Ludwig Bäumer

Ludwig Bäumer (born September 1, 1888 in Melle ; † August 28, 1928 in Berlin ) was a German writer and communist.

After graduating from high school in Hanover, Bäumer studied law in Marburg and Göttingen, but broke off his studies in 1910 and went to the Worpswede artists' colony . Here he made friends with the artist Heinrich Vogeler and his wife Martha . In the period that followed, an intense love affair developed between Bäumer and Martha Vogeler, which lasted until 1919. Ludwig Bäumer worked for Franz Pfemfert for his magazine Die Aktion , in which a number of expressionist poems by him appeared. He took part in the First World War as a non-commissioned officer, but then turned into an enemy of the war and was active as a communist politician in Bremen during the November Revolution. At the end of 1918 he was a delegate at the founding party congress of the KPD in Berlin. In January 1919 he became a member of the Council of People's Representatives of the Bremen Soviet Republic , after which he was imprisoned. Ludwig Bäumer left the KPD in June 1919. In 1919 his book The Essence of Communism appeared . In 1920 Kurt Schwitters created a MERZ portrait of him.

Bäumer lived in Worpswede until 1922, most recently as managing director of a pub. In 1922 he married Romaine Taylor-Wagenseil, with whom he moved to Bavaria in 1923. He later lived as a freelance writer in Munich and Berlin. In 1927 Christian Schad painted his portrait. Ludwig Bäumer died on August 28, 1928 by suicide in Berlin.

Publications

• The essence of communism , Paul Steegemann Verlag, Hanover (1919)

literature

• Kuckuck, Karin: Ludwig Bäumer. Artist, communist, conformist. A biographical sketch . In: Workers' Movement and Social History. Journal for Regional History of Bremen in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Issue 13/14, 2004, pp. 57–63.
• Neteler, Theo: Ludwig Bäumer, Melle - writer, politician and lover Martha Vogelers , Worpswede. In: Heimat-Jahrbuch Osnabrücker Land, 2017, pp. 185–198. ISBN 978-3-941611-17-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ludwig Bäumer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biographical information from the Handbook of the German Communists
• Poems by Ludwig Bäumer in Die Aktion
• MERZ portrait by Kurt Schwitters: The Bäumer picture

Individual evidence

1. ^ Poems by Ludwig Bäumer in Die Aktion
2. ^ Illustration by Kurt Schwitters: Das Bäumerbild
3. ↑ Das Bäumerbild (1920) in: Kurt Schwitters 1887–1948, Propylaen Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, 1986, p. 127
4. ↑ Rose-Maria Gropp: The deep looks, FAZ from December 9, 2008 ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ^ Günter A. Richter: Christian Schad, Rottach-Egern 2002, p. 136