Background
Erich Mühsam was born on 6 April 1878 in Berlin, of Jewish middle-class parents.
Erich Mühsam was born on 6 April 1878 in Berlin, of Jewish middle-class parents.
A Bohemian intellectual and a prolific dramatist. Mühsam emerged at the end of World War I as one of the leading agitators for a federated Soviet Republic in Bavaria. The violent tone of his revolutionary speeches and writings provoked an intense backlash among conservative and nationalist circles in Munich.
Several of his literary works from the Weimar period satirized the threat posed by Nazism.
Mühsam was a bete noire of the Nazis long before 1933 and marked down by Goebbels as one of those ‘Jewish subversives’ who would be liquidated once they were in power. Unfortunately for Mühsam he delayed his departure from Germany too late and was arrested a few hours after the Reichstag tire in February 1933.
During the next year, which he spent in captivity in Sonnenburg, Brandenburg and Oranienburg concentration camps, he was subjected to every conceivable torture and indignity. Beaten and taunted by the camp guards, pieces of his beard were ripped out to make him resemble the caricature of an orthodox Jew.
His battered corpse was found hanging in a latrine at Oranienburg on 10 July 1934.
Republikanische Nationalhymne
(The author attacked the judicial system for its harsh pun...)
1924(The abook mocked racial doctrines.)
1923(The book envisaged the possibility of a Nazi seizure of p...)
1930Mühsam was acutely conscious of the danger of Nazism and, after his release from prison in 1924, sought to organize a united front of revolutionary groups to oppose the radical Right.