Individualist Anarchism: Individualism In Middle Europe
This piece by Thomas Riley, published in the New England Quarterly, Volume XVIII, (March 1945) is largely about the individualist anarchist impulse in Germany contrary to the widely held and/or cultivated belief that such impulses are innately alien to the German psyche such as it exists.
New England Anarchism in Germany
by Thomas A. Riley
John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) is almost invariably mentioned in
histories of modem German literature as a characteristic figure
of the rebellious 1880's and 1890's, a period in which German
writers were struggling violently - and more or less successfully
-to throw off the hampering blanket of idealism and to establish
letters on the scientific basis of Darwinism and a materialistic
philosophy. 1 The era produced such famous names as Hauptmann and Nietzsche, who shocked the German middle class by their supposedly
immoral works and un-Christian, un-Godly attitudes. Mackay,
who was probably the most rebellious of all the young rebels,
went so far towards perdition as to become an anarchist, and to
publish Die Anarchisten (1891) in which he preached anarchism
as a mass movement to the German populace. One of his poems in
Sturm (1888) praises atheism, another extols free love, and a
third, entitled "Vaterland," attempts to show the folly of love
of country, while predictions of bloody wars and social revolutions
in the twentieth century form the basis of long cycles of
cantos. Critics of the time felt that with Mackay evil in literature
had reached its nadir.
Mackay, a German. through and through in spite of his Scottish
name, appeared to have been influenced entirely by European
social and intellectual forces. 2 The recent discovery in this
country of two hundred and eighty-six original Mackay letters now
reveals for the first time how much his thinking
was dominated by intellectual currents which have their source
deep in New England history and tradition. 3 Mackay's best
friend for more than forty years was the Massachusetts born-and-
bred Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939); champion of American anarchism,
a member of the Class of 1874 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and for some time one of the editors of the
Boston Globe. 4 During those forty years, almost everything that
Mackay wrote expressed directly or in sublimation an anarchism
that cannot be discussed adequately without a consideration of such
"anti-government" Americans as the Quakers, the Abolitionists,
Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau. 5
Mackay went over to individualistic anarchism, of which Tucker was the
leader, during 1888 and 1889, remaining true to this
position long after Tucker's retirement in 1908 and the death
of the movement as such in the United States. As late as 1928 he
issued a handsome edition of his collected works, composed largely
of Die Anarchisten (1891) and Der Freiheitsucher (1921),
both of which express essentially American thoughts and theories
in the most artistic form that they ever received. The story
behind these two books covers the life-time of an individual
who remained faithful to his beliefs in spite of the scorn,
amazement, bewilderment, and horror of his contemporaries.
The young, rebels who shocked the sense of decency of the middleclass
Germans in the eighties and nineties are all either dead or
very old, although now highly respected. Several of
them 6 in the past decade have published reminiscences of their
times in which the strange figure of John Henry Mackay, forgotten
by the present generation, is depicted as well known in the
younger German literary circles of the fin de siècle not only as
a propagandist, but also as a sensitive lyrist and novelist. Max
Halbe, who had had no connection with Mackay for years, wrote in
1934:
In Mackay's house [many years ago] at a small formal party I
became acquainted with a young musician who had just come from
Munich and who had put some of Mackay's songs to music. They
were sung on that evening, flattering the senses with their
beauty, and reaching into one's very soul. The young musician,
who at that time was almost unknown, was Richard Strauss. Now,
in June 1934, the whole intellectual world has just honored the
seventy-year-old maestro as the greatest creative genius and
interpreter of the emotions of our age. And certainly with justice. It may be
that during those celebrations the old man remembered in some
quiet moment those creations of his youth whose sweet melodies
were written for the verse of a half-forgotten poet, one who should not be forgotten.
The name of the musician now echoes
through the world. The poet, dying in bitterness and misery,
pushed aside, passed over, a man out of step with his times,
rests in some corner of some Berlin cemetery, and few know his
name, let alone his work. 7
The songs are Strauss's most famous ones: "Morgen" and "Heirnliche Aufforderung."
Schönberg and d'Albert have also composed music to Mackay's lyrics.
All "Who remember the Mackay of those two decades before he
disappeared from public life - use the word vornehm in describing
him. Of a well-to-do family, he traveled widely in France,
Italy, and England (to the United States in 1893), and was in
contact with all the progressive intellectual and social
movements of the time. Although he universally gave the impression of
good breeding, taste, softness, and amiability, he
possessed a certain inner masculinity and strength. Under his
polished demeanor he cherished a violent hate for the traditional
Christianity and morality of Germany, a fear of the innate
cruelty of churchgoers and people who considered themselves
"good." His earliest poetry in the eighties, before he knew
Tucker, is full of a Schopenhauerian Weltschmerz and a longing
for death as an escape from the evil of life. His adoption of anarchism was
clearly an attempt to find a weapon with which
to combat his greatest fear, life itself. Among the anarchistic
leaders of those days were many highly educated men, some of
noble families: Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Cafiero, and
Reclus. Mackay was not entirely out of place when at the age of
twenty-three he came to London and settled down for a year among
the anarchistic political exiles, the most notorious names in
Europe, banned by police from every Continental capital. These
communist-anarchists felt that the only salvation of mankind lay in a
communal holding of property in a stateless society to be brought
about by a revolution of the masses. Johann Most brought these
ideas in a somewhat primitive form to New York from London in
1882 and spread them throughout the radical Germans in America.
In Benjamin R. Tucker, American anarchism found an organizer and
advocate, but one who believed in private ownership and non-
violence, in contrast to its European cousin, represented by such agitators as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The European form was famous and noisy, with murders in every
country laid at its door; the American brand was quiet, unsensational, and known
only among a few hundred followers. Tucker always denied the
right of Europeans to call themselves anarchists, for to him they
were but communists, revolutionary communists. Individualism,
according to Tucker. did not admit of the compulsory holding of
property in common with others; an anarchist was in essence an
individualist with the right to possess any property his labor has produced or
that has come to him through inheritance or gift. 8 In his belief
that all government built on armies and police s stems could be
done away with by non-violent means, Tucker felt himself completely within
the American tradition, and pointed proudly to
Josiah Warren, the original American anarchist, and to his own
profoundly American background and that of most of his followers.
In the 1880's American ultra radical movements--socialism as
well as anarchism--were to a large extent supported by a small
group of German immigrants. Not until the nineties did communist-anarchism
pass over into the hands of the Russians associated with Emma
Goldman. 9 Since these Germans were so deeply interested in untraditional
forms of political thought and Tucker
wished to rescue them from communist-anarchism, he made an attempt in
1888 to reach them by a German edition of his journal
Liberty. He called to Boston as editor of the venture a young man named
George Schumm (1856-1941), 10 American-born son of German
parents, who wrote equally well in German or English and who had
been already active in liberal politics in the Middle West. The
project would have been a complete failure, the nine numbers
issued during 1888 showing that there was not enough interest
among Germans to pay for the publication, if it had not been for
the fact that it was the German Libertas that, by chance fell
into the hands of John Henry Mackay in London and made him Tucker's
convert. 11 Tucker and Mackay met in Paris the next year, in 1889, for the first times
Mackay was a poet through and through, with a poet's nature.
Since he was no organizer and refused to give speeches, the
spread of propaganda for individualistic anarchism had to be
arranged by other men. Bernhard Zack, Mackay's publisher after 1908,
was active for a while in forming clubs and arranging for
speakers and discussion evenings. He even put out a journal for
a few numbers. Otherwise, there was little organized activity
among the people interested in the movement, for the whole
philosophy of individualistic anarchism, while not opposed to the
formation of clubs and parties, nevertheless did not encourage them.
Some measure of the public interest in the movement is indicated
by the sale of Mackay's books. By 1903, Die Anarchisten
had sold sixty-five hundred copies in Germany, and by 1911,
about eight thousand. Its final sale by the time of Mackay's
death in 1933 was over fifteen thousand. In 1922, when he
reissued Tucker's' pamphlet State Socialism and Anarchism in a
new German edition, he had by January of that year already
thirty-five hundred copies subscribed for, according to his
letter to Tucker on January 2. Rudolf Rocker, himself a communist-anarchist,
wrote, in German, in 1927:
Those comrades who had known the underground period of the movement
[1878-1890] were without exception followers of Communist-Anarchism.
They knew nothing of any other form. Then there
appeared in Zurich in 1891 J. H. Mackay's novel "Die
Anarchisten," which excited considerable attention in Anarchist
circles of Germany although the theoretical bases are extremely
weak and open to criticism. In the meetings and discussion
groups there were now endless quarrels over the question: Communistic
or Individualistic Anarchism? And not a few came to the decision that individualism
incorporated in itself the real basic ideas of Anarchism. 12
During the years from 1895 to 1922, Mackay issued a series of
eight propaganda pamphlets in German, for the most part translations
of Tucker's articles made mostly by himself or by Schumm.
Five of these Staatssozialismus und Anarchismus (1895), Sind
Anarchisten Mörder? (1899), Der Staat und das Individuum (1899),
Was ist Sozialismus? (1902), Die Stellung
des Anarchismus zur Trustfrage (1911), were written by Tucker
and a sixth, Die Frauenfrage (1899), by two of Tucker's associates.
All together he distributed about forty-three thousand
of these, no doubt to a large extent at his own expense.
If Mackay was Tucker's greatest convert, Mackay's greatest was
Rudolf Steiner, Goethe scholar, mystic, and theosophist, now
known throughout the world as the leading spirit of anthroposophy.
Steiner's important work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit
(Berlin, 1894), first brought the two together; but as Steiner
became a mystic the friendship between the two cooled, for Mackay,
although deeply emotional, was also thoroughly materialistic.
Nevertheless, Steiner never forgot his former friend but mentioned him
frequently in later years as a great poet and personality. 13 In
1898, a few weeks after the assassination of the Empress Eliza
beth-of Austria by an alleged anarchist, when mobs were shouting
for the blood of all who called themselves anarchists, Steiner
horrified the good readers of Das Magazin für Litteratur, which
he was editing at the time, by Publishing an exchange of letters
between John Henry Mackay and himself, in which he said: "If, in
the sense in which such things can be decided, I should say whet
her the term Individualistic Anarchist is applicable to me, then
I should have to answer in the affirmative." 14 It was an attempt
by Steiner--a hopeless one, of course--to rescue American anarchism
from the inevitable confusion with its cousin of bad reputation,
cornmunist-anarchism.
Hardly any book or article on another German of a quite different
character, the egoist Max Stirner, fails to mention John
Henry Mackay as Stimer's discoverer and biographer. 15 But Tucker's
part in the discovery of this writer's one book, Der Einzige und
Sein Eigentum (1844), is never mentioned, although
in actuality Tucker knew Stirner's work long before Mackay did.
When Mackay first became acquainted with American
anarchism, it had already incorporated in itself Stirner's
ethical code of absolute egoism in place of Christian altruism,
at a time when Germany was almost completely unaware of this egg
of its own laying. 16 Nevertheless, Mackay was almost alone instrumental
in the later popularization of Stirner's book, which
eventually created wide interest, with eighteen translations in
the fifteen years immediately following the appearance of Mackay's
biography. Stirner's ethical attitudes are omnipresent in
everything Mackay wrote after 1890, just as they form the basis for
much of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra.
Mackay's real contribution to individualistic anarchism lies
however, primarily in the two semi-novels Die Anarchisten and
Der Freiheitsucher. He himself always referred to these two
books, along with the largely communist-anarchist Sturm, as
propaganda, in contrast to his other poems, novels, and short
stories, which were expressions of pure art. The fact is that
these three books do contain detailed programs for a political
and social movement while his other works are anarchistic only in the very wide
sense that they are the expression of a sensitive poet's yearning
for a life of absolute individualism. If the critic wishes
to keep Mackay's own division, he must admit at once that Mackay's
two propaganda novels are of an extremely high quality,
especially Der Freiheitsucher. Mackay, in spite of his old-
fashioned tendency to look down on mere propaganda, felt that the
latter was the most important work that he ever produced, superior
to his non-propaganda novel, Der Schwimmer.
In Die Anarchisten there are two contrasting characters, one of
which represents a philosophy of life that is clearly communist-
anarchism; the other, a more intellectual person, is an individualistic
anarchist and an egoist. Through the eyes of these two
men we see the horrors of life among the London poor in 1887 and
the useless attempts of London radicals to wipe out the evils of
the world by means of an effective social movement. Only by
individualism à la Tucker and egoism à la Max Stirner can the
world progress out of the misery, poverty, and wars
produced by governments. The book is obviously aimed not only at
the layman but also at the communist-anarchists, in an attempt to
persuade them to drop their evil ways and come over to the camp
of the Americans. It was translated into English by George
Schumm immediately after its appearance and published by Tucker
in Boston. Subsequently it has been translated into six other
languages and has sold slowly but unceasingly from the time of
its origin to 1933, the most wide-spread and best-known of all
Mackay's books.
Der Freiheitsucher is very different from Die Anarchisten. In
the center of the latter, Mackay put the London anarchists in
mass, and all through it he dealt with crowds: street crowds,
unemployed demonstrations, mobs, and political assemblies. Now,
in its companion book, he wished to show the mental and emotional
development of a lone individual from childhood to a mature
belief in the possibility of a world in which no one is forced to
submit to unwanted government, a world in which everyone works
out his own system of ethics without respect to laws
and believes in his own God. It was written during the
four, years of World War I, its publication held up by the
ensuing economic distress until 1921, and the costs met then by
the sale of his last piece of property, his summer place in
Silesia, "Das Haus zur Freiheit." Within a few months the inflation
swept away every source of income he had left, except for
his stores of unsold and for the most part unsalable books.
In the main the story of Der Freiheitsucher is that of Mackay's
own life: his stern foster father, his loving, idolized mother, a rebellious
child, school, university, important stays
in London and Switzerland, long friendship with a non-German
anarchist, a womanless life, a brooding life, filled with attempts
to fathom its meaning and to find solutions for its evils.
More than half the book is devoted to the main character's discoveries
in the realm of thought: his gradual realization that
governments are the causes of mankind's troubles, and the solutions, the
sudden dawning on him that he must be an anarchist
to think thus. The outline of American anarchism given in Die Anarchisten in conversations among the various characters is
here filled out in detailed essays to a complete Weltanschauung
covering all phases of life. Of course, only the basic points
are taken over from American anarchism; Mackay builds on this
foundation a house of his own, German and not American, Mackay
and not Tucker.
To readers whose sympathies were already anti-state, anticommunistic,
and anti-revolutionary, the book presented a beautiful
expression of their views. Thoreau would have delighted in
it. Indeed, American anarchism has in existence today a well-rounded
body of literature produced by Josiah Warren, the founder;
Benjamin Tucker, organizer and popularizer; Max Stirner,
moralist; Pierre Proudhon, social theorist; and greatest of them
all, the poet and artist, the synthesist, John Henry Mackay. In
this literature is the mentality of a movement, a head whose body has
disappeared into the air, as strange a sight as Alice's cat or
Morgenstern's house of space.
Der Freiheitsucher is an anomaly in literature, for it is the
acme of an American movement, reached not in America but in a
foreign country and in a foreign language after the original
movement had died out. Mackay was the greatest convert of American
anarchism and its most stubborn adherent. He was in a way a
genius, talented in the field of letters as none other of the
many shrewd heads Benjamin Tucker attracted to his cause. For
over thirty years the basic principles of the Americans, which
included the egoism of Max Stirner, glowed in his intellect and emotions
until he cast them in a master form, one that Tucker, Schumm,
Robinson, Yarros, Walker, or Byington could never have achieved,
in a flow of language that their English was never capable of.
The book met with scarcely a mention or a review in the
German press, even among the radical publications. Die Anarchisten had made Mackay
famous; Der Freiheitsucher brought him almost to beggary.
The mere fact that Der Freiheitsucher was never translated
into English shows how the American movement had disintegrated.
Mackay wrote Schumm, in German, on October 20, 1921:
It is completely incomprehensible to me that my new book, by far
the most important thing that I have ever written and my true
life's work, should be such a complete failure over there. And
all the more incomprehensible when one remembers that you can
have it for almost nothing, for about thirty cents according to
the present state of the mark. And is there no one who is willing
to take on a number and sell them with a profit to himself?
Is the German social movement dead? Are there no German [radical]
periodicals published over there any more?
In spite of the hopelessness of marketing a German book in this
country in the early 1920s, George Schumm took over the task of
selling it in the East; Clarence Swartz and Henry Cohen of Los Angeles,
old-time supporters of Tucker, took the West,only to find that their greatest
and most self-sacrificing efforts brought almost no results. With the mark fluctuating
giddily and climbing to awful heights, Mackay soon saw hunger
very close to him, so close that in desperation he offered a new
plan to the three Americans. In order to get a steady flow of
money from America, the dream of all Germans during the inflation
years, he suggested persuading a small group of Americans
interested in anarchism, ' Tucker-followers of former days, to
buy regularly each month a dollar's worth of his books, any of his books. His
three friends redoubled their efforts and during 1922 were able
to send to Berlin a few hundred dollars from about twenty different
persons, for which Mackay returned several hundred dollars
worth of his books, the exchange being very favorable to the
Americans.
Refusing with the greatest vehemence all outright gifts from
Tucker, who had been living with his wife and child in France
since 1908, Mackay then struggled through the next few years by
selling everything he had of value: the fifteen hundred volumes
of his library, his antique furniture, his collection of letters from
all famous German writers, and that which caused him
the most pain, his unique collection of Stirner books and documents.
A new edition of the undying, Anarchisten came at just
the right moment, too. They were unhappy years, but he survived
them without having to accept charity. Then in 1926 a strange
fate befell him.
When Tucker, in a letter to the New York Tribune in 1898, named
the various kinds of people who were anarchists (noncommunistic,
American anarchists) lie mentioned that one or two millionaires
were adherents to the cause. 17 Their identity is uncertain, but at
least one wealthy manufacturer who for several years paid $500
for his subscription to Liberty was Henry Bool of Ithaca, New
York. He stood very close to Tucker until the latter's retirement
to France, whereupon he also retired to England. 18 In Der Freiheitsucher
in 1921 Mackay makes a plea for more financial
support of anarchism by men of wealth, especially millionaires. 19 In
1926 his plea was suddenly answered; a millionaire came to his rescue.
It was like a fairy tale, a dream of a hungry man, that into the misery that
surrounded Mackay's last years, recognition and reward should suddenly be thrust.
Michael Davidovsky, a wealthy Russian living in France, interested for
years in Mackay, Stirner, and American anarchism, first supplied
the means for setting up a Stirner Publishing House in Berlin and then made
provision for Mackay's receiving a monthly pension. Mackay saw
before him a carefree old age, in which he could devote himself
entirely to new projects.
His plans as a result of Davidovsky's support entailed an "
International Radical Publishing House," which would issue first
of all his own works, then a three-volume edition of Max Stirner,
and finally Tucker's most important writings in German translation.
In the summer of 1927 he came on to Monte Carlo to visit
the Tuckers for the first time in many years, all happness
and all confidence, but the official papers were not yet all
signed. In November, after his return to Berlin, a bit of doubt
began to appear in his letters to Tucker. In February, 1928, he
wrote: "Our millionaire does not pay. I put the last I had in
the Stirner Verlag and now we are dependent on the sale. But the
book is splendid, one of the finest editions ever made in Germany......
The book he refers to is his Werke in einem Band, the crown of
his life's work and the crown of American anarchism, a beautiful
thin-paper edition of over a thousand pages, a delight to any
book lover, containing, besides his most important poetry, stories,
and novels, also the two Tucker books: Die Anarchisten and
Der Freiheitsucher. Thus far did he realize his dreams and no
farther. The millionaire refused to pay any more. Gone were the
Stirner edition, the Tucker edition, the monthly stipend; he almost
lost the rights to the Werke in einem Band through a lawsuit
with a former friend who had assisted him in the editing. If he
could have sold his new creation, it would have given him financial
relief, but with no money for advertising he could not move
it. One letter in 1929 mentions the selling of six copies in
three months.
Defeated again and deeply unhappy, Mackay turned back to the
former scratching for a living to which he had been compelled
before the appearance of a Maecenas, but he scratched for much
more than a living now. With fear of death's overtaking him
before his work was done, he sought for more than a bit to eat;
as much as life itself he wished to publish his last words to the
German people, -words that no newspaper, magazine, or publishing
house would accept. After an attempt to raise money from friends
to put out the Stirner books had failed, he instituted in March, 1931,
a Mackay-Gesellschaft, the main purpose of which was to
finance entirely new books, and surprisingly enough he was able
to publish two tiny ones that winter before the plan collapsed.
Then during the summer of 1932 someone in America gave him the
money to publish what turned out to be his last book, the
deeply moving Abrechnung, Randbemerkungen zu Leben und Arbeit, in three
thousand copies, autobiographical, the summary of a lonely,
bitter fight of nearly seventy years, his attempt to turn back
the German political, social, and moral tide to an exaggerated
individualism, far beyond anything Goethe and his individualistic
age had ever conceived. Only today can we comprehend the enormous
irony in his self-imposed task.
He died on May 16, 1933, soon after the Nazi "assumption of
power," according to the letter an English-writing friend of
Mackay's wrote to Tucker. In his will he stipulated that all his
manuscripts and correspondence were to be destroyed, and a recently
made convert to individualistic anarchism, who had loaned
him some rather large sums, was to be appointed heir to his
unsold books. The correspondent wrote to Tucker:
On the evening of Sat. the 20th May we had a little funeral at
Wilmersdorf near Berlin. As he had wished, no word was spoken,
we were only five persons. But the organ played pieces of Bach
and Händel, a woman sang his "Ich ging an deinem Haus
vorüber . . ." with accompaniment of organ and violin after the
composition of d'Albert.... The ashes are deposited in a churchyard
at Stahnsdorf, a stone with the name will there be laid on
the place....
✳ ✳ ✳