Landau, Leo

Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin on April 6, 1878 . While his brother Hans became a physician and his sister Charlotte married Leo Landau, a lawyer, Erich chose a different path and became an anarchist author, poet, and publisher. He was imprisoned from 1917-1918 for refusing military service, and from 1919-1924 for his role in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.

Muehsam published many anarchist books, plays, and periodicals. He was also successful as a writer and performer in cabarets. An early critic of the Nazi regime, in 1934 he was arrested and sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp, where he was murdered on July 10, 1934 . After the death of her husband, Kreszentia (Zenzl) Muehsam fled first to Prague and later to Moscow, on the invitation of the Internationale Rote Hilfe (International Red Aid). Imprisoned in 1938, she was eventually sent to Siberia and released in 1955. She then settled in East Berlin, where she died in 1962.