Zenzl Mühsam

[5] During this time she met and then moved in to live with the 24 year old artist and sculptor Ludwig Engler, employed as a domestic servant or, according to some bourgeois neighbourly gossip, illegally as a concubine.

In Munich a Soviet republic was declared in April 1919, led by Ernst Toller and other prominent left wingers and anarchists including Erich Mühsam.

They were both arrested and imprisoned, but Zenzl was released whereas Erich was sentenced to fifteen years "confined in a fortress" where, it seems, he had a little more freedom than in a conventional prison: he wrote numerous poems and, in 1920, published "Judas", his first play.

[5] Nothing came directly out of her requests, but at the end of 1924 Erich Mühsam was released from prison, according to one source let out "early" by the Bavarian authorities because he was suffering from heart problems.

Erich Mühsam had long enjoyed a frosty relationship with the Communist Party, but as a left-wing anarchist writer he was evidently high on the Nazi target list, and he was among the first to be arrested.

[4][7] Newly widowed, Zenzl Mühsam turned to friends and comrades for support, notably Meta Kraus-Fessel (although the two quickly fell out).

[8] Keen to preserve both her husband's legacy and her own liberty, she transferred Erich Mühsam's copious collection of papers to a comrade called Ernst Simmerling who was in turn able to pass them to the relatively safe care of his brother in law, Rudolf Rocker, an anarcho-syndicalist who around this time successfully fled to the United States.

Czechoslovakia at this stage was still an independent country, and its capital, Prague, was the destination of choice for a large number of political refugees keen to avoid imprisonment or worse in the new Germany.

Her demands for a public investigation into her husband's death did not endear Zenzl Mühsam to the Nazi authorities, and when she was warned by the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, that she was about to be arrested by the Gestapo, on 15 July 1934 she crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.

[4] In September 1934, with the help of a book dealer called Fritz Picard and Camill Hofmann, the Czechoslovak press attaché, she managed to smuggle her dead husband's papers into Prague as "diplomatic baggage".

Her move to the Soviet Union had been anticipated by the publication by International Red Aid in Moscow of a "brochure" detailing the suffering of Erich Mühsam and the subsequent deprivation of German citizenship for his widow.

However, the authorities were evidently not indifferent to international campaigns, and in October 1936 she was released, subject to the condition imposed by the NKVD law enforcement agency that she should not remain in Moscow.

Later that year, in June, she concluded a deal with the Gorky Institute whereby she sold Erich Mühsam's literary legacy in return for a monthly maintenance payment of 500 roubles.

[1] In order to be able to publish Erich Mühsam's "Unpolitischen Erinnerungen" ("Unpolitical Memories") and his "Jolly Gedichte" ("... poems") Zenzl set about researching in various institutes and libraries.

Sources speculate that refusal of the application was intended to prevent her reporting the Stalin Show Trials and Soviet prison conditions in the west.

[1] During 1947/48 she reapplied for permission to return to "Germany" - in this case the large region surrounding Berlin which since May 1945 had been administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

[1] In Ivanovo she was rearrested in October 1949 and deported to the Omsk region where she was set to work on a collective farm[5] and lived with the Götting family, surviving members of the Volga German community.

[1] Meanwhile Rudolf Rocker, who by this time had lived in the United States for many years, launched an international campaign for her release:[4] In the end she was allowed to return to her work at the orphanage in Ivanovo only after the death, early in 1953, of Joseph Stalin.

[1][10] In July 1956 a solemn ceremony took place in which 94,000 micro-filmed pages of the Erich Mühsam literary archive were handed over from the Maxim Gorky Institute to the (East) Berlin Arts Academy.

In 1958 at the East Berlin "Club of the Creatives" ("Klub der Kulturschaffenden") an event was organised to celebrate, had he lived for longer, what would have been Erich Mühsam's eightieth birthday.