Archive of Rudolf Rocker, 1894-1958

Johann Rudolf Rocker was born on 25 March 1873 in Mainz, Germany, as the second son of Georg Philipp Rocker, a music printer stemming from a peasant family in Wörrstadt and Anna Margaretha (born Naumann) from a bourgeois family in Mainz. His father died in 1877. When his mother also died in 1887, Rudolf was sent to a Catholic orphanage.

After finishing his schooling he received permission from the orphanage to apprentice himself as a bookbinder. His uncle Rudolf Naumann had a strong influence on his intellectual development, introducing Rocker to the socialist movement, which in the Germany of the day stood under the intellectual influence of Lassalle and Marx. At the time the laws of exception against socialists enacted by Bismarck were still in effect. But even after the repeal of the antisocialist legislation, political liberties were restricted by the tough police ordinances of Bismarck's authoritarian state. To avoid arrest for a speech he had given to a meeting of the unemployed in Mainz, he fled to France in 1893. In Paris he frequented socialist circles and had contacts with Elisée Reclus, who, like other intellectuals of the time, went over to anarchism.

When in this period of "propaganda through action" the ground got too hot for him in France, he emigrated to England in 1895. In London he became familiar with the libertarian movement of East European Jewish exiles. Although not Jewish himself he learned their language and from 1898 until the outbreak of the First World War he edited the weekly newspaper The Workers Friend (Der Arbeterfraynd) and the theoretical monthly Germinal. He became a member of the East European Jewish anarchist community and gave lectures on social and literary themes.

In a small circle of Jewish comrades he made the acquaintance of his later lifelong companion Milly Witkop (b. 1-3-1877, d. 23- 11-1955), who at the time belonged to the Workers Friend group and distributed newspapers and pamphlets and collected funds for the movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was arrested as an "enemy alien" and spent most of the war years in captivity (see his Hinter Stacheldraht und Gitter).

Expelled from England ten months before the war's end, he was granted asylum in Holland, until he was able to return to his fatherland with the collapse of the German Empire. Back in Germany he joined the Free Association of German Unions (Freien Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften) and was one of the founders of the Free Workers Union of Germany (Freien Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands, FAUD) and the International Workers Association (IAA) in 1922-1923.

He continued to work in Germany until the advent of Hitler's dictatorship in 1933. A last-minute flight saved him from the justice of the Third Reich. His library, which contained a valuable collection of some 5,000 volumes, and the better part of his correspondence, were burned. He emigrated to the United States, where he published many books and articles on political, cultural and philosophical themes. His books, including his 1937 work Nationalismus und Kultur, were translated and published in many languages. He died in Crompond, New York in 1958.