Fritz Scherer (anarchist)

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Memorial stone for Fritz Scherer on the premises of the Bakuninhütte

Fritz Scherer (born May 13, 1903 in Berlin ; † June 18, 1988 there ) was an anarchist migrant worker and bookbinder .

Life

As a teenager he developed an awareness of social criticism and took part in political campaigns. In the 1920s he was a member of the Anarchist Association Berlin. At the urging of his parents, he completed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, after which he was drawn to the country road again and again. He was a member of the “ Free Workers Union of Germany ” (FAUD) and collected membership fees for many years in the Neukölln district , while also distributing the anarcho-syndicalist weekly newspaper Der Syndikalist . Refraining from alcohol and being close to nature were a matter of course for him. Until the end of his life he was a member of the Alpine Club , but not in the German one, which was too nationalistic for him, but in Austria.

The Bakuninhütte near Meiningen , with the Fritz Scherer memorial stone in the foreground.
Stick nail of the Bakunin hut

When Scherer came to Thuringia on his wandering , he heard about the Bakuninhütte near Meiningen from comrades . In this anarcho-syndicalist mountain hut , he took on the role of hut keeper from November 1930 to May 1931 . His experiences there had such a lasting impact on him that in the following decades he became the most important reminder of the Bakunin hut. At every opportunity he spoke of his time as a hut warden and occasionally gave away one of the hut's stick nails to good friends . His hiking diary still contributes to the memory - not only of the Bakunin hut. For this reason, a memorial stone for Fritz Scherer has been on the Bakuninhütte site since 2010 .

At the beginning of the 1930s, he lived with the speaker Berthold Cahn in an apartment in Berlin's Scheunenviertel . After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists , Scherer and Cahn were arrested, and “subversive leaflets” were their undoing. In contrast to the Jewish Cahn, Scherer was released again and now hired himself out to the Berlin fire brigade . Because of his anti-fascist attitude and actions, he was arrested several times by the Gestapo . His poems also provided an occasion for this, according to one distributed in 1938: "The threat of mass murder", "The war drivers are lurking", they "cloud the brains with trumpets and hurray ...".

With Fritz Scherer, some of his poems and his extensive collection of anarchist classics by Bakunin , Kropotkin , Mühsam , Rocker and others also survived National Socialism . Set in politically unsuspicious bindings, they survived political censorship and in later years formed the basis for numerous new editions in West Germany.

Even the GDR People's Police did not tolerate his tireless standing up for a free world. At the last minute, warned by comrades, he managed to evade arrest and to flee to West Berlin .

For Scherer, anarchy meant: “Law and freedom without violence, lack of power, self-determination” and “the most beautiful thing in the world”. He was also a critic of parliamentarism and religion .

Fritz Scherer was married and the father of two daughters.

literature

  • Hiking Association Bakuninhütte e. V. (Ed.): Rebellenheil. Commemorative script for Fritz Scherer. Vagabond, wanderer, hut warden, anarchist . With DVD Highway, Customers, Vagabonds . Part 1 and 2 of an RBB production. Karin Kramer Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-87956-350-0 .
  • Hans Halter: Fritz Scherer (1903–1988), anarchist. A life under the black flag for 85 years . In: taz . June 29, 1988 ( obituary ).
  • Christoph Höfer, Marian Luck, Kai Richarz: What is left of the Bakuninhütte? Ilmenau-Kolleg , 2010 ( seminar paper ).

Web links

Commons : Fritz Scherer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also: Rudolf Berner: The invisible front . Libertad Verlag, Potsdam 1997, ISBN 3-922226-23-X , pp. 54 f., 73, 137, 140.
personal data
SURNAME Scherer, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German vagabond, wanderer, hut warden, anarchist
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1988
Place of death Berlin