Rudolf Rocker, an unusual destiny

Berlin was truly a world city, back in the Weimar years. As it is the case with other capital cities, the people who made its fame came often (most often?) from other towns or even other countries or even remote corners of the world.

Bertolt Brecht was born in Bavaria, a very un-berliner part of Germany, Kurt Weill in Dessau, Alexander Moissi in Trieste, Lisbet Juel in Copenhagen.

As for Johann Rocker, he came into being in Mainz, Western Germany. He was an important figure in the world’s anarchist movement, but that is not the reason I find him a fascinating person. No, it is because, being a Catholic born German, he became a Jewish anarchist. By that I mean that he learned Yiddish in order to start a newspaper directed towards Jews in Britain. Rocker played an important rôle in the Jewish worker’s movement.

Having joined the SPD, the German social-democratic party, in the 1890s, he was soon excluded from that party, as he was considered too far left. Searched by the police, he fled to Paris in 1893. There, he came in contact with Jewish anarchists. He even lived together with Solomon Rappaport, later known as S.Ansky, writer and researcher of Jewish folklore in Podolia and Volhynia.

In 1895 he moved to London. In Britain, he was instrumental in organizing Jewish workers. Not being a Jew, he had to study Yiddish, the langage of East-European Jews and then authored many Yiddish books, pamphlets and articles.

Back in Germany, he settled in Berlin in 1918. There, he worked actively in the anarchist movement. His ideals were anti-nationalist and also anti-marxist and anti-soviet. In 1923 he met Nestor Makhno, the exiled Ukrainian anarchist.

In 1933 he fled once more Germany, to the U.S. this time. He died 1958 in the libertarian commune Mohegan Colony about 50 miles from New York City.

Germinal, a newspaper founded by Rocker