Gustav Landauer

Gustav Landauer

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.

Praise

Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader

Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader

SKU: 9781604860542
Author: Gustav Landauer • Edited and Translated by: Gabriel Kuhn
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781604860542
Published: 6/2010
Format: Paperback, ePub, PDF, mobi
Page count: 360
Size: 6 x 9
Subjects: Politics, Anarchism, Essays

Praise

“If there were any justice in this world–at least as far as historical memory goes–then Gustav Landauer would be remembered, right along with Bakunin and Kropotkin, as one of anarchism’s most brilliant and original theorists. Instead, history has abetted the crime of his murderers, burying his work in silence. With this anthology, Gabriel Kuhn has single-handedly redressed one of the cruelest gaps in Anglo-American anarchist literature: the absence of almost any English translations of Landauer.”
—Jesse Cohn, author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics

“Gustav Landauer was, without doubt, one of the brightest intellectual lights within the revolutionary circles of fin de siècle Europe. In this remarkable anthology, Gabriel Kuhn brings together an extensive and splendidly chosen collection of Landauer’s most important writings, presenting them for the first time in English translation. With Landauer’s ideas coming of age today perhaps more than ever before, Kuhn’s work is a valuable and timely piece of scholarship, and one which should be required reading for anyone with an interest in radical social change.”
—James Horrox, author of A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement

“At once an individualist and a socialist, a Romantic and a mystic, a militant and an advocate of passive resistance… He was also the most influential German anarchist intellectual of the twentieth century.”
—Paul Avrich, author of Anarchist Voices



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