, 1918 and Mühsam was set free two days later, and promptly threw himself into revolutionary agitation.  On November 8, the King of Bavaria abdicated and the republic proclaimed.  Mühsam's part in the Munich Council-Republic is described in the accompanying account of Gustav Landauer.  He was senteced to 15 years' hard labor, of which he served more than four years before being released under an amnesty in 1924.

On his release he became active in the Red Aid, for assisting political prisoners, in the agitation id defence of Sacco and Vanzetti, about whom he wrote the play Staatsräson.  From that time until his arrest in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mühsam edited a monthly anarchist review, Fanal, and during this period he travelled all over Germany trying to rouse the workers against the menace of Nazism.  Zensl Mühsam has told in a pamphlet (published in an Italian translation by Edizioni RL—Volontà) the terrible story of Mühsam's prison life from February 1933 to his death on July 9, 1934 at Oranienburg, when his murder was disguised as suicide.

When Zensl Mühsam took to Moscow those manuscripts and papers of her husband's which had not been seized by the Nazis, she hoped they would be published there.  They passed into the Soviet archives and all that has appeared since are his selected poems and a volume of “Unpolitical Memoirs”.  In an article on Mühsam in FREEDOM in 1947, “W.R.” remarked that, “One of his last works was The Liberation of Society from the State in  which, as a pupil of Gustav Landauer, he contributed valuably to the discussion of the problem of socialism and the state.”  It would be interesting to know if the text of this work, linking Mühsam's thought with that of Landauer and of Buber, still exists.



-----------------------------



Susanne Leonhard. Gestohlenes Leben. Schicksal einer politischen Emigrantin in der Sowjetunion. 5th revised edition. Herford: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968.

Copyright © 1968 by Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung

[p.15] My friend Erich Mühsam was brutally tortured and tormented in the Oranienburg concentration camp, until SS men finally strung him up...

[p.71] Zensl Mühsam, the widow of the revolutionary poet Erich Mühsam who was murdered by the Nazis in the summer of 1934 in the Oranienburg concentration camp, also used to move in the Dutchman de Wit's circle of friends.  Frau Meese told me that Zensl Mühsam had already been arrested by the end of April 1936, but was released again six months later.  From the prison, she went immediately, dirty and with sagging stockings, to the Dutch family — the de Wits.  A musty prison smell hung on her.  Then she turned to the MOPR [Mezhdunarodnoye Obshtchestvo Pomoshtchi Revolutzioneram; Russian: International Red Aid], and Yelena Stassova set her up in a room in the MOPR building, where she was watched closely.

Zensl Mühsam came to the Soviet Union in August 1935, at the invitation of Yelena Stassova, the director of the MOPR.  Her Prague acquaintances — Zensl found herself in emigration in Czechoslovakia for a year — and all of Erich Mühsam's friends were very astonished by her decision to go to the “Bolsheviks”.  Yet I saw therein merely the consequence of a notion which a great many still shared at that time — and I, too, among them —, namely the notion that the Soviet Union represented a closed field of the most implacable enmity towards the National Socialists, that it therefore must be the exile par excellence for all those persecuted by Hitler, indeed for all revolutionaries of every stripe.  I had been friends with Erich Mühsam for many years; I became better acquainted with Zensl only after Erich had been hauled off to the concentration camp.  At the report of Erich's ostensible suicide, I rushed to her immediately.  I found her composed and fiercely determined.  “Up to now — next to Erich — I haven't had anything to say, but you will see....I will speak and speak, I will scream, I will stir up [p.72] the world's conscience.  Now I have only one task in life:  Revenge for Erich!”

On July 16, 1934, Erich Mühsam was buried in the Waldfriedhof in Dahlem, where two weeks before the burial of the murdered “red general” Schleicher had taken place.  In the chapel, our group of mourners consisted of only fourteen people.  At the grave, we were joined by only an additional half-dozen.  Not more.  Only this little group of people had dared to show their sympathy for the dead poet.  Not a single prominent writer was present.

While we were burying Erich, Zensl had already left Germany.  I only saw her again early in 1936, in Moscow. She was in the company of her nephew Elfinger.  With beaming eyes, Zensl told then of her lecture tour on behalf of MOPR.  She was in Sverdlovsk, Czelyabinsk, Kirov and others cities, where she spoke at factory meetings about the Hitler terror and the martyrdom of her husband and of other upright revolutionaries.  The Soviet Union, it seemed, had made possible for her that which she had sworn to do, to avenge Erich and to stir up the world against the Nazi dictatorship.  Enormous propaganda was made with Erich Mühsam's name.  Zensl was proud of it.  And now this Frau Meese told me, Zensl had been arrested, since she had ostensibly “abused the hospitality of the country of asylum” and behaved in a manner “contrary to the political morals of the Soviet Union.”  We both feared that the great wave of arrests could catch Zensl a second time and sweep her away forever.  Indeed, I learned later in the camp that Zensl Mühsam was arrested once again in 1937 and then sent off to a camp in Siberia.*


Leonhard's Footnotes

[* Leonhard's footnote 23, p.72:  Frau Kreszentia Mühsam — after many years detention in camps and places of exile — was allowed in mid-1950's to finally return to Germany.  She lived, receiving the best of care, in East Berlin, where she died in March 1962 (born July 28, 1884).]

Copyright © 1968 by Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung

[Translated by C.R. Edmonston]



-----------------------------



L. Kraft. “Who is Bruno Traven?” Cienfuegos Press Review of Anarchist Literature , Vol.1, No.1, 1976, pp.1-2. [ISBN 0-904564-09-6]:


“Who is Bruno Traven?”


...For the subsequent data I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Erich Meuhsam [sic], whose biography (more correctly, a biographic sketch) I am writing now.  I might insert that our identical conception about the world, our uninterrupted correspondence and personal acquaintanceship have provided the basis for this biographical sketch.  In connection with Erich Meuhsam's lectures, which I arranged in Vienna in the year 1931, I naturally discussed with him about the accomplished author Trave, whose work I praised without reservation because the fundamental tendency professed in them is also ours.

One autumn day in 1917 Erich Meuhsam related to me — a very gifted young man appeared in Munich and began publishing an interesting magazine that appeared very irregularly.  The young man used the name Ret Marut:  his publication he called “Ziegelbrenner” (“The Brickburner”).  No one knew his real name.  Even his closest friends had no idea what his real name was.  The Ziegelbrenner attacked very strongly the methods pursued by journalism; it also attacked the question of war, legal justice and governmental authority in general.  He also helped to spread the seeds of the revolution which started in Munich on May 1, 1919, when the Soviet-Republic of Bavaria was founded.  General Ep with his band of volunteers then marched into Munich and Ret Marut, one of the main leaders of the Soviet, was arrested and without much ceremony slated to be shot.  On the way to the place of execution, he succeeded in escaping from the military court and disappeared.  A few numbers of the Ziegelbrenner continued to appear in 1920 and 1921 in Vienna, and later in several other European cities until it became defunct.  After the Munich happenings, the magazine was delivered to its former subscribers only.  (According to a notice on its title page, no new subscriptions were accepted).  At the same time, the anonymous editor made this declaration:

“In several parts of Germany, there are certain people who claim to be publishers of “Ziegelbrenner”  Whoever makes such a claim in an imposter because the real publisher entertains no motive to look for such rotten propaganda”.  This was very much regretted by Meuhsam who had the highest regard for the anti-authoritarian Ziegelbrenner.  When Meuhsam, after being freed from a five-year term of imprisonment in the Bavarian fortress, published the monthly journal Fanel [sic] in the city of Berlin, he printed this announcement in the seventh issue of its first year's appearance in April 1927:

	Where is the Ziegelbrenner?

Do none of the readers of Fanel know the whereabouts of Ziegelbrenner? — Ret Marut, comrade, friend, co-revolutionist, brother, let us hear from you, show us that you are alive, that you are still the same “Ziegelbrenner”, that your heart has not failed you, that your mind has not tempered, that your arm is not paralysed, that your hand has not stiffened.  You eluded the Bavarians in 1919.  If you had not succeeded, you would have long been placed where Landauer and others of our great thinkers are buried, where I too would be if they had not arrested me 14 days before and sent me away from the place of execution.  Right now they can do nothing to you.  The amnesty that was proclaimed will have to be applied also in your case.  It calls upon you to write the origin of the Bavarian Commune.  The published documents, until now, have been written from a partisan viewpoint.  I, too, am, in some respects partial, too personally imbued with the aims, too deeply engrossed in the conflicting merits and demerits to be able to write with sufficient objectivity the history of the revolution.

[p.2]

You are the only one who took an active part in the happenings and, therefore, could observe from within, as well as from without, what ocurred [sic] that was repulsive and what was intended to be good; what was interpreted correctly and what could have been made better.  The remaining works of Gustav Landauer, his letters, his speeches and all that he accomplished in his last days will soon be offered for open criticism.  You were at his side as co-worker and follower when he was the People's Commissar of Propaganda.  We are in need of you.  Who knows the “Ziegelbrenner”?  Who of the readers of “Fanel” knows where we might locate Ret Marut?

Many inquire about him.  Many are waiting for him.  He must answer the call.”

To our dismay, as Meuhsam related to me, the appeal remained unanswered, and Meuhsam lost all hope in ever hearing about Ret Marut.  Then, one day, he came upon the first books of Traven.  He began reading them.  Somehow, the style of writing appeared very familiar to him.  But he had to rack his brains to find somewhere a similarity to this writing.  He then searched through the old issues of Ziegelbenner and together with Rudolf Rocker, compared the style of writing.  One day it dawned on him that the style resembled very closely that of Ret Marut.  It was then that both Meuhsam and Rocker decided that Ret Marut, editor of Ziegelbrenner, was none other than Bruno Traven.  This is how the story was related to me by Erich Meuhsam.

...

When I was in Germany, not long ago, I procured after a long search, several numbers of “Ziegelbrenner”.  I think Meuhsam's conclusion is positively correct....

L. Kraft
(This article, translated by Sam Polinov from the Argentinian journal Das Freie Wort, first appeared in Man!, the American anarchist monthly, August 1939.).



-----------------------------



Frederic V. Grunfeld. Prophets Without Honour. A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979, pp.115-129:

Copyright © 1979 by Frederic V. Grunfeld


[Elizabeth] Lasker-Schüler was to outlive not only Mühsam, who was nine years her junior, but also Toller, twenty-four years younger than herself....

She was very fond of wilde Juden, among whom she counted herself, and that was one of the reasons she felt a special affinity for Mühsam and Toller, each of whom was a “wild Jew” in his own fashion.  Mühsam's political ideal was summed up in the title of his essay, Die Befreiung der Gesellschaft vom Staat (The Liberation of [p.116] Society from the State).  He could be heard preaching this messianic doctrine in the literary cafés of Munich, though people rarely took him seriously.  Much of his “revolutionary” poetry sounds, in fact, like Lasker-Schüler transposed into a more proletarian mode:

...Ich weiss von allem Leid
fühl alle Scham
und möchte helfen aller Kreatur.
Der Liebe such ich aus dem Hass die Spur,
Dem Menschenglück den Weg aus Not und Gram....

Doch keiner war noch, der mein Wort verstand,
und keiner, der die Hand ergriffen hat.
Ich weiss vom Leide nur, fühl nur die Scham, — 
Und kann doch selber nicht Erlöser sein,
wie jener Jesus, der die ganze Pein
der Welt auf seine schwachen Schultern nahm.

I know all suffering, feel all pain, and seek to help all of creation.  I want to find a path whereby love can escape from hatred; I want to lead humanity out of misery and need....Yet there is no one who understands my words, and none to seize my hand.  I only know of suffering, can only feel the pain!  I cannot myself be the redeemer, like that Jesus who took the whole of the world's suffering upon his slender shoulders.

Mühsam means “arduous” in German, and something in his style was eminently suited to the name:*1  though he could write devastating satires and comic verse, his serious writing is often laborious in its earnestness, as though he were spelling out a message for an audience by which he felt himself misunderstood....

[p.117]

...Mühsam's “Liberation of Society from the State” was nothing other than [William] Blake's “Striving with Systems to Deliver Individuals from those Systems”....

Mühsam thought of himself as a realist, though his friends all describe him as a “good-natured and shaggy” romantic.  He confessed to being a revolutionary by temperament.  Even as a schoolboy he had “resisted the influences that sought to impose themselves on me,” and this esprit de contradiction had determined the course of his life because it endowed him with a fatal weakness for lost causes.  He was the son of a pharmacist, born in Berlin in 1878 but raised in Lübeck, the home of Thomas and Heinrich Mann.*2  His education followed the familiar pattern of more or less continuous conflict with an authoritarian school system.  In one of his autobiographical sketches he gives a telegraphic account of his childhood, as though he could hardly bring himself to write about it:  “Uncomprehending teachers; nobody who might have understood the peculiarities of this child, hence rebelliousness, laziness, preoccupation with other things.  Early attempts at writing poetry, encouraged neither at school nor at home; on the contrary, seen as [p.118] distraction from school and thus as attempt to evade duty; poetry had to be written in secret.”

As a student in the Lübeck Gymnasium he sent the text of a speech given by the Direktor, together with appropriate comments, to the local Social Democratic newspaper, and was expelled from school as a radical and a troublemaker.  He became a pharmacist's apprentice and then an assistant in a pharmacy, but it occurred to him, while working in Berlin, that he had no vocation to be anything but a poet.  For a time he, too, belonged to the group around “St. Peter” Hille and the “New Society” of the brothers Hart, who wanted to create a “great commune of humanity, happiness, beauty, art and a new religious spirit of dedication.”  Gustav Landauer, another member of the circle, soon converted him to a more militant kind of Utopian Socialism.  One of Mühsam's first published essays was an article for Karl Kraus's Die Fackel in which he described the young Berlin Bohemians and their ideas.  A Bohemian, he explained — he was, of course, writing mainly about himself — “is a person who has despaired of ever establishing contact with the great majority of his fellow human beings.  This great despair is the underlying reason for his wanting to be an artist, and on that account he goes into life to experiment with chance, to play catch-ball with the accidents of the moment, and to unite himself to the eternity that is always with us.”

Mühsam's Bohemians — as opposed to Henri Murger's La Bohème — were not really antisocial; it was “the compulsive way in which conventions are drilled into people” that alienated them from the rest of mankind.  Their skeptical attitude toward the world, and “their negative view of all conventional values” was combined with “a great social longing for an ideal civilization.”  These Bohemians, in fact, would have liked to live like early Christians, and their tracts bear a more than glancing resemblance to the hippie pronunciamentos of the 1960s.  By the same token, there was no love lost between the Utopians and the Communists.  In 1906 — well over a decade before the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks were able to test their theories in practice for the first time — Mühsam prophesied in Die Fackel that a state built on Communist principles would produce “such a regime of bureaucrats and officials that the present Prussian State would be a veritable holiday camp by comparison.”  He himself could see no advantage in a system where “Father State will function as the only employer, the sole monopolistic exploiter.”  Later he was to coin the term Bismarxism for the rigidities of Communist-authoritarian thinking.  Immediately after the Russian Revolution he supported the Com-[p.119]-munists for a time, thinking they might have begun to move toward his kind of Socialism, but the party found him unamenable to discipline and denounced him as a “Kaffeehaus poet.”

Indeed, Mühsam's natural habit was the literary café, where he was to be found at all hours improvising nonsense rhymes and the Spoonerist couplets (Schüttelreime) for which he became famous:

Man wollte sie zu zwanzig Dingen
In einem Haus zu Danzig zwingen.

They wanted to force her to do twenty things in a house at Danzig.

There were also long, satirical ballads that Mühsam wrote for his café repertoire, and love lyrics in which he celebrated the newly emerging sexual mores of the twentieth century:

Als ich dich fragte:  Darf ich Sie beschützen?
Da sagtest du:  Mein Herr, Sie sind trivial.
Als ich dich fragte:  Kann ich Ihnen nützen?
Da sagtest du:  Vielleicht ein andres Mal.
Als ich dich bat:  Ein Kuss, mein Kind, zum Lohne!
Da sagtest du:  Mein Gott, was ist ein Kuss?
Als ich dich befahl:  Komm mit mir, wo ich wohne!
Da sagtest du:  Na, endlich ein Entschluss!

And when you asked:  how may I serve you?
You said, Monsieur, you're being trivial.
And when I asked:  do I deserve you?
You thought the question unconvivial.
And when I pleaded for a fond embrace
You laughed at me with some derision.
But when I said:  let's go to my place!
You said:  at last a real decision!

Mühsam would recite his poems and then pass the hat, since most of the time he had no other source of income.  “Nothing was sacred to this rebel,” reported one chronicler of the Berlin scene.  “there was no word in the German language which he would not turn inside out for a Schüttelreim, and there was no well-to-do patron of the café from whom he would fail to extract a thaler as a tribute to his art.”  The humorist Roda Roda remembered him as a desperately thin little man with wild hair and a full red beard — “A solidly decent fellow, whom I liked a lot.  I used to play chess with him.”  But Mühsam would rather talk about politics than art, and Roda Roda regarded him as an “incurable crank” politically.  “Once I invited him to dinner, together with one of his like-minded friends.  At the same time I invited three young officers of the [p.120] feudal Berlin Franz-Regiment; they came, as I had requested, in civilian clothes.  I seated them at the table; each anarchist between two aristocrats.  It was a memorable occasion.  After the first bewilderment they got along perfectly well, and they parted company with assurances of mutual respect.”

Mühsam's way of life was even more minimalist than Lasker-Schüler's.  He slept in a barn in the suburbs or relied on friends with apartments in the city to put him up.  Richard, the hunchback headwaiter at the Café des Westens, is said to have been the one who subsidized the first of his pamphlet “pages for humanity.”  The Heidelberg philosopher Gustav Radbruch recalls in his memoirs that while he was living in Berlin at the beginning of the century, Mühsam was “periodically without a place to live.  He would spend his nights at the Café des Westens and then, almost every morning, would knock on my door at six o'clock in order to get some sleep.  Once he arrived coatless, having given his overcoat to a freezing beggar....”

IN 1907 the thirty-year-old poet set out for Paris via Switzerland, where he spent some time with the exiled Russina revolutionaries at Ascona before wandering across the Alps on foot, stopping at the Simplon for three days to discuss theology with the Cistercian monks who kept a hospice for travelers at the top of the pass.  He had already come to the realization that wanderlust was an Unbehagen of the modern soul:

Weiter, weiter, unermüdlich!
Westlich, östlich; nördlich, südlich.
Suche, Seele, suche!...

Mit dem Fahrschein bahnbehördlich
Westlich, östlich; südlich, nördlich.
Suche, Seele, suche!
Siehst dein Glück vorübertreiben
hinter Schnellzugsfensterscheiben.
Fluche, Seele, fluche!

Onward, onward without rest
to the north, east, south, west!
Seek, soul, seek!...

With your ticket sallying forth
to the west, east, south, north.
Seek, soul, seek!
See your life flash by in pain
from the window of a midnight train.
Shriek, soul,  shriek!

[p.121]

In Paris he fell in easily with the artists and poets who frequented the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse, among them Picasso, Paul Fort and Jules Pascin.  The satirical weekly L'Assiette au beurre published some of his pieces.  He spent his nights at the Lapin Agile, the most creative of the Montparnasse cabarets, which, as he afterward remembered it, was always crowded with poets, singers, pretty girls.  “In this cabaret no distinction was made between performers and audience; there were no program schedules or contracts:  people simply wanted to be sure that their art was seen and heard, and to discover what other people were creating that was new.”  When he returned to Germany the following year he summed up his impressions with the phrase, Paris lebt — Berlin funktioniert (Paris lives, Berlin functions).

Munich seemed to offer a more congenial atmosphere for a man of his talents, and for a decade he became a prominent member of the Schwabing  literary set — though as one of its members recalled, “he never had any money because he gave away everything he had.”  To readers of the Munich weekly Simplicissimus he was already known as the author of some of the most sardonic ballads of the day.  His poem Idyll, for example — first published in Simplicissimus in February 1906 — opens with a cheerfully macabre vision of a lynch victim:

Ein alter Leichnam hängt
am einem Telegraphenmast.
Nach seinen Schlenkerbeinen fasst
    — ob er sie fängt? — 
ein ausgespreizter Eichenast....

An aging corpse
hangs from a telegraph pole.
Toward his dangling legs reaches
    — can it catch them? — 
the outspread branch of an oak.

Mühsam produced scores of such poems as well as “vegetarian hymns,” a rhyming calendar for the underprivileged, workmen's ballads, songs to sing to a barrel organ, social satires, a Psychology of the Erbtante (the aunt from whom one expects to inherit money) and the numerous essays about ways of improving the world with which he filled the pages of his one-man “Journal for Humanity” with the curiously accusative title, Kain.  The playwright Frank Wedekind, his boon companion of the Torggelstube (a wine bar adjoining the Munich Hofbräuhaus) once warned [p.122] Mühsam that his political fixation was dangerously at odds with his literary gift.  “You're like a bareback rider standing on two horses that are headed in different directions,” Wedekind told him.  “They will tear your legs apart.”  Mühsam disagreed.  “If I let one of them go,” he said, “I'll lose my balance and break my neck.”

Although Mühsam had written love lyrics in praise of plain girls with bowlegs and frizzy hair, he married the very pretty Kreszentia — Zensl, for short — whom friends described as an “arch-Bavarian peasant girl.”  She was immensely devoted to him, and he to her.  “Erich was the most attentive husband you can imagine,” she wrote to his sister three years after his murder.  “Besides, he was always so terribly proud of me — 'My wife does everything herself!'...He filled out my life, far beyond his death.  I know people do not simply die; everyone leaves a faint shadow behind.  But Erich, he stands beside me, he walks beside me, he remains with me.  When I dream, I have never yet dreamed that Erich is dead.”

In his prewar essays, Mühsam repeatedly attacked the militarism which was considered the very foundation of Wilhelmine Germany, and which had produced the heel-clicking cult of the officer class that Nietzsche once characterized as “Obedience and Long Legs.”  Mühsam tried to show his readers that armies were both dangerous and immoral.  “Special prerogatives for the military encourage people's enthusiasm for war,” he wrote.  “One has to work against that.  It is with children that the 'patriots' begin their work.  The antimilitarists should also start with children.  They have to be taught that war is murder.  They have to be imbued with an aversion and hatred for murder....”  Besides, the garrison state was uneconomical.  “Hundreds of thousands of young men otherwise capable of doing work or having families are torn from their normal occupations and dressed in comically colored gear in which everyone looks alike, decked out in shiny buttons, tin headgear and numbered badges on their shoulders.”

When the war broke out, Mühsam's “small, squeaky voice” was drowned out by the cheering and the marching songs.  Though he went on agitating for pacifist solutions, the government did not consider him sufficiently dangerous to be sent to jail.  Only when he refused to be conscripted into the vaterländische Hilfsdienst (Patriotic Auxiliary Service) was he finally imprisoned as a conscientious objector.  Then, after years of isolation from the mainstream of German events, he suddenly found himself — distinctly out of his depth — at the center of a real, as opposed to a literary, revolution.  On November 7 and 8, 1918, the leader of the [p.123] Independent Socialists in Bavaria, Kurt Eisner, persuaded the Munich army garrison to support him in declaring a Bavarian republic.  The last of the Wittelsbach kings had already departed:  without a shot having been fired, Bavaria was transformed from a kingdom into a “Free State” and acquired a provisional government.  Eisner was a gifted statesman and orator, but his rise to power as prime minister was something of a fluke:  he was a Berlin Jewish intellectual who had been working in Munich for a decade and had acquired a small following among the voters of the moderate Left.  He hoped to change Germany by kindness, and when he took office he declared that he was “certain that we can find the way toward a new freedom...without the use of force..”

Among the most prominent figures to participate in Eisner's government were Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam — all of them Jewish intellectuals, and not one of them with so much as a Bavarian accent.  It was not only the right-wing establishment that recoiled from this unheard-of state of affairs.  Franz Kafka, looking on from the sidelines, wrote to Max Brod a year after the revolution that the Jews had overreached themselves:  “They have always tried to push Germany into things which it might have accepted slowly and in its own fashion, but which it was bound to reject because they came from outsiders.”  Kafka had reached this conclusion after listening to the German guests at a hotel where he was staying:  “They don' forgive the Jewish Socialists and Communists a single thing; they drown them during the soup and quarter them while carving the roast.”*3

After three months in office, Eisner was assassinated in the street on his way to the opening of the Bavarian Provincial Assembly (where, in fact, he intended to deliver his resignation speech).  His murderer was Count Arco Valley, a young man who felt stigmatized by the fact that his mother was Jewish, and who wanted to prove to his Teutonic friends in the Thule Club that (as the club's founder, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, expressed it) “even a half-Jew was capable of a heroic deed.”  Eisner's death was followed by a short civil war in which the hastily organized Räterepublik — the “Republic of Soldiers' and Workers' Councils” — was liquidated by [p.124] 200,000 freebooting soldiers of the so-called Freikorps, the forerunners of Hitler's Storm Troops.

Leading figures of the Räterepublik who were left alive after the “White Terror” were given long prison sentences by a military tribunal that charged them with treason.  Mühsam received a fifteen-year sentence of which he was to serve six years before being amnestied — most of them at the notorious fortress prison of Niederschönenfeld, where the lives of political prisoners were made as miserable as possible.  Mühsam was repeatedly singled out for special punishment — for writing the “subversive” poetry that was discovered in his cell, for having insulted a Bavarian minister or for minor infractions of the prison regulations.  Once he drew special punishment for calling the health authorities' attention to the fact that a fellow prisoner needed psychiatric treatment.  “For this,” Toller recalled in his memoirs, “Mühsam was punished with seven weeks' solitary confinement.  'It will give Mühsam an opportunity to decide whether it is worth while to try and gain leadership by interfering with the affairs of other prisoners,' the report read.”

Though he became deaf in one ear and developed heart trouble as a result of his experiences, Mühsam continued writing poems and plays whenever he was permitted the use of writing materials.  Since his first brushes with the law he had been perfectly aware that with his wild hair and rabbinical beard, he was to be made to pay for more than purely political crimes.  His poem Das Verhör (The Interogation) touches on this point with a delicacy reminiscent of Carl Sternheim:

Sie heissen? fragte mich der Direktor.
Ich nannte den Namen.
Geboren?
Ja!
Wann, meine ich.
Ich nannte das Datum.
Religion?
Geht Sie nichts an.
Schreiben Sie also:  mosaisch! — Der Beamte schrieb....

Your name? the Director asked me.
I told him the name.
Born?
Yes!
When, I mean.
I named the date.
Religion? [p.125]
Doesn't concern you.
Very well, write:  Jewisch! — the clerk wrote it down.

When he was paroled in December 1924 — Lasker-Schüler and Kurt Tucholsky were among the influential writers who had campaigned for his release — his arrival in Berlin drew such a large crowd to the railway station that the police felt justified in breaking up the welcoming party with rubber truncheons.  After what he called the “Kaspar Hauser adventure of my return among my people,” he devoted himself to helping others whom he considered unjustly imprisoned.  A lecture tour was organized for him, and he spoke of his prison experiences on behalf of the Communist-sponsored Rote Hilfe, the “Red Assistance” for political prisoners.  But he resigned from the organization when it became apparent the Rote Hilfe ignored the plight of anarchist prisoners in the Soviet Union.  The call for an amnesty, Mühsam insisted, “must not fall silent at the borders of Russia.”

Since the existing political parties failed to come up to his expectations, he fell back on publishing a small, eccentric magazine of his own, Fanal, while at the same time writing comic verse in Berlinerisch dialect for one of the local weeklies.  He had not lost his touch, and he was still being asked to recite his poetry on all possible occassions.  “Young people loved him,” writes the critic Alfred Kantorowicz.  “They crowded around him, asking him to recite his verses — especially the memorable song of the Revoluzzer im Zivilstand Lampenputzer (the revolutionary who cleans lamps for a living).  He could be very cheerful.  He was not fanatical, not doctrinaire, not 'always in the right.'”  The young writer Günter Dallmann remembered him “not only on account of his bushy beard, as an infinitely good and gentle prophet — though he could also grow very angry about injustice....”  Indeed, much of Mühsam's poetry is deliberately prophetic and biblical in its allusions:

...Ein Jude zog aus Nazareth
Die Armen glücklich zu machen.

“A Jew came from Nazareth/ that the poor might be happy,” run the concluding lines of one of his most messianic poems.  His vision of Moses, too, is based on what the philosopher Ernst Bloch was to call das Prinzip Hoffnung, the Hope Principle — Des Menschen Himmel ist allein sein Hoffen (man's sole heaven is his ability to hope).  In the poem Vermächtnis (Legacy) Mühsam went so far as to employ the symbolism of the Eucharist to describe his own impending Passion: [p.126] 

Bald wird vielleicht uns das Henkerbrot
in den Keller gereicht.
Dann segne das Blut, das dem Leibe entrinnt!

Soon, perhaps, the hangman's bread
will be passed to us in the cellar.
Then bless this blood that from the body flows!

In March 1933 Mühsam was caught in the Nazi roundup of left-wing intellectuals following the Reichstag fire.  Klaus Mann reports that friends had urged him to leave Berlin, and had provided him with a third-class ticket to Prague.  While he was packing up his books and papers, an acquaintance who was also wanted by the Gestapo came to him for help.  “The young man told later how Mühsam behaved that afternoon.  In his bearded, Christ-like face, his eyes shone.  'Would you go if you could?' he asked.  And as the lad nodded, he drew a ticket from his pocket — the third-class ticket to Prague which was to have helped him to save his life that night.  The lad did not ask many questions.  From Mühsam's house he ran straight to the station.”  Early the next morning the poet was arrested by Storm Troopers.

He was fifty-fife at the time of his imprisonment.  For seventeen months he was subjected to a crescendo of beatings and tortures in a succession of concentration camps:  Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and Oranienburg.  On the day of his arrival in Sonnenburg they began by smashing his glasses, knocking out his teeth and tearing out bunches of his hair.  He was stood against a wall, blindfolded and told he was going to be shot.  Mühsam tore off the blindfold and shouted at the firing squad:  “I want to see the dogs who are going to shoot me!”  But it turned out to be only one of the mock executions with which the guards amused themselves.  A fellow prisoner who escaped to Prague wrote a detailed account of what he had seen of the way Mühsam was treated at Brandenburg.  Besides the routine beatings which were administered to almost all the prisoners there were scenes of public humiliation reserved especially for Mühsam.  “On October 12, 1933, Mühsam was pushed into the courtyard where we prisoners had to form a ring around him.  The section leader, SS-man Schmidt, gave the following speech:  ‘Look at this miserable specimen, this target in a shooting gallery!  These are your leaders!  This is Erich Mühsam of the Munich Räterepublik!  Mühsam is that you?’ — ‘Yes, that is who I am,’ Mühsam said. — ‘See, this Judenschwein is even proud of it!’ Schmidt cried, and punched Mühsam in the face with such terrific force he fell to the ground.” [p.127]

In November Mühsam requested the authorities' permission to write a letter to his wife.  Shortly afterward an SS-man called him aside and demanded:  “Mühsam, give me your hand!”  When the poet refused, the SS-man reached out and broke both of Mühsam's thumbs:  “There, now you can write to your wife!”  By now, according to several eyewitness reports, he had been beaten nearly blind and deaf.  On November 11 (the fifteenth anniversary of the Armistice) he was seized by several guards and publicly beaten with a rifle butt until he collapsed.  “One could hear only a single groan.  Mühsam never cried.  Even when both his thumbs were broken he uttered only a stifled groan.”  He recovered from this beating, too, though his ears had been beaten to a pulp and “he was in terrible condition.  From his right ear, which bled continuously, hung a giant blister of blood and pus.”

At Oranienburg, the camp to which he was transferred in February 1934, the guards devised ever more ingenious ways of torturing their prisoner.  The Gestapo had discovered a chimpanzee at the home of a scientist who had been arrested.  They brought it it the concentration camp and loosed it on Mühsam.  The ape was supposed to bite the poet, but it seemed capable of distinguishing friend from foe:  it threw its arms around Mühsam's neck, hugging and kissing the prisoner, who “spoke kind words to him.”  When they saw their plan had misfired the guards tortured the animal in Mühsam's presence and then killed it.  And yet in spite of everything, when one of his friends was about to be moved to another camp, Mühsam told him, by way of farewell:  “Have faith, humanity will triumph!”

He was aware that they were trying to goad him to suicide — as many other prisoners had been goaded — but he was determined not to cooperate.  Finally, on July 9, 1934, he was called to the camp's headquarters and bluntly told:  “We'll give you forty-eight hours to kill yourself, and if you don't we'll help you along.”  He had already survived a number of such threats, but this time he was convinced they were in earnest.  “If you hear that I have taken my own life, don't believe it,” he told his friends among the prisoners.  “I shall not do this work.  I am not my own executioner; I shall leave that to others.”  That night he was called out of the barracks and failed to return.  The next morning his scarred, beaten body was discovered hanging from a beam in the latrine.  But it was clear that the rope had been knotted by a specialist and not by the near-blind Mühsam, who had difficulty tying his shoelaces.  The position and condition of the body also indicated that the poet had, in fact, been murdered during the night. [p.128]

Only a handful of people dared to attend Mühsam's funeral in Berlin-Dahlem on July 16.  His wife, Zensl, who had done everything in her power to get him released, was not among them.  She had already arranged with the press attaché at the Czech Embassy to smuggle her husband's papers out of Germany by diplomatic pouch, and now she followed them to Prague, where she took refuge with one of their Czech friends.*4  Mühsam had always regarded his unpublished diaries as the most important of his writings.  According to their friend Erich Wollenberg, Mühsam had warned his wife at their last meeting:  “You must promise me, Zensl, never to visit Russia so long as Stalin rules.  Guard my diaries like the apple of your eye, and never allow my papers to fall into the hands of the Communists.  That would be the worse than my death!”  The International Rote Hilfe for political prisoners, however, persuaded Zensl Mühsam to visit Moscow in 1935, and the following spring she concluded a contract with the Soviet government giving the Moscow Literary Institute exclusive rights to her husband's literary estate.  She arranged to have the manuscripts delivered to the Soviet Embassy in Prague.

As soon as they were safely in Soviet hands and her signature was affixed to the contract, Zensl Mühsam was arrested in Moscow, charged with being a “Trotzkyist agent.”  Apparently she had been tricked into surrendering her husband's manuscripts so that, in the words of one knowledgeable observer, his “anarchist criticism of the Communists could be rendered harmless for the future.”  In point of fact, Mühsam's literary legacy has never been made public:  his papers continue to repose behind locked doors at the Gorki Institute for World Literature in Moscow.

His widow, meanwhile, was to spend most of the next twenty years in Soviet prisons and labor camps.  Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German writer imprisoned on much the same charges, afterward remembered meeting her in a Moscow prison cell.  “Zensl Mühsam was about sixty.  She wore her gray hair in a plait around her head, she was slender and tall, and moved like a young woman.  She never complained about her cruel fate.  Her calm superiority was remarkable.  In her conversation she always came back to, ‘Erich said even them...’ or ‘If Erich were still alive...’”

Unlike Lasker-Schüler's ex-husband, Herwath Walden, who emigrated to Russia only to vanish into the Gulag without a trace, [p.129] Zensl Mühsam survived her imprisonment and, though mentally disoriented, was repatriated to East Germany at the age of seventy-two, seven years before her death in 1962.  Whether her husband's writings are ever to be disinterred remains an unanswered question:  there are known to be 12,540 pages of material in the microfilm copies which the Moscow Institute deposited with the East Berlin Academy of Arts, but these, too, continue to be kept under lock and key.  (Actually, the Moscow Institute's contract for publication — or rather, nonpublication — rights appears to be legally invalid, since the co-executor of Mühsam's will, then living in America, never consented to the arrangement.)

Ernst Toller, who spent nearly five years in the same Bavarian prison, came away with a picture of Mühsam as “a man of rare integrity and great courage.”  Yet they were in no sense allies or co-conspirators, even in literary matters.  Toller's plays were written in the stylized Expressionist idiom that Mühsam considered unnecessarily sophisticated:  “The Expressionist stammer,” he wrote, “fulfills the bourgeois' need for modernity but not the proletarian's need for an art that will illuminate his experience of life.”...


Grunfeld's Footnotes


[* 1 - Grunfeld's footnote, p.116:  He himself must have regarded the name not only as a rich source for puns but as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  A friend quotes him as saying to a psychoanalyst who proposed to probe the etiology of his neuroses:  “Ich lasse mir aber meine mühsam erworbenen Hemmungen nicht nehmen”; i.e., I refuse to let you take away the neuroses that I have acquired so laboriously (in such a mühsam fashion).]

[* 2 - Grunfeld's footnote, p.117:  It was also the birthplace of the free-thinking Countess Reventlow, Wolfskehl's inamorata, who was later to become a close friend of Mühsam's in Munich.  Around the turn of the century the burgomaster of Lübeck was heard to complain of this embarrassing brood:  Thomas Mann and his Buddenbrooks, Heinrich Mann with Professor Unrat (to become better known as The Blue Angel), the countess with her illegitimate child and Mühsam the anarchist poet.  “And they all have to be from Lübeck!  What do you suppose the people in the rest of the German Reich must think of us?”]

[* 3 - Grunfeld's footnote, p.123:  The German right always accused the German Socialists and Communists of being “terrorists,” though in 1918 even such radical leaders as Rosa Luxemburg were outspoken opponents of violence.  Socialism, she wrote, did not need to “destroy its own illusions with bloody acts of violence.”  She also pointed out that her critics on the Right were “the very people who sent one and a half million German men and youths to the slaughter without blinking an eyelid, who supported with all the means at their disposal for four years the greatest blood-letting humanity has ever experienced — they now scream hoarsely about 'terror'....”]

[* 4 - Grunfeld's footnote, p.128:  The attaché, Camill Hoffmann, was himself a surrealist poet of note.  He was arrested by the Germans after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and later killed in a concentration camp.]

Copyright © 1979 by Frederic V. Grunfeld



-----------------------------



Paul Johnson. Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s. Revised edition. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. August 7, 2001, p.289:


...Inside the camps...all was unspeakable cruelty, often sadism, and the negation of the law.

A typical case-history, one of many thousands, was that of the Jewish poet Erich Muhsam. He had taken part in Eisner's reckless Bavarian Socialist Republic, and served six years in prison for it, being amnestied in 1924. Immediately after the Reichstag fire, fearing arrest, he had bought a ticket to Prague, but had then given it to another intellectual who was even more frightened than he was. He was pulled in and taken to Sonenburg camp. They began by smashing his glasses, knocking out his teeth and tearing out chunks of his hair. They broke both his thumbs so he could not write, and beating about the ears destroyed his hearing. He was then moved to Cranienburg [sic] camp. There, in February 1934, the guards had possession of a chimpanzee which they found in the home of an arrested Jewish scientist. Assuming it was fierce, they loosed it on Muhsam, but to their fury the creature simply flung its arms around his neck. They then tortured the animal to death in his presence. The object was to drive Muhsam to suicide. But he would not comply; so one night he was beaten to death and hanged from a beam in a latrine. Muhsam had become wise in the ways of totalitarianism, and before his arrest had given all his papers to his wife, with express instructions on no account to go to Moscow. Unfortunately, she disobeyed him and took the papers with her; and as soon as the Soviet authorities got their hands on them they arrested her. She spent the next twenty years in Soviet camps as a ‘Trotskyite agent’, and the papers are to this day under lock and key in the so-called ‘Gorky Institute for World Literature’ in Moscow. 

[citing:  Frederic V. Grunfeld. Prophets Without Honour. A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979.]



-----------------------------



“erich muehsam: Poet, playwright, bohemian, anarchist revolutionary,” Organize! for Revolutionary Anarchism, No. 67, Autumn 2006, p.26:


Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist (in fact the pharmacy is still there).

He hated the school where he was sent, which was known for its authoritarian discipline and its unsparing use of corporal punishment. Erich was often a victim of “the unspeakable flailings which were supposed to beat out of me all my innate feelings” because his rebellious nature often clashed with the school regime. In 1896 he wrote an anonymous piece for the socialist paper Luebecker Volsboten denouncing one of the school's most brutal teachers. This caused a scandal and Erich was expelled for taking part in socialist activities.

Erich had wanted to be a writer and poet from an early age and he left Luebeck to pursue this aim in Berlin in 1900. He got involved in a group called Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society) which combined socialist ideology with experiments in communal living. Here he met Gustav Landauer who introduced him to anarchist communist ideas. Muehsam contributed to Kampf, the anarchist paper of his friend Senna Hoy, who later died in terrible conditions in a Russian prison. In 1904 Erich went to Ascona in Italian Switzerland to live in the artists' colony of Monte Verita (the writer Herman Hesse, the dance theorist Laban, the psychotherapist Otto Gross and many Daddaists and Expressionists lived there at one time or other).

He began writing plays there, the first of which, The Con Men, mixed new political theory with traditional dramatic forms. He also continued contributing to many anarchist papers, which drew the attention of the German authorities. He was considered one of the most dangerous anarchist agitators.

He moved to Munich in 1908 and took part in the cabaret movement. He did not care much for writing cabaret songs, but he achieved much notice because of them. In 1911 he founded the paper Kain which advocated anarchist communism. He castigated and ridiculed the German state, fighting capital punishment and theatre censorship, and prophetically analysing international affairs. The World War that he had predicted led to the suspension of Kain. At first Erich publicly supported the war, but by the end of 1914 was persuaded that he had been wrong, saying that, “I will probably have to bear the sin of betraying my ideals for the rest of my life”. He threw himself into anti-war activity taking part in various actions. He supported the strikes that were beginning to break out. As these became more widespread and began to take on a revolutionary nature, Erich was among those arrested and imprisoned in April 1918, and then freed in November. With the fall of the Kaiser and King Ludwig of Bavaria, Munich burst into revolt. Muehsam and Landauer as well as Ret Marut (later known as the novelist B. Traven) were among those agitating for the setting up of Workers Councils which led on to the founding of the Bavarian Council Republic. This lasted only a week. The Social Democrats, terrified by the thought of revolution, allied with the right. The Freikorps, a reactionary militia organised by the socialist minister Noske and composed of right wing military and students, crushed the Council Republic. Landauer died under the blows of rifle butts and boots.

Muehsam escaped but was later captured and sent to prison for 15 years. In prison, Erich continued with his writing, composing many poems and the play Judas. Released in the amnesty of 1924, he returned to a Munich in the grip of apathy. He joined the Anarchist Communist Federation of Germany (FKAD). He restarted Kain but this failed after a few issues. He then brought out Fanal (The Torch) where he attacked both the Communists and the far right. His openly revolutionary tone and his attempts to stop the rise of the right made him a hate figure among conservatives and Nazis.

He used satire to ridicule the Nazis with short stories and poems. This came to the personal attention of Hitler and Goebbels, arousing their anger. He agitated for the freeing of the revolutionary Max Hoelz and wrote a play, Staatsraeson (For reasons of State) in defence of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1928.

In 1930 he completed his last play Alle Wetter (All Hang) which called for mass revolution as the only way to stop the seizure of power by the radical Right. A few hours after Van der Lubbe had set fire to the Reichstag in February 1933, Muehsam was arrested and then spent the last 17 months of his life in the concentration camps of Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and Oranienburg. His teeth were smashed in with rifle butts, his scalp was branded with a swastika from a red-hot iron and he was hospitalized. He was forced to dig his own grave for a mock execution, and his body became a mass of bruises and wounds. His tormentors tried to force him to sing the Nazi song the Horst Wessel Lied. He refused to give in and sang the International. “Thanks to his will power he resisted all attempts to humiliate him” (Augustin Souchy).
Despite these tortures Erich remained intransigent to the end. Finally he was tortured and murdered on the night of 9th July 1934. After beatings, a Stormtrooper leader administered a lethal injection and then a suicide by hanging was faked.

[source: http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue67/index.html]