Max Nettlau

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Max Nettlau

Max Heinrich Hermann Reinhardt Nettlau (born April 30, 1865 in Neuwaldegg , today part of Vienna , † July 23, 1944 in Amsterdam ) was a German linguist and historian of anarchism .

Life

Nettlau studied Celtic language and literature in Berlin from 1882 ; In 1885 he began studying in London, where he joined the Socialist League and became interested in and collected anarchist and socialist literature. From 1885 to 1890 Nettlau was a member of the Socialist League and attended the 2nd International as its delegate . Through his contacts with Victor Dave and Johann Most , he became familiar with the ideas of anarchism. From 1895 he was a member of the anarchist Freedom Group and involved in founding the Freedom Press .

With his work "Contributions to Cymric Grammar" he was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD. The dissertation was published in Leipzig in 1887. Nettlau built up a huge collection of magazines and books in his life and processed them into a representation of the history of anarchism and its representatives. An inheritance from his father, who died in 1892, made him financially independent and devoted himself entirely to research into the history of anarchism. These were particularly favored by his contacts with many well-known anarchists.

In the following years, Nettlau wrote many articles for various international anarchist newspapers, such as Die Freiheit , Freedom or Les Temps Nouveaux, and published biographies on Michail Bakunin , Elisée Reclus and Errico Malatesta . His main work is his history of anarchy , published from 1925 and conceived in seven volumes . Volumes 6 and 7 remained unpublished and are kept as handwritten manuscripts in the IISG.

During the economic crisis after the First World War, he lost the fortune inherited from his parents due to inflation and lived in very poor conditions in Vienna. Nonetheless, he continued to collect and publish. In 1935, Nettlau had to sell his collection to the International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam because of financial problems .

In 1938, when Austria was annexed to the German Reich , he fled to Amsterdam with the help of Meta Kraus-Fessel , where he lived until his death in 1944. He continued to work on cataloging the IISG archives. The Nazis were obviously unaware of this, and Nettlau likely died of stomach cancer without ever being molested by them.

Quotes

“The social movements since 1917 and all previous and their previous failures prove not that socialism fails because of the natural need for freedom, but that a socialism that does not correspond to this urge for freedom is not viable, even if all means forced upon it by force are used To be available. Because every organism needs a free sphere of movement, without which standstill and decline occur. Every social class has understood this, even if it had acquired the greatest possible position of power. The urge for freedom of injustice and privilege is precisely the ceaseless struggle for their expansion and reinforcement, while the rigid systems of authoritarian socialism believe they can put a stop to this urge to move towards the establishment of social justice, an illusion because it gives humanity the element of freedom that invigorates it would withdraw, which is why their serious realization is always opposed by instinctive mistrust. In addition to shorter periods of apparent calm, in which a rule, a system seemed to have prevailed, while in reality this brief bloom was inevitably followed by withering and decay, there were normal periods of constant struggles, either for the defense of independence or autonomy or for attack Aimed at extending a rule or a privilege. Every feudal lord fought in this sense against kings, cities and the state, for his old or new privileges or in league with them against weaker neighbors for booty. The beginning bourgeoisie of the free cities of the Middle Ages, even tyrants in their urban area and the surrounding area within their reach, defended themselves against the nobility and kings and the centralist state of the modern age, which they were preparing to crush.

These grandiose struggles of the bourgeoisie in Italy, Holland, England, America, France from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and all over the world in the course of the nineteenth, finally gave the bourgeoisie the complete domination now represented by international finance capital, a power which still has many possibilities of expansion which, however, has long since shown a Hippocratic trait: through the exclusion of the immense masses of the people, the nominal power of the bourgeoisie lacks any permanent solid foundation and is actually maintained primarily by the distrust of socialism, for which a form that pacifies the natural need for freedom The masses are not yet known, while the liberal tendencies of socialism, anarchism, have long been trying to find practical ways of synthesizing freedom and solidarity. "

- Max Nettlau, 1925

Fonts

  • Michael Bakunin . A biography (1896–1900)
  • Bibliographie de l'Anarchy (1897; 1976)
  • History of anarchy . 7 volumes ( table of contents ( memento from September 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ))
    • Volume 1: The early spring of anarchy (1925; 1993) ( online as pdf ; new edition Liberdad Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-922226-25-3 )
    • Volume 2: The Anarchism from Proudhon to Kropotkin (1927; 1993)
    • Volume 3: Anarchists and Social Revolutionaries (1931, 1996)
    • Volume 4: The first heyday of anarchy 1886–1894 (1981)
    • Volume 5: Anarchists and Syndicalists , Part 1 (1984)
    • Volume 6: Anarchists and Syndicalists , Part 2 (unpublished)
    • Volume 7: Anarchists and Syndicalists , Part 3 (unpublished)
    • Supplementary volume on the history of anarchy (1972; 1984)
  • Collected essays . Verlag Die Freie Gesellschaft, Hanover 1980. (Articles from Die Internationale , FAUD (1929–1932))
  • Eugenics of anarchy . Ed. V. Heiner M. Becker. Wetzlar 1985.
  • Errico Malatesta . The life of an anarchist . Publishing house Der Syndikalist , Berlin 1922.
  • Élisée Reclus . Anarchist and scholar (1830-1905) . Publishing house Der Syndikalist, Berlin 1928.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Max Nettlau  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Max Nettlau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Meta Kraus-Fessel in the archive for the history of sociology in Austria at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
  2. ^ Brief History of the Collection on the IISG website
  3. ↑ Max Nettlau: The early spring of anarchy. Berlin: Verlag "Der Syndikalist" Fritz Kater , 1925, p. 5.
personal data
SURNAME Nettlau, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nettlau, Max Heinrich Hermann Reinhardt (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist and historian of anarchism
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuwaldegg , today part of Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1944
Place of death Amsterdam