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.

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Praise

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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Book Events

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Reviews

• Revolution and Other Writings in Marx & Philosophy
• Revolution and Other Writings in The Fifth Estate
• Revolution and Other Writings in CHOICE
• Gustav Landauer’s Revolution
• Cobbling Together Spirituality and Anarchism

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Interviews

• Prospects for Social Democracy in the US: Insights From a Syndicalist in Sweden
• The State as a Social Relationship: Gustav Landauer Revived
• Gabriel Kuhn: Anarchism Today
• Anarchic Revolution and Traditional Judaism

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Mentions

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Blog

• WikiLeaks: Who Helped Shape Julian Assange?
• Prospects for Social Democracy in the US: Insights From a Syndicalist in Sweden
• Remembering Gustav Landauer
• New Landauer Biography
• New Landauer Online Bibliography
• Gustav Landauer Exhibition in Berlin
• Gustav Landauer Monument in Munich to be Reerected
• Gustav Landauer, Revolution, and Social Relationships: A Response to “Landauer’s Fallacy”
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• Food Not Bombs Activists Murdered in the Philippines
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• Class War in Sweden
• Gustav Landauer Exhibition in Berlin
• Notes on Anarchist Organizing
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• State Repression in India
• “Best to Do What We Can”
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