The True Front | 23Landauer was born in Karlsruhe in 1870, nearly twins with Otto von Bis-
marck’s united Germany. In 1875, the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands
(SAPD) was established through the fusion of the two previously dominant left-
wing factions: Ferdinand Lassalle’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (Gen-
eral German Workers’ Association) and the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpar-
tei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany) of Wilhelm
Liebknecht and August Bebel.^24 The Sozialistengesetze (Socialist Laws) of 1878
attempted to outlaw socialist organizing but failed, and when Bismarck retired
in 1890, the Reichstag declined to renew them. Now allowed to organize openly
once again, the SAPD renamed itself the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutsch-
lands (SPD), the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Between 1891 and 1914, the
SPD expanded continually until it became the single largest party in the country.
The lapse of the antisocialist laws occurred when Landauer was twenty years
old, a student of German classicism and romanticism at University of Berlin.^25 At
that point, however, he was more interested in his studies than in new opportu-
nities for activism, and he soon left Berlin for a term at University of Strasbourg
(1890–1891), during which he read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. He was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s passionate advocacy of
free, individual creativity, and he would eventually strive to integrate his politics
with Nietzsche’s philosophy, despite the latter’s virulent antipathy to socialism
and anarchism.^26 Upon his return to Berlin in April 1891, Landauer became in-
volved with the Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theater), an institution estab-
lished by the socialist Bruno Wille for the cultural education of the working class
through cheap access to theatrical performances. It was through Wille and his
theater that Landauer met the group that would introduce him to anarchism.^27
Funding for the Freie Volksbühne was provided by the SPD, which had
grown from a mere political party into a mass cultural institution.^28 However,
the SPD’s growth was not without its casualties. At a party convention in Erfurt
in 1891, the newly legalized SPD adopted the program of Karl Kautsky, both re-
committing itself to the seizure of the means of production from capitalists and
endorsing the moderate and legally available means of parliamentary activity.
Kautsky reasoned that revolution was inevitable according to the Marxist under-
standing of history, such that the socialist task was the amelioration of workers’
living conditions until the final battle in the class struggle. In the course of the
debate over the Erfurt Program, a group of radical youth who had been members
of the SAPD and who advocated boycotting electoral politics were expelled from
the congress, and as a result they excluded themselves from the newly formed
SPD.^29 Known as the Verein der unabhängigen Sozialisten (Association of Inde-
pendent Socialists), or simply the Jungen (Young Ones), this was the group with
whom Landauer chose to affiliate upon his entrance into political activism. As a
result, he could later say, “I was an anarchist before I was a socialist, and one of