Raphael Friedeberg

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Raphael Friedeberg
Born(1863-03-14)14 March 1863
Tilsit, East Prussia
Died16 August 1940(1940-08-16) (aged 77)
Ascona, Switzerland
OccupationPhysician
Political partySPD

Raphael Friedeberg (14 March 1863 – 16 August 1940) was a German physician, socialist and

anarchist
.

Early life

Friedeberg was born in

University of Berlin after the sunset of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, graduating in 1895.[2]

Social democracy

He worked as a general practitioner and a specialist for pulmonary disease in Berlin from 1895 to 1911. Friedeberg contributed to Sozialistischer Akademiker from early 1895 to the end of 1896, and from 1897 on, he was a member of the press commission of Sozialistische Monatshefte. Both of them were periodicals which attempted to draw intellectuals to socialism and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Friedeberg was active in the establishment of health insurance for the working class in Berlin. The German socialist movement was just discovering the health insurance movement and starting to be active within it, both to win access to medical treatment for the working class and as a means of disseminating socialist ideas. In 1899, Friedeberg helped establish Berlin's Central Commission of Health Insurance Boards, which then organized the first Congress of German Health Insurance Boards.[1]

city council of Berlin from 1901 (or 1902 according to some sources) to 1904, making him a top SPD leader in Germany's capital.[4]

Anarcho-socialism

Soon after, however, he started becoming increasingly disillusioned with the SPD, and particularly the

class struggle. In 1907, all members of the FVdG were given the choice of either leaving this federation and joining the centralized unions or losing their SPD membership. Friedeberg opted for the latter.[5]

During this period, he conceived what he called anarcho-socialism. Despite the socialist movement's growing number of supporters, he claimed little had been done to improve the conditions the German working class lived under. One problem, said Friedeberg, was to be found in the SPD's political theory. The SPD adhered to a dogmatic interpretation of Karl Marx's writings, particularly the view that the course of history can be deduced from the state of the relations of production, that "social being determines consciousness". Though correct at the time Marx set historical materialism down, Friedeberg stated, technological development had made this view obsolete. He conceived the term historical psychism, holding that the "spiritual relations [...] have the greatest power over the material relations". The socialist movement's theoretical errors had then led to mistakes in its political strategies, according to him. The working class opposition was now focused on gaining influence in the German parliament, the Reichstag. This had led to the "flattening out of the revolutionary movement" from a "great, all-encompassing cultural movement" to a "purely economic, even a pure stomach question". From this, he saw the need to replace political methods of class struggle with economic and psychological means. Above all, he advocated for the general strike as a means of revolutionizing society. It encompasses the proletariat fighting for their own interests rather than having representatives do it for them. However, in order to be capable of doing this, proletarians must first liberate themselves from the constraining ideologies of capitalist society: namely religion, belief in laws and the state, nationalism and militarism. Friedeberg's synthesis of anarchism and socialism was criticized by anarchists and socialists alike. Erich Mühsam, a prominent German anarchist, said historical psychism was no more than a new version of historical materialism, the "replacement of one fabricated regularity by a very similar one". Karl Kautsky, a leader in the SPD, on the other hand accused him of "theoretical confusion, which does not comprehend the necessity of the connection between politics and economy".[6]

Anarchism

He first set foot in

Zurich in 1906. He started visiting Ascona frequently and also moved out of Berlin to the suburb of Friedrichshagen. In August 1907, he attended the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam. In 1908, he visited Peter Kropotkin in London. In 1909, he held his last large public lecture, titled "Anarchism, its Ideas and Tactics", at the Anarchist Federation of Germany's conference in Leipzig. He started turning his back on organized anarchism, moving to a more individualist understanding of anarchism. Moreover, he was by now both in poor health and deeply resigned as to the possibility of a socialist revolution. He still followed German and European politics, but felt no need to participate.[7]

He remained the attending physician of August Bebel and Karl Kautsky.[8]

Casa Selma, a light-and-air bathing hut on Sanatorium Monte Verità

From 1911 to 1931, Friedeberg worked as a physician in the spa town of

Leo Trotsky.[11]

In 1931, he permanently settled in Ascona. Otto Braun, former Prime Minister of Prussia, lived in his house after he escaped from Nazi Germany.[8]

Friedeberg died in Ascona in 1940.

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-313-29899-8
    .
  2. ^ Biography Archived 2011-07-19 at the Wayback Machine at SPD-Berlin.de (in German)
  3. ^ Bock/Tennstedt 1978, p. 38
  4. ^ Bock/Tennstedt 1978, p. 38 and footnote 19 on p. 50.
  5. ^ Bock/Tennstedt 1978, pp. 38-39
  6. ^ Bock/Tennstedt 1978, p. 40-41 and Pierson 1993, p. 188.
  7. ^ Bock/Tennstedt 1978, pp. 40, 42.
  8. ^ a b Stargardt, Wolfgang; Tennstedt, Florian; Umrath, Heinz (1976). "Albert Kohn - Ein Freund der Kranken" (PDF) (in German). Bundesverband der Ortskrankenkassen. p. 814.
  9. ISBN 978-3-86906-027-9
    .
  10. ISBN 9780674015036
    .
  11. ISBN 0-521-36381-0
    .

External links
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