Early life edit
Friedrich August Reinsdorf was born on January 31, 1849 in Pegau, Saxony. He would rarely use his first name. His parents were Friedrich August Reinsdorf, a shoemaker, and Emilie Christinae. He was the oldest of twelve siblings and had a petit bourgeois background. After elementary school, he was apprenticed as a compositor, finishing his training in 1865. He then moved around working in several German cities and spent time in Leipzig, Neuruppin, Berlin, Stettin, Hannover, Naumburg, Mainz, and Mannheim. In Leipzig, in 1869 he first met Johann Most. Their friendship would last for the rest of Reinsdorf's life.[1]
It remains unknown at what point Reinsdorf's political ideas began to form. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Reinsdorf, already filled with hate for the Prussian state according to his friend Max Schütte, decided to shirk his military obligations. He moved around southern Germany, before fleeing to Winterthur, Switzerland. He spent several years there, working for the then-renowned Bleuler-Hausherr'schen printing house. Reinsdorf then proceeded to move around Switzerland. He worked in Geneva, St. Gallen, Zurich, Bern, Lucerne, Basel, Solothurn, Fribourg, Lausanne, and several smaller cities. While in Switzerland, he met several exiles including the famed anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin as well as the Paris communard Paul Brousse and Johann Philipp Becker, a friend of Karl Max and Friedrich Engels'.[2]
Legacy edit
According to Derek Brewer, Reinsdorf may have served Henry James as the model for the character Diedrich Hoffendahl in the novel The Princess Casamassima, as the British press reported on Reinsdorf's assassination attempt while James was preparing the novel.[3] In Jochen Schimmang's 2009 novel Das Beste, was wir hatten, set in 1990, a fictional left-wing group named Gruppe August Reinsdorf plans to blow up the Niederwald monument to protest German nationalism after re-unification.[4]
Notes edit
Bibliography edit
- Brewer, Derek (1986). "Introduction". In James, Henry (ed.). The Princess Casamassima. New York: Penguin. pp. 7–30.
- Carlson, Andrew R. (1972). Anarchism in Germany Vol. I: The Early Movement. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press.
- Carlson, Andrew R. (1982). "Anarchism and Individual Terror in the German Empire, 1870–90". In Mommsen, Wolfgang J.; Hirschfeld, Gerhard (eds.). Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 175–200.
- Elun, Gabriel (2011). "Anarchism's Appeal to German Workers, 1878–1914". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 5 (1): 33–65.
- Elun, Gabriel (2014). Assassins & Conspirators: Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany. DeKalb, IL: NIU Press.
- Kemp, Michael (2018). Bombs, Bullets and Bread: The Politics of Anarchist Terrorism Worldwide, 1866–1926. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
- Linse, Ulrich (1969). Organisierter Anarchismus im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
- Linse, Ulrich (1982). "'Propaganda by Deed' and 'Direct Action': Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence". In Mommsen, Wolfgang J.; Hirschfeld, Gerhard (eds.). Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 201–229.
- Mühlnikel, Marcus (2014). "Fürst, sind sie unverletzt?". Attentate im Kaiserreich 1871-1914. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
- Shortt, Linda (2011). "Reimagining the West: West Germany, Westalgia, and the Generation of 1978". In Fuchs, Anne; James-Chakraborty, Kathleen; Shortt, Linda (eds.). Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989. Rochester, NY: Camden House. pp. 156–169.