Erich Mühsam and Bertha von Suttner, anarchist antimilitarism and organised pacifism

~ Bernd Drücke, ZivilCourage ~

The Civil Courage editorial team asked me to outline Erich Mühsam’s anarchist-antimilitarist positions and to demonstrate the differences between pacifism and anarchist antimilitarism. I would like to answer this question with the help of Mühsam and another historical figure: Bertha von Suttner. She is an icon of organised pacifism, while Mühsam’s life and work are primarily honoured by anarchists and antifascists.

Bertha von Suttner

The Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner, born in 1843, is the namesake of the Bertha von Suttner Foundation. She was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and also the one who inspired Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, to establish the prize. Her 1889 bestseller “Lay Down Your Arms” is a novel about the war horrors of her time. Like many pacifists today, she appealed to governments, calling for general disarmament and the peaceful settlement of disputes based on international law. Her book made her a star of the peace movement and inspired the founding of the “Austrian Society of Friends of Peace” in 1891. The social base of this society, which considered itself “apolitical,” was the liberal nobility. This also applied to the Peace Society founded in Berlin in 1892, whose successor organisation, the German Peace Society – United War Resisters (DFG-VK), is today the largest pacifist organizsation in Germany.

Erich Mühsam

Erich Mühsam, born in 1878, was inspired by, among others, the Russian anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Leo Tolstoy. Along with Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Rocker, and Ernst Friedrich, he was one of the most influential German anarchists of his time. Mühsam was Jewish but, as an atheist, left Judaism.

As a writer, he became famous for his satirical texts. His poems, such as “To obey means to lie” and “The Lamp Cleaner,” have been musically interpreted by Konstantin Wecker, Harry Rowohlt, Christoph Holzhöfer, Slime, and Dieter Süverkrüp, among others.

During the First World War, he attempted – unsuccessfully – to establish an “International League of War Opponents.” In 1915, he was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to serve in the military. He was a contributing author to, among others, the magazine “Der Sozialist,” published by the anarcho-pacifist Gustav Landauer, and to the “Weltbühne,” edited by Carl von Ossietzky.

As a social revolutionary agitator, he played a key role in the proclamation of the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919. For this, he served five years in prison. He was editor of the anarchist monthly magazine “Fanal” from 1926 until its ban in 1931 – for “disparaging the Reich government.”

On February 28, 1933, the well-known anti-fascist was arrested and, after imprisonment and torture, brutally murdered by SS men in the Oranienburg concentration camp on July 10, 1934.

Mühsam and Suttner

Particularly interesting from an anti-militarist perspective is “Cain,” the anarchist “journal for humanity” (subtitle), which Mühsam published from 1911 to 1919. It could no longer be published during the First World War due to press censorship.

After Bertha von Suttner’s death, Mühsam published an obituary for the Nobel laureate in “Kain” No. 4 in July 1914. He honoured her stance and emphasised their common goal, “world peace.” He also addressed the differences between pacifism and anarchist anti-militarism: “We do not believe in international understanding between states. For we know that states represent hostile demarcations between countries.” Mühsam was convinced that the populations, not the governments, would eliminate wars. “Capitalist states have capitalist interests, and capitalist interests know nothing of ideals. (…) As long as there are states and armies, there will be wars. We take up Bertha von Suttner’s battle cry, but we pass it on not to the rulers and governments, but to the peoples and armies: Lay down your arms!”

Mühsam campaigned throughout his life for a social revolution and a liberal socialist society. As an anarchist, he saw the main cause of war in the state, in the rule of man over man, in the system of command and obedience that makes mass murder on command possible in the first place.

In the German Empire, militarisation began as early as kindergarten. Children were hard put to the test by anti-Semitism, corporal punishment, and Prussian-style blind obedience.

In Mühsam’s time, the German Armed Forces (DFG) was an elitist organization dominated by aristocrats and upper-class patrons. It did not support deserters and conscientious objectors and largely advocated a supposed “defensive war.” Like the SPD, many of these bourgeois pacifists did not want to abolish the military, but rather democratise it. Mühsam ridiculed the “peace congresses” they held, in the poem ‘Calendar 1913’ in Brennende Erde (“Burning Earth“), Munich 1920:

“How bad things are in the world
is determined at congresses.
People drink, they dance, they talk happily,
and everything remains the status quo.”  

The Broken Rifle

The Broken Rifle, now also used by pacifists and non-anarchist antimilitarists, was a symbol used almost exclusively by antimilitarist anarchists until the end of the First World War. It served them not only to agitate against militarism—often criminalised in the German Empire—and for conscientious objection, desertion, and sabotage of weapons production, but also as an identifying symbol. From January 1909, the Dutch anarchists of the “Internationale Anti-Militaristische Vereniging” (International Anti-Militarist Association) used it in the headline of their magazine “De Wapens neder” (The Netherlands). The anarcho-communist newspaper “Der Freie Arbeiter” also featured it in its headline from April 1909. After the First World War, the Broken Rifle was also often featured on the cover pages of the anarcho-syndicalist weekly “Der Syndikalist” and in anarchist youth magazines.

WRI

In 1921, the War Resisters’ International (WRI) was founded in the Netherlands, initially under the name “Paco” (the Esperanto word for peace). The WRI is a network of anarchist and non-anarchist antimilitarists, pacifists, and conscientious objectors. Its membership includes 90 organisations in 40 countries, including the German Research Foundation (DFG-VK), the IdK, and, since 1972, the non-violent anarchist monthly magazine Graswurzelrevolution (“Grassroots Revoluton“)

Despite all the differences between pacifists and anarchist antimilitarists, many of them today can agree on the Broken Rifle as a symbol and the WRI Declaration as a maxim for action: “War is a crime against humanity. Therefore, I am firmly determined not to support any form of war and to strive to eliminate all causes of war.”

Let us work together to stop the shift to the right and remilitarisation and enforce the human right to conscientious objection and asylum for deserters.