“To use Lefebvre’s argument, anarchists did not simply occupy space; they consciously produced it by appropriating places for themselves and inscribing them with meaning that reflected their ideology and identity…..German anarchists derived much of their political identity from what some have called “geographies of resistance”: back rooms of saloons or even elaborate picnics in secluded areas of the city’s parks. The spatiality of anarchism, its geopolitical realm, is therefore crucial to understanding the history of the movement because it adds a spatial dimension to an otherwise exclusively temporal examination”. From Introduction, p.7.
German-speaking anarchists-Austrians and Germans- were among the first to develop a movement in the United States, rooted in New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Paterson, and the surrounding smaller towns.
Anarchism had started taking off in Germany in the late 1870s, with the revulsion of many rank and file members of the Social-Democratic Party towards their leaders and parliamentarians who seemed to them to offer no resistance to the suppression of socialism by Chancellor Bismarck.
Bismarck passed the Anti-Socialist law in 1878. This stipulated that “Persons who constitute a danger to the public safety or other can be refused residence in the district or town”. Some of the 800 who were exiled in this period immigrated to the USA, whilst a much larger number made the move without the imminent threat of exile. Some of these would become anarchists in America.
The leading pioneers of this movement, Wilhelm Hasselmann and Johann Most, are dwelt on in this book as well as an important and long-term character in the movement, one Justus Schwab. His father had fought in the 1848 Revolution. He himself had emigrated to New York in 1869.He had taken an active part in the workers’ movement in New York and had opened a saloon on the Lower East Side. The anarchist Emma Goldman described him as a “champion of freedom, sponsor of labor’s cause, pleader for joy in life”. This imposing man with broad shoulders and blond curly hair had been an important figure among the revolutionaries now organising outside the Socialist Labor Party, with his saloon as a base for this grouping. Schwab’s saloon was to continue to be a regular meeting place for anarchists till the end of the 19th century.
As well as dealing in detail with the differences within this anarchist movement, between those who called themselves anarchist collectivists and those who called themselves anarchist-communists, with those who favoured organising in the workplace and those who shunned it, Goyens deals at length with the “radical geography” of the movement.
The alternative space created by the German anarchists included the saloons and the lecture halls as well as propaganda groups, discussion circles, lecture evenings and book clubs, drama groups, choirs and other musical groups, free schools as well as large picnics, fundraisers and street demonstrations and rallies. As Goyens says the culture of this movement served two purposes,: “On the one hand, it served the anarchists’ need for a separate, ideologically fulfilling sphere of action in which they could nurture an anarchist lifestyle, and on the other hand, it was designed to critique-and occasionally oppose-mainstream capitalist society”.
The network of anarchist clubs was invigorated by the itinerant speechmakers, and as the anarchist Bruno Reinsdorf was to state: “the living word penetrates to the heart more than the dead letter”.
The experiments in social space that was undertaken by the German-American anarchists should be remembered when we attempt to construct a culture of resistance in this country and in this time. The importance of our own social space and its revolutionary implications should not be under-emphasised. German anarchists created a political bohemia in New York long before the days of Greenwich Village, a bohemia that was working-class, radical and meaningful”-Goyens.
The larger than life figure of Johann Most casts a long shadow over the pages of this book. But finally one recalls the cosy shelter of the back room at Schwab’s saloon, “a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists” (Emma Goldman) where one became as much intoxicated by the heady mixture of humour, art, and politics, music and debate as by the glasses of lager beer.
When Schwab died in 1900 nearly 2,000 people, many in tears, followed his hearse down Second Avenue.