Ludwig Rubiner (12 June 1881 – 27 February 1920) was a German poet, literary critic and essayist, generally seen as a representative of the expressionist movement that originated in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century.
During his university years he was a member of the "Berliner Freien Studentenschaft", participating in the organisation's literary activities, delivering lectures on radical authors such as Tolstoy, Strindberg and Wedekind while also involving himself in theatrical productions.
These included Erich Mühsam, Paul Scheerbart, René Schickele, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Wilhelm Herzog and Herwarth Walden.
[1] Till 1914 he was seen as a major figure among the young Berlin "Bohemians" around Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954), editor of Die Aktion, to which Rubiner was also a regular contributor.
When it came to literature, those whose works he most frequently scrutinised for the benefit of his own readers included Else Lasker-Schüler, Max Brod, Ernst Blaß, Arthur Holitscher, Peter Hille and Heinrich Mann.
[1] Musicians about whom he wrote included Claude Debussy, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni und Giacomo Puccini.
[1] In 1906 Rubiner wrote a libretto for the opera "Der Nachtwächter" by his friend Herwarth Walden and tried - apparently without success - to interest Gustav Mahler in the work.
[4] From the moment he embarked on his career as a literary critic Rubiner took an interest in foreign-language literature, especially in French and in Russian: he knew both languages well.
[1] Other significant translations included that, in 1908, of Mikhail Kuzmin's novel "Deeds of the Great Alexcander" and Nikolai Gogol's volume Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.
In November 1912 he relocated to Paris where he lived with the critic-journalist Carl Einstein in a small hotel near Saint-Sulpice, along the Rue de Veaugirard.
He formed a particularly close friendship with Marc Chagall whose pictures were included in Herwarth Walden's first Autumn Exhibition of German Artists, held in Berlin at the Sturm Gallery in 1912.
However, at the end of 1914 he started working for "Die Weißen Blätter" which at that stage was still based in Germany (published in Leipzig), and to which he contributed an essay entitled "Homer und Monte Christo".
[4][10] There he wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and also, during 1917/18, published "Zeit-Echo", a pacifist news magazine produced primarily for Switzerland's international community of exiles.
He translated and wrote an introduction to an adventure novel by Eugène François Vidocq, a writer who as a young man lived through the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath.
Rubiner now became a central figure in a group of exiled French and Russian pacifist intellectuals such as Romain Rolland, Henri Guilbeaux and Anatoly Lunacharsky.
In the same year he published his "manifesto", "Die Änderung der Welt" (loosely, "Changing the world") in the magazine "Das Ziel".
[2] There are suggestions that during 1918 the Swiss were coming under increasing pressure from the German General Staff in respect of the Communist activist Frida Rubiner and her anarchist-poet husband.
His wife's involvement in the revolutionary events the took place in Munich during the first half of 1919 vindicate official suspicions at the time that Frida Rubiner, for one, was among those actively working for a soviet style revolution in Germany.
[1][2] While his wife remained politically engaged in Munich, Ludwig Rubiner returned home to Berlin where he moved into the apartment of his friend, the musician Ferruccio Busoni, who was undertaking a succession of postwar concert tours across Europe's cultural capitals.
This was also the year in which he published his essay "Die kulturelle Stellung des Schauspielers" ("The cultural standing of the stage-actor") in the theatre journal, "Freie Deutsche Bühne".
[1] Early in 1919 Rubiner teamed up with the politically like-minded writers Arthur Holitscher, Rudolf Leonhard, Franz Jung and Alfons Goldschmidt to set up the Bund Proletarischer Kultur ("League for Proletarian Culture").
[4] It sought to introduce proletarian culture to support the struggle of the revolutionary masses for liberation from the bourgeois economic and educational monopoly.
[1] Ludwig Rubiner spent the final months of his life working on translating the novels and stories of Voltaire into German.
A few days before he had been presented with an award by "Das junge Deutschland Gesellschaft" ("The Young Germany Society") in celebration of his literary activities.