Otto Rinke

Erich Otto Rinke , also Otto Rau (* 1853 in Schmiegel , † 1899 in St. Louis ) was a German anarchist and editor .

Life

Trained as a locksmith, Rinke traveled to Saxony and Württemberg in search of work . Here he came into contact with the labor movement and became increasingly radicalized. When he was called up for military service, he deserted shortly afterwards on December 5, 1873. His escape led him to Switzerland, where he found jobs as a locksmith in Bern and Geneva. Together with Emil Werner he joined the Social Democratic Association in Bern , where he gained access to Bakuninist circles. He joined the Jura Federation and, together with August Reinsdorf and Emil Werner, edited the Arbeiter-Zeitung from July 15, 1876 to October 13, 1877 . Most of the articles were written by Paul Brousse and then translated into German. In it, the authors committed themselves to anarcho-communism and to the propaganda of the deed .

Rinke founded, together with Werner and Kropotkin, the Anarchist-Communist Party of the German Language . The group's statutes state that the intention was to unite the various elements of the German-speaking peoples who recognized anarchist-communist principles and who were associated with the International Workers' Association (IAA). After a demonstration, in which a red flag was actually hoisted in the spirit of propaganda , he, Werner and Brousse were forced to leave Bern. The red flag was banned in Switzerland as an emblem of the revolution after the Paris Commune .

Rinke traveled with Werner to Belgium on the IX. Congress of the Anti-Authoritarian International in Verviers and the World Socialist Congress of the IAA in Ghent . From there he returned to Germany under the name Otto Rau , where he stayed in Munich, Cologne and Mannheim. After a brief detention, he left the country and went to Paris. There he met the Bohemian anarchist Josef Peukert . They became lifelong friends and role models within a wing of anarchist German communism in the years to come.

In 1881 Rinke spent most of his time in Paris with only brief forays into Germany and Switzerland. Here he met the German anarchist Balthasar Grün . In December of the same year, Rinke and Werner brought out the first edition of Der Rebell, organ of the German-language anarchists in Geneva. This was smuggled into Germany. In March 1882, Rinke and Grün went on a propaganda tour through Germany. However, they were soon arrested in Darmstadt. In September of this year, Grün committed suicide in Hanau prison. Rinke was serving a term in prison in Ulm.

Rinke then went to London in October 1883. There he printed the magazine Der Rebell in his apartment. Peukert took on most of the editorial tasks. By then, the magazine had declared itself to be the organ of all German-speaking anarchists. The last edition appeared in October 1886. Together with Peukert, Rinke directed the newspaper Die Autonomie against Johann Most's magazine Freiheit in November 1886 . The news about the anarchist movement was the main theme in the new newspaper. Rinke later met the Scottish-German anarchist John Henry Mackay and went with him on trips to the East End of London. The figure of Otto Trupp in Mackay's novel The Anarchists , which was written in 1891, is modeled on Rinke.

Life in London was very difficult for Rinke. He had no permanent job and had to support a wife and two young children. In the years 1888–1890, however, he found a permanent job and was better off. Rinke was able to devise successful operations for the smuggling of his magazine to Germany. A sign of his success was the fact that the Berlin police chief von Richthofen wrote that the police could only confiscate a few copies of the newspaper and could not arrest anyone who had smuggled them into the country. But now the British police were pursuing and harassing anarchists.

Before the persecution, Rinke fled to the USA in 1890 and initially lived in Elizabeth , New Jersey. There he joined the Autonomous Groups of America and published, together with Peukert and Claus Timmermann in New York, his anarcho-communist newspaper The Anarchist .

In 1896 Rinke moved to St. Louis, where he worked as a foreman in a factory that produced electric motors. He died in 1899 at the age of 46.

literature

• Paul Avrich, Karen Avrich: Sasha and Emma. The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman . The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London / England 2012
• Andrew R. Carlson: Anarchism and individual terror in the German Empire 1870-90 . In: Gerhard Hirschfeld, Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Eds.): Social Protest, Violence & Terror in Nineteenth- & Twentieth-Century Europe . The Macmillan Press LTD, London 1982
• Daniel Laqua: Political Contestation and Internal Strife: Socialist and Anarchist German Newspapers in London 1878-1910 . In: Constance Bantman, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds.): The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017
• Josef Peukert: Otto Rinke: In memory of the dead friend and pioneer . In: Yearbook of the Free Generation , NF., Vol. 1, Paris 1910
• Sarah Wise: The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum . Vintage Book, London 2009

Web links

• Rinke, Erich Otto Aka Rau, Rinkius, Big Otto (1853-1899) (English)
• Anarchism in Germany - Vol. I: The Early Movement (English)