Raphael Friedeberg

[1] [3] Additionally, he served as a member of the city council of Berlin from 1901 (or 1902 according to some sources) to 1904, making him a top SPD leader in Germany's capital.

Despite the socialist movement's growing number of supporters, he claimed little had been done to improve the conditions under which the German working class lived.

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.

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.

Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), a leader in the SPD, on the other hand, accused Friedeberg of "theoretical confusion, which does not comprehend the necessity of the connection between politics and economy".

[6][7] He first set foot in Ascona, Switzerland in 1904 to recover from a blood infection, which led to a heart dilatation, following a carbuncle operation.

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.

[9] From 1911 to 1931, Friedeberg worked as a physician in the spa town of Bad Kudowa (Silesia) throughout the summer and at the natural healing Sanatorium Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland, in the winter.

Friedeberg turned Ascona into "a center for itinerant anarchists" like Erich Mühsam (who called Monte Verità a "Saladorium")[10] and Johannes Nohl.

The mixture of vegetarianism and anarchism attracted such visitors as Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Lenin and Leo Trotsky.