That Gustav Landauer is remembered by many primarily for the circumstances surrounding his death in the Bavarian revolution of 1918-19 does little justice either to the richness and originality of his thought, or to the sheer multifariousness of his achievements. A committed activist and political theorist par excellence, Landauer was also an accomplished journalist, playwright, essayist, lecturer, theatre critic, gérant of the anarchist periodical Der Sozialist, and a prolific translator, notable for his German editions of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Walt Whitman.
Born in Karlsruhe on April 7th 1870 into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family, Landauer excelled academically from a young age, developing a keen interest in particular in literature, theatre and the arts. After attending university in Heidelberg, Berlin and Strasbourg, where his burgeoning antiauthoritarian disposition was shaped by the art...
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Citation: Horrox, James. "Gustav Landauer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 August 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13004, accessed 09 June 2026.]
