Augustin Souchy

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Augustin Souchy Bauer (born August 28, 1892 in Ratibor , Upper Silesia , † January 1, 1984 in Munich ) was a German anarchist and anti-militarist .

Life

Youth and First World War

Augustin Souchy, anarchist, Landauer student, anarcho-syndicalist and anti-militarist, described himself more as a “student of the revolution” who, in addition to the Russian revolution, experienced, partly shaped and described the German, Spanish, Cuban and Portuguese revolutions.

As a 19-year-old Augustin met Gustav Landauer in Berlin and began to agitate for his Socialist Bund .

When the First World War broke out , the 22-year-old staunch anti-militarist left for Austria. From there he was deported as an anarchist, with a sign around his neck: “Beware of anarchist!”, Which he later converted into the title of his political memoirs. He traveled to neutral Sweden, had passport problems there and was arrested. He managed to escape and entered Sweden illegally via Denmark and Norway.

On all of his travels, Souchy immediately learned the language of the respective host country on an autodidactic basis , got involved in the anarchist movement and from that moment on felt that he belonged to the respective country and its people.

Weimar period

In 1919 he came back to Germany and joined the anarcho-syndicalists in the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD).

From April to November 1920 he traveled to Russia and, as a representative of the syndicalists , met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at the Comintern meeting . During this time he visited Peter Kropotkin , one of the most important anarchist theorists at the time. Souchy analyzed what, in his anarchist opinion, the Bolshevik Revolution was and where it was headed. With this example he wanted to bring revolutionary groups on the anarchist course in the future and warn against a centralist party as an instrument for conquering power: "The Bolsheviks as state socialists have shown us that they cannot bring socialism." Together with Helmut Rüdiger , Arthur Lehning and Albert de Jong he edited the press service of the International Anti-Military Commission (IAK) in the 1920s .

In 1921 he first worked in France, lived with Therese and had a son, Jean, but was again expelled from the country as an anarchist. In the Weimar Republic, Souchy was involved in the German anarcho-syndicalist trade union movement (FAUD). For the Free Workers' Union of Germany he worked as the responsible editor of the newspaper Der Syndikalist , for which Helmut Rüdiger, Max Winkler, Gerhard Wartenberg and Fritz Köster also worked. Until the early 1930s and from 1924 to 1926 he was editor of the journal Die Internationale . Together with Fritz Kater u. a. he was part of the Berlin business commission of FAUD and was involved in the networking of anarcho-syndicalist organizations in the International Workers' Association (IAA) initiated by Rudolf Rocker , which saw itself as an international counter-organization to the Bolshevik Red Union International. Together with Rudolf Rocker and Alexander Schapiro , he was elected Secretary of the IAA. During this time he got to know numerous anarchists from different countries who repeatedly sought and found refuge in Berlin, including the Russian anarchists who fled the Bolsheviks, or Spanish anarchists like Buenaventura Durruti , who at times evaded repression in Spain. After the fall of the monarchy in 1931, he made several trips to Spain on behalf of the IAA. In 1936 he wrote to the anarchist Emma Goldman : “In the last five years I have been here five times. Every time there was a movimento, a movement. April 1931 revolution. December 1931 uprising. December 1932 general strike. April 1933 general strike again. October 1934, Catalonia rises against the Castilian hegemony. It was fermenting in 1935. February 1936 Overthrow of the Gil Robles dictatorship. New surveys…. Today a huge meeting is to take place in the monumental bullring. Organized by the anarchist youth, the juventad libertaria. I came here to speak at this meeting. The arena holds 100,000, and the comrades assure me that no fewer will appear ”. The meeting then did not take place; Franco staged a coup the night before.

exile

Poster for an anti-war event in Barcelona in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War . Souchy was one of the speakers .

A few days before his friend, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam , was arrested by the National Socialists , Souchy fled to Paris in 1933 and initially lived in France again. When the civil war in Spain broke out in 1936, Souchy took over the information point of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union CNT in Barcelona ; for the FAI he tried to organize money and arms in France. He later wrote his most influential books on the collectivizations in the liberated anarchist zone. In Catalonia, the Levant and Aragon ( Night over Spain and The Peasants of Aragon ) over 1000 "colectivades" had formed and were not organized from above, but spontaneously from place to place through voluntary initiative. After the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1939, Souchy returned to France with the stream of refugees from Barcelona, ​​where he was interned in a prison camp for two years.

In 1942 he managed to escape into exile in Mexico. He lived there until 1948 and published numerous books, including a. on libertarian socialism , the Spanish collectives, etc., and advised Mexican initiatives that started agricultural projects. In 1952 he traveled to Israel and studied the kibbutzim . He published his experiences there in Cuba, where he had temporarily moved and where he participated in the very lively Cuban anarchist movement. His books have now appeared in Havana. At the end of the 1950s he went on a lecture tour of all Latin American countries on his own initiative and without sponsors and tried to promote union work. In 1960, at the invitation of trade unionists, he carried out an in-depth study of the effects of the policies of the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, with particular reference to land reform. In addition to the recognition of improvements in the sense of greater social justice, one of his central conclusions was: “The Cuban revolutionary government is a dictatorship. The people know and feel it. ”A few days after Souchy left the country, the government, at the instigation of the Communist Party, had the entire edition of his report Testimonios sobre la Revolución Cubana confiscated and destroyed. The book was published again shortly afterwards in Buenos Aires.

Together with Rudolf Rocker and Helmut Rüdiger , he supported the Federation of Liberal Socialists (FfS). This activity had consequences. In 1963, the International Labor Office in Geneva commissioned him to go on a tour as an education expert to the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Augustin said with a smile: “Imagine, at the age of 71, when others have long since retired, I got my first job!” Until then, Souchy had worked tirelessly and exclusively for the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement and lived ascetically.

Return to Germany

In 1966 he settled in Munich; now he was a frequently sought witness and interview partner who appeared in SPIEGEL (1969, 1983), in the Frankfurter Rundschau (1960, 1962, 1970, 1972) in DAMALS (1970, 1972), the Basler Zeitung (1980) or in radio broadcasts ( HR 1967, BR 1976) and on ZDF (1977, 1982). As early as 1950 he had started to publish again in Germany, his surviving old comrades, who had organized around the journal Die Freie Gesellschaft , were grateful buyers of his articles, which from No. 3 to No. 41 (1953) were included in almost every issue were. On the other hand, many unpublished manuscripts in the 1960s show that there were no binding buyers for his work in the meantime. The magazines Geist und Tat , new beginnings and Zeitgeist ( largely supported by Otto Reimers and Margret Reimers from Hamburg) were the exception. In the 1970s, the Swedish syndicalist Arbetaren , European ideas , acracy and liberation were added, in the 1980s the new series of Die Free Gesellschaft and Schwarzer Faden . Together with u. a. In 1973, Karl Retzlaw , Peter Bernhardi and Peter Maslowski set up the left-wing discussion forum “ Arbeitskreis Karl Liebknecht ”. In 1979 he was a participant and speaker at the international conference of War Resisters 'International (WRI) in Denmark and in 1982 he came to the Libertarian Forum in Berlin at the invitation of the International of War Resisters' International (IDK).

Augustin Souchy's books had only appeared sporadically, book chapters in the Berlin Karin Kramer Verlag , his book Night over Spain first in the publishing house Die Freie Gesellschaft in Darmstadt, later in the Frankfurt March publishing house and even later in the Frankfurt publishing house Die Freie Gesellschaft. In 1977 Luchterhand-Verlag published his political memoirs “Beware of anarchist!”. From 1982 onwards, through the cooperation with the publishing house however , a continuous publishing practice became possible, in the consequence caution anarchist! , Night over Spain , journey through the kibbutzim , Erich Mühsam . His work was published in the anthology A las Barricadas for the May days in Barcelona in 1937 and in collaboration with the Freiburg media workshop and the Swiss fighter Clara Thalmann (Columna Durruti) The Long Hope as a book and as a documentary film in ZDF's “Little TV Game” (broadcast on February 29, 1984 he did not live to see). In 1983 Augustin and Clara went to Spain again with the media workshop and visited places where both had been active.

A comrade visited him shortly before his death and reported; he looked tired but interested. The book about Erich Mühsam is almost finished, a few pages left. He still needs at least three years, he grinned, since u. a. his manuscripts were planned as a volume of materials in the anyway publishing house . Augustin Souchy died of pneumonia on January 1st, 1984 at the age of 91 in the Red Cross Clinic in Munich . There was no burial and no grave; Augustine had already bequeathed his body to anatomy. Souchy's library and estate went to the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. A few years later, Clara Thalmann was buried in the anonymous part of a meadow in a cemetery in Nice, where her partner Paul was buried somewhere .

His summary: “A lot aimed at, little achieved. But: I used to think in decades, now in centuries. In the end, history will prove us right ”.

The following, from his memoir, Beware: Anarchist! Original quote is characteristic of Souchy's work:

"My non-domineering striving has always been aimed at the establishment of a non-violent order in place of organized violence."

Fonts

(Selection)

  • Latin America. Between generals, campesinos and revolutionaries. 20 years of experience and teaching . Edition Mega, Frankfurt am Main 1974. ISBN 3-87979-003-5 .
  • Reign of Terror in America. Mainly using John Andersson's “Wallstreets blodiga vilder”. Verlag Der Syndikalist 1927, Reprint Impuls-Verlag, Bremen 1978.
  • Sacco and Vanzetti. On the 50th anniversary of death. Publishing house Der Syndikalist 1927, Reprint Freie Gesellschaft, Frankfurt 1977.
  • Night over Spain. Anarcho-Syndicalists in Revolution and Civil War 1936–39. A factual report. 1955. New edition Alibri Verlag , Aschaffenburg 2007. ISBN 978-3-86569-900-8 .
    • similar: dsb .: anarcho-syndicalists on civil war and revolution in Spain. A report. Series: MARCH archive 7, March, Darmstadt 1969 (formerly udT: Night over Spain. Published by Die Freie Gesellschaft ).
    • Short version from it: Civil war and revolution in Spain in: MÄRZ-Texte 1, März-Verlag, again in: März-texts 1 & Trivialmythen Area, Erftstadt 2004 ISBN 3-89996-029-7 (pp. 279–284).
  • At the farm workers of Aragon , Edition AV , Lich 2012.
  • (with Erich Gerlach ): The social revolution in Spain. Collectivization of industry and agriculture in Spain 1936–1939. Documents and self-portraits of the workers and peasants. Karin Kramer Verlag , Berlin 1974.
  • (with Clara Thalmann ): The long hope. Memories of another Spain. (Ed. Medienwerkstatt Freiburg), however publishing house, Grafenau 1985. ISBN 3-922209-54-8 . There is also a film of the same name for the book! (Broadcast on ZDF in 1984).
  • Between generals, campesinos and revolutionaries. Nevertheless-Verlag, Grafenau 1974.
  • Beware: anarchist! A life for freedom. Political memories. (Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt 1977.) Nevertheless-Verlag, Grafenau, ISBN 3-922209-50-5 .
  • Journey to Russia in 1920. With a current foreword “59 years later” and a conversation. ed. by A. W. Mytze. (1979, reprint of the 1920 edition).
  • Traveling through the kibbutzim. Nevertheless-Verlag, Grafenau 1984. ISBN 3-922209-52-1 .
  • Erich Mühsam. His life, his work, his martyrdom. Nevertheless publishing house , Grafenau 1984. ISBN 3-922209-53-X .
  • Mexico - land of revolutions. Communications 1942–1976. OPPO publishing house. Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-926880-19-2 .
  • Anarchist socialism. , Unrast Verlag . Münster 2010. Ed .: Hans Jürgen Degen. ISBN 978-3-89771-919-4 .

Translations by Augustin Souchy

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christiane Rostock: Live that you can die every hour. Obituary for an anarchist - On the death of Augustin Souchy . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 7, 1994.
  2. ↑ Karl-Heinz Janßen : A revolutionary becomes wise. Augustin Souchy - a world-famous anarchist takes stock . In: Die Zeit, July 23, 1976.
  3. ↑ Augustin Souchy: Testimonios sobre la Revolución Cubana. P. 61, Reconstruir, Buenos Aires 1960, (Spanish)
  4. ^ Frank Fernández: Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement. See Sharp Press, 2001
personal data
SURNAME Souchy, Augustin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Souchy Bauer, Augustin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anarchist and anti-militarist
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Ratibor , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1984
Place of death Munich