Erich Muhsam

Early life: 1878–1900

The third child born to Siegfried Seligmann Muhsam, a middle-class Jewish pharmacist, Erich Muhsam was born in Berlin on 6 April 1878. Soon after, the family moved to the city of Lubeck.

Muhsam was educated at the Katharineum-Gymnasium in Lubeck, a school known for its authoritarian discipline and corporal punishment, which served as the model for several of the settings in Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks (1901). The young student Erich, who was by nature rebellious and resisted the school's regimented programme, was often physically punished. It was in the spirit of this resistance that, in January 1896, Muhsam authored an anonymous submission to the Lubecker Volksboten, denouncing one of the school's more unpleasant teachers, which caused a scandal. When his identity became known, Muhsam was expelled from the Katharineum-Gymnasium for sympathising and participating in socialist activities. He completed his education in Parchim.

From an early age, Muhsam displayed a talent for writing and desired to become a poet — a career aspiration his father sought to beat out of him. His juvenilia consisted of animal fables, and he was first published at the age of 16, earning small amounts of money for satirical poems based on local news and political happenings. However, at the insistence of his father, young Erich set out to study pharmacy, a profession which he quickly abandoned to return to his poetic and literary ambitions. Muhsam left Lubeck for Berlin to pursue a literary career, later writing of his youth that "My hatred grows when I look back on it and visualise the unspeakable flailings which were supposed to beat out of me all my innate feelings."

Poet, writer, anarchist: 1900–1918

Muhsam moved to Berlin in 1900, where he soon became involved in a group called Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society) under the direction of Julius and Heinrich Hart which combined socialist philosophy with theology and communal living in the hopes of becoming "a forerunner of a socially united great working commune of humanity." Within this group, Muhsam became acquainted with Gustav Landauer who encouraged his artistic growth and compelled the young Muhsam to develop his own activism based on a combination of communist and anarchist political philosophy that Landauer introduced to him. Desiring more political involvement, in 1904, Muhsam withdrew from Neue Gemeinschaft and relocated temporarily to an artists commune in Ascona, Switzerland where vegetarianism was mixed with communism and socialism. It was here that he began writing plays, the first Die Hochstapler (The Con Men), juxtaposing new modern political theory within traditional dramatic forms, which became a typical trademark of his dramatic work. During these years, Muhsam began contributing to and editing several anarchist journals. These writings made Muhsam the target of constant police surveillance and arrests as he was considered among the most dangerous anarchist agitators in Germany. The press seized the opportunity to portray him as a villain accused of anarchist conspiracies and petty crimes.

In 1908, Muhsam relocated to Munich, where he became heavily involved in cabaret. While Muhsam did not particularly care for his work in writing cabaret songs, it would become among his most famous creations.

In 1911, Muhsam founded the newspaper, Kain (Cain), as a forum for anarcho-communist ideologies, stating that it would "be a personal organ for whatever the editor, as a poet, as a citizen of the world, and as a fellow man had on his mind." Muhsam used Kain to ridicule the German state and what he perceived as excesses and abuses of authority, standing out in favour of abolishing capital punishment, and opposing the government's attempt at censoring theatre, and offering prophetic and perceptive analysis of international affairs. For the duration of World War I, publication was suspended to avoid government-imposed censorship often enforced against private newspapers that disagreed with the imperial government and the war.

Muhsam married Kreszentia Elfinger (nickname Zenzl), the widowed daughter of a Bavarian farmer, in 1915.

World War I would see the international anarchist community starkly divided into pro-war and anti-war positions, some hypernationalistically supporting Germany, others desiring that Germany's enemies (the United Kingdom, France, and later the United States of America) would be victorious. Muhsam became extremely nationalistic and militant in his support of Germany in the war, writing in his diaries: "And I the anarchist, the anti-militarist, the enemy of national slogans, the anti-patriot and implacable critic of the armament furies, I discovered myself somehow possessed by the common intoxication, fired by an irate passion." His public support of the war was seized upon by the state-controlled press for the purposes of propaganda, and by fellow anarchists who felt betrayed. However by the end of 1914, Muhsam, pressured by his anarchist acquaintances renounced his support of the war effort, stating that "I will probably have to bear the sin of betraying my ideals for the rest of my life" and appealing, "Those who comfortably acquiesce and say 'we cannot change things' shamefully desecrate human dignity and all the gifts of their own hearts and brain. For they renounce without a struggle every use of their ability to overthrow man-made institutions and governments and to replace them with new ones." For the rest of the war, Muhsam opposed the war through increased involvement in many direct action projects, including workers strikes, often collaborating with figures from other leftist political parties. As the strikes became increasingly successful and violent, the Bavarian state government began mass arrests of anti-war agitators. Muhsam was among those arrested and incarcerated in April 1918. He would be detained until just before the war's end in November 1918.

Weimar years: 1918–1933

When Erich Muhsam was released on 3 November 1918, he returned to Munich. Within days, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated as did King Ludwig III who had semi-autonomous rule in Bavaria, and Munich was in the throes of revolt. Kurt Eisner of the Independent Socialist Party declared Bavaria a socialist republic during the Red Bavaria Revolution. Eisner, in a gesture designed to bring the anarchists into the new government, offered a ministry position to Muhsam, who refused, preferring to fight along with Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, Ret Marut and other anarchists for the development of Worker's Councils (Soviets) and communes.

However, after Eisner's assassination in 1919, the Bayerische Raterepublik (Bavarian Soviet Republic) was proclaimed, ruled by independent socialist Ernst Toller and anarchists Gustav Landauer and Erich Muhsam. This government was short-lived, lasting six days, being overthrown by communists led by Eugen Levine. However, during this time, the Bavarian Soviet Republic declared war on Switzerland, resulting from the inexplicable machinations of a mentally-ill Foreign Affairs deputy who became irate at Switzerland's refusal to lend the new Republic's government 60 locomotive engines. When the Weimar Republic's Freikorps, a right-wing army commanded by Gustav Noske, crushed the rebellion and took possession of Munich, Gustav Landauer was killed and Muhsam arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in jail.

While in jail, Muhsam was very prolific with his writing, completing the play Judas (1920), and a large number of poems. In 1924, he was released from jail as the Weimar Republic granted a general amnesty for political prisoners. Also released in this amnesty was Adolf Hitler, who had served eight months of a five-year sentence for leading the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

The Munich to which Muhsam returned was very different from the one he left after his arrest. The people were largely apathetic, in part because of the economic collapse of Germany under the pressure of reparations for World War I and hyperinflation. He had attempted to restart the journal Kain which failed after a few issues. In 1926, Muhsam founded a new journal which he called Fanal (The Torch), in which he openly and precariously criticized the communists and the far Right-wing conservative elements within the Weimar Republic. During these years, his writings and speeches took on a violent, revolutionary tone, and his active attempts to organize a united front to oppose the radical Right provoked intense hatred from conservatives and nationalists within the Republic.

Muhsam specifically targeted his writings to satirize the growing phenomenon of Nazism, which later raised the ire of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Die Affenschande (1923), a short story, ridiculed the racial doctrines of the Nazi party, while the poem Republikanische Nationalhymne (1924) attacked the German judiciary for its disproportionate punishment of leftists while barely punishing the right wing participants in the Putsch.

In 1928, Erwin Piscator produced Muhsam's third play, Staatsrason (For reasons of State), based upon the controversial conviction and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the United States.

In 1930, Muhsam completed his last play Alle Wetter (All Hang), which sought mass revolution as the only way to prevent a radical Right-wing seizure of power. This play, never performed in public, was directed exclusively at criticizing the Nazis who were on the rise politically in Germany.

Arrest and death

Muhsam was arrested on charges unknown in the early morning hours of 28 February 1933, within a few hours after the Reichstag fire in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, labelled him as one of "those Jewish subversives." It is alleged that Muhsam was planning to flee to Switzerland within the next day. Over the next seventeen months, he would be imprisoned in the concentration camps at Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and finally, Oranienburg.

Marinus van der Lubbe, an alleged Communist agitator, was arrested and blamed for the fire, and his association with Communist organizations led Adolf Hitler to declare a state of emergency, encouraging aging president Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolishing most of the human rights provisions of the Weimar Republic's constitution (1919). Hitler used the state of emergency to justify the arrests of large numbers of German intellectuals labelled as communists, socialists, and anarchists in both retaliation for the attack and to silence opposition for his increasing suppression of civil liberties.

On 2 February 1934, Muhsam was transferred. The beatings and torture continued, until finally on the night of 9 July 1934, Muhsam was tortured and murdered by the guards, his battered corpse found hanging in a latrine the next morning.

An official Nazi report dated 11 July stated that Erich Muhsam committed suicide, hanging himself while in "protective custody" at Oranienburg. However, a report from Prague on 20 July 1934 in the New York Times stated otherwise

After the death, publications would accuse Theodor Eicke, the former commander of the concentration camp at Dachau, as the murderer, aided by two Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers) officers identified as Ehrath and Konstantin Werner. It was alleged that he was tortured and beaten until he lost consciousness, followed by an injection that killed him, and that Muhsam's body was taken to a latrine in the rear of the building and hung on a rafter so as to create the impression that Muhsam had committed suicide.