Erich Mühsam (featured by August Sander): 1878-1934

Erich Mühsam (1878-1934), poet, bohemian, revolutionary, is one of Germany’s most renowned and influential anarchists. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he challenged the conventions of bourgeois society at the turn of the century, engaged in heated debates on the rights of women and homosexuals, and traveled Europe in search of radical communes and artist colonies. He was a primary instigator of the ill-fated Bavarian Council Republic in 1919, and held the libertarian banner high during a Weimar Republic that came under increasing threat by right-wing forces. In 1933, four weeks after Hitler’s ascension to power, Mühsam was arrested in his Berlin home. He spent the last sixteen months of his life in detention and died (a most horrible death) in the Oranienburg Concentration Camp in July 1934.
His widow, Zenzl Mühsam, escaped to the Soviet Union where she spent twenty years in Gulag camps.
A link to the book on the PM Press (no relation to this blog).