Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader

Gustav Landauer is one of the key figures of German Anarchism, and his influence can be seen in the work of many prominent authors including Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Hermann Hesse. Born in 1870, by the 1890s he was Germany’s most prominent anarchist author and agitator. After several prison sentences and increasing tensions within the country’s anarchist movement, Landauer focused on translations, literary criticism, and philosophical writing. In 1908 he returned to political activism by founding the Socialist Bund and reviving the journal Sozialist. Both were forced to an end by World War I, which Landauer campaigned against unwaveringly. After the end of the war, he became involved in the Bavarian Revolution and played a decisive role in the proclamation of its council republic in April 1919. When this experiment in radical democracy was crushed by military force three weeks later, reactionary soldiers murdered Landauer.

“Landauer is the most important agitator of the radical and revolutionary movement in the entire country.” This is how Gustav Landauer is described in a German police file from 1893. Twenty-six years later, Landauer would die at the hands of reactionary soldiers who overthrew the Bavarian Council Republic, a three-week attempt to realize libertarian socialism amidst the turmoil of post-World War I Germany. It was the last chapter in the life of an activist, writer, and mystic who Paul Avrich calls “the most influential German anarchist intellectual of the twentieth century.”