73 Facts About Rudolf Rocker

1.

Johann Rudolf Rocker was a German anarchist writer and activist.

2.

Rudolf Rocker was born in Mainz to a Roman Catholic artisan family.

3.

Rudolf Rocker's father died when he was a child, and his mother when he was in his teens, so he spent some time in an orphanage.

4.

Rudolf Rocker became involved in trade unionism and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany before coming under the influence of anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.

5.

Rudolf Rocker became increasingly concerned with the rise of nationalism and fascism and left Germany in 1933 for the United States.

6.

Rudolf Rocker was born to the lithographer Georg Philipp Rocker and his wife Anna Margaretha nee Naumann as one of their four children, in Mainz, Hesse, Germany, on March 25,1873.

7.

In October 1884, the Rudolf Rocker household was joined by his mother's new husband Ludwig Baumgartner.

8.

Rudolf Rocker enjoyed leaving his hometown and traveling to places like Rotterdam.

9.

Rocker's uncle, Carl Rudolf Naumann, had a substantial library consisting of socialist literature of all colors.

10.

Rudolf Rocker became a socialist and regularly discussed his ideas with others.

11.

Rudolf Rocker's employer became the first person he converted to socialism.

12.

Rudolf Rocker volunteered in the 1890 electoral campaign, which had to be organized in semi-clandestinity because of continuing government repression, helping the SPD candidate Franz Jost retake the seat for the district Mainz-Oppenheim in the Reichstag.

13.

Rudolf Rocker was heavily disappointed by the discussions at the congress, as it, especially the German delegates, refused to explicitly denounce militarism.

14.

Rudolf Rocker was rather impressed by the Dutch socialist and later anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, who attacked Liebknecht for his lack of militancy.

15.

Rudolf Rocker got to know Karl Hofer, a German active in smuggling anarchist literature from Belgium to Germany.

16.

Rudolf Rocker maintained that political rights originated towards the individual, rather than government as the collective that maintained personal freedoms.

17.

Rudolf Rocker became convinced that the source of political institutions is an irrational belief in a higher authority, as Bakunin claimed in God and the State.

18.

However, Rudolf Rocker rejected the Russian's rejection of theoretical propaganda and his claim that only revolutions can bring about change.

19.

Rudolf Rocker even attempted to emulate this style in his speeches, but was not very convincing.

20.

Rudolf Rocker became a member and founded a local section in Mainz, mostly active in distributing anarchist literature smuggled in from Belgium or the Netherlands in the city.

21.

Rudolf Rocker was a regular speaker at labor union meetings.

22.

Rudolf Rocker decided to flee Germany to Paris via Frankfurt.

23.

Rudolf Rocker had already been toying with the idea of leaving the country, in order to learn new languages, get to know anarchist groups abroad, and, above all, to escape conscription.

24.

In 1895, as a result of the anti-anarchist sentiment in France, Rudolf Rocker traveled to London to visit the German consulate and examine the possibility of his returning to Germany but was told he would be imprisoned upon return.

25.

Rudolf Rocker got a job as the librarian of the Communist Workers' Educational Union, where he got to know Louise Michel and Errico Malatesta, two influential anarchists.

26.

Rudolf Rocker joined the Jewish anarchist Arbeter Fraint group he had obtained information about from his French comrades, quickly becoming a regular lecturer at its meetings.

27.

In May 1897, having lost his job and with little chance of re-employment, Rudolf Rocker was persuaded by a friend to move to New York.

28.

Unable to find employment upon return, Rudolf Rocker decided to move to Liverpool.

29.

Arbeter Fraints unsound financial footing meant Rudolf Rocker rarely received the small salary promised to him when he took over the journal and he depended financially on Witkop.

30.

In November 1899, the prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman visited London and Rudolf Rocker met her for the first time.

31.

Not wanting to be left without any means of propaganda, Rudolf Rocker founded the Germinal in March 1900.

32.

From June 8,1906, Rudolf Rocker was involved in a garment workers' strike.

33.

Rudolf Rocker was asked by the union leading the strike to become part of the strike committee along with two other Arbeter Fraint members.

34.

Rudolf Rocker was a regular speaker at the strikers' gatherings.

35.

Rudolf Rocker represented the federation at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907.

36.

In 1909, while visiting France, Rudolf Rocker denounced the execution of the anarchist pedagogue Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona, leading him to be deported back to England.

37.

In 1912, Rudolf Rocker was an important figure in a strike by London's garment makers.

38.

Rudolf Rocker's call was not followed, since over seventy percent of the East End tailors were engaged in the ready-made trade, which was not linked with the West End workers' strike.

39.

Rudolf Rocker became a member of the strike committee and chairman of the finance sub-committee.

40.

Rudolf Rocker was responsible for collecting money and other necessities for the striking workers.

41.

Rudolf Rocker opposed both sides in World War I on internationalist grounds.

42.

Rudolf Rocker called the war "the contradiction of everything we had fought for".

43.

In March 1918, Rudolf Rocker was taken to the Netherlands under an agreement to exchange prisoners through the Red Cross.

44.

Rudolf Rocker stayed at the house of the socialist leader Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis and he recovered from the health problems from which he suffered as a result of his internment in the UK and met up with his wife Milly Witkop and his son Fermin.

45.

Rudolf Rocker returned to Germany in November 1918 upon an invitation from Fritz Kater to join him in Berlin to re-build the Free Association of German Trade Unions.

46.

Rudolf Rocker started giving public speeches in March 1919, including one at a congress of munitions workers in Erfurt, where he urged them to stop producing war material.

47.

Rudolf Rocker decried nationalism as the religion of the modern state and opposed violence, championing instead direct action and the education of the workers.

48.

On Gustav Landauer's death during the Munich Soviet Republic uprising, Rudolf Rocker took over the work of editing the German publications of Kropotkin's writings.

49.

Rudolf Rocker denounced what he considered a massive oppression of individual freedoms and the suppression of anarchists starting with the purge on April 12,1918.

50.

Rudolf Rocker supported instead the workers who took part in the Kronstadt uprising and the peasant movement led by the anarchist Nestor Makhno, whom he would meet in Berlin in 1923.

51.

In 1924, Rudolf Rocker published a biography of Johann Most called Das Leben eines Rebellen.

52.

Rudolf Rocker attributed this loss of membership to the mentality of German workers accustomed to military discipline, accusing the communists of using similar tactics to the Nazis and thus attracting such workers.

53.

Rudolf Rocker was encouraged by the anarcho-syndicalist movement he found in the US and Canada.

54.

Rudolf Rocker wrote to Nettlau in 1927: "Every nationalism begins with a Mazzini, but in its shadow there lurks a Mussolini".

55.

In 1929, Rudolf Rocker was a co-founder of the Gilde freiheitlicher Bucherfreunde, a publishing house which would release works by Alexander Berkman, William Godwin, Erich Muhsam, and John Henry Mackay.

56.

Rudolf Rocker was worried: "Once the Nazis get to power, we'll all go the way of Landauer and Eisner".

57.

In 1931, Rudolf Rocker attended the IWA congress in Madrid and then the unveiling of the Nieuwenhuis memorial in Amsterdam.

58.

Rudolf Rocker was welcomed there by many of the Jewish anarchists he had lived and fought alongside for many years.

59.

The Rudolf Rocker family moved to live with a sister of Witkop's in Towanda, Pennsylvania where many families with progressive or libertarian socialist views lived.

60.

Rudolf Rocker found many of his Jewish comrades from London, who had since emigrated to America, and became a regular writer for Freie Arbeiter Stimme, a Jewish anarchist newspaper.

61.

Back in Towanda, in the summer of 1934, Rudolf Rocker started work on an autobiography, but news of Erich Muhsam's death led him to halt his work.

62.

Rudolf Rocker was working on Nationalism and Culture, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 instilling great optimism in Rocker.

63.

Rudolf Rocker published a pamphlet The Truth about Spain and contributed to The Spanish Revolution, a special fortnightly newspaper published by American anarchists to report on the events in Spain.

64.

In 1937, Nationalism and Culture, which he had started work on around 1925, was finally published with the help of anarchists from Chicago Rudolf Rocker had met in 1933.

65.

Rudolf Rocker aims to prove the claim that culture and power are essentially antagonistic concepts.

66.

Rudolf Rocker applies this model to human history, analyzing the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern capitalist society, and to the history of the socialist movement.

67.

In 1938, Rudolf Rocker published a history of anarchist thought, which he traced all the way back to ancient times, under the name Anarcho-Syndicalism.

68.

In 1939, Rudolf Rocker had to undergo a serious operation and was forced to give up lecture tours.

69.

In 1947, Rudolf Rocker published Zur Betrachtung der Lage in Deutschland about the impossibility of another anarchist movement in Germany.

70.

Rudolf Rocker thought young Germans were all either totally cynical or inclined to fascism and awaited a new generation to grow up before anarchism could bloom in the country.

71.

Rudolf Rocker wrote for its organ, Die Freie Gesellschaft, which survived until 1953.

72.

Rudolf Rocker is often described as an anarcho-syndicalist and wrote key introductory texts to that approach as well as the syndicalist platform of the FAUD.

73.

Rudolf Rocker wrote three volumes of memoirs, which have been published in Spanish and Yiddish translations from a German typescript:.