Reitzel, Robert

REITZEL, ROBERT (1848–1898). Perhaps the most prestigious German American literary stylist of his age, Robert Reitzel was editor of Der arme Teufel (1884–1902), a German-language weekly devoted to culture, politics, and critique of religion that sympathized with anarchism. Reitzel became well known because of his campaign to save the lives of the Haymarket anarchists and for his fiery speech at their graveside.

Reitzel was born in the German revolutionary year, and his democratically inclined mother named him after the murdered “Forty-Eighter” revolutionary Robert Blum. Forced by his conservative father to study theology, the twenty-year-old Reitzel refused and found himself sent penniless to America. He wandered around begging and half-starved until a German minister took him in and gave him a place with a German church in Washington. Awakened by his readings of early socialist philosophy critical of religion, he quarreled with the church synod, founded a “free-thought congregation,” and became an atheist, socialist, and soon a popular speaker among the German-speaking American Left. The halls were full when the charismatic Reitzel attacked religious fanaticism, Puritanism, militarism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. As an advocate of free love and equality of the sexes, he foreshadowed the revolutionary sexual emancipation movements of the twentieth century, and he was also an early advocate of homosexual rights. This cultural revolutionary was a friend of the anarchists Johann Most, Benjamin Tucker, John Henry Mackay, and Alexander Berkman. He thought highest of Emma Goldman, who for her part was fascinated by his bohemian personality. Politically, Reitzel tended toward the social wing of anarchism, and his moral critique connected him to the individualistic anarchists, though he claimed independence from all political groups. He held a lifelong admiration for political assassins. For him, they were slayers of tyrants after the manner of German classicism, like Schiller’s William Tell.

In the 1890s, Reitzel’s Der arme Teufel became an influential forum for European culture. On a trip to Europe, he met the German naturalists whose group, called “the young ones,” had been expelled from the Social Democratic Party and who had gone over to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the overman. Reitzel imported Nietzsche’s Zarathustra cult into the United States, but he also gave space to critics of irrationalism. He died of tuberculosis of the bone, the illness that killed his favorite writer, Heinrich Heine.

Heider, Ulrike. Der arme Teufel: Robert Reitzel. Vom Vormärz zum Haymarket. Bühl-Moos: Elster Verlag, 1986.