Edgar Bauer

Early life

Edgar Bauer was born on 7 October 1820 in Charlottenburg. He came from a Thuringian family.^[1] His father F. G. Ch. Bauer was a porcelain painter in Eisenberg.^[1][2] In 1815, his father was appointed to Charlottenburg, where he served as director of an expanded painting workshop he had established, remaining in that post until his death in 1853.^[1]

Bauer's mother was Eleonore Karoline Wilhelmine Reichardt, whom Bauer's father married on 7 February 1809 after the early death of her sister Juliane Louise Reichardt (his first wife, married 22 October 1804 in Altenburg). Together they had four sons, of whom Edgar was the youngest.^[1] Around 1841, his mother read journal reviews and author sketches and closely followed David Strauss's life and work, including the reception of his Dogmatik. The Bauer family belonged to the German middle class.^[3]

Young Hegelianism and radical politics

Bauer studied jurisprudence and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he joined the Young Hegelian circle around his brother Bruno Bauer. Other members of this circle included Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx, Max Stirner, Friedrich Engels, Georg Herwegh, Karl Grün, Moses Hess and Mikhail Bakunin. He was particularly close to Engels at that time. Bauer became a regular contributor to a range of philosophical and political publications, and he developed a strongly revolutionary political outlook.

After Bruno Bauer was dismissed from his academic position because of his atheism, Edgar Bauer regarded an academic career as closed to him, given his brother's reputation and his own growing profile as a radical publicist. In 1842 he abandoned his studies and became a freelance writer and journalist. He contributed to the liberal Rheinische Zeitung, among other publications.^{[citation needed]}

Trial and imprisonment

In 1843 Bauer published Critique's Quarrel with Church and State, a work described as the first sustained theoretical defense of terrorist tactics for political and social ends. The book appeared on 7 August 1843, but the Berlin police confiscated what they believed to be the entire edition that same night. On 23 October 1843, Bauer was indicted for publishing without submitting the book to the royal censor. His trial ran from November 1843 to February 1844.^[4]

In September 1844 he was sentenced to three years of minimum-security confinement. Bauer had meanwhile smuggled a single copy to Switzerland, enabling the radical publisher Friedrich Jenni to issue a second edition. When copies reappeared in Berlin in mid-1844, Bauer was rearrested and retried, and in spring 1845 his sentence was extended to four years. He began serving his term at the fortress of Magdeburg on 9 May 1845.^[4]

While he was in prison, his former associates Marx and Engels published a polemical critique of him and his brother Bruno, The Holy Family (1844). They continued this critique in The German Ideology (1846), which was not published at the time. Despite this, Edgar Bauer appears to have remained on friendly terms with Marx and Engels.^{[citation needed]}

Revolution of 1848

Following Prussia's general amnesty for political prisoners of 18 March 1848, Bauer returned to Charlottenburg and Berlin in April, where he participated in the Revolution of 1848. Berlin's political situation had changed radically since his imprisonment. On 23 March, Berlin radicals had taken the initiative in founding the Political Club, in which Young Hegelians also gathered, under the chairmanship of the Cologne jurist and Young Hegelian Georg Jung [de]. Bauer joined the club soon after his return, and on 16 April 1848 he became a member of the "Volks-Wahlcomité" (People's electoral committee), which was to choose the members of the National Assembly. The Political Club soon became the largest and most influential of the political clubs founded in Berlin in 1848, with more than 1,200 members, and on 21 May it was renamed the Democratic Club. On 27 June, Bauer was elected one of its two vice presidents.^[5]

Within the Democratic Club, Bauer quickly became one of the leaders of its more revolutionary wing. In speeches he criticized the caution of the Frankfurt National Assembly and denounced its election of Archduke John of Austria as imperial regent as a betrayal of the German people. He called for power to rest with the sovereign people rather than a hereditary monarchy, and submitted the text of a petition urging the deputies who had voted against John's election to withdraw from the Assembly and constitute a new representative body on republican principles. These initiatives provoked objections from more cautious members and brought the club close to a split. On 1 July 1848, Bauer announced that the presidium was resigning because it no longer appeared to enjoy the confidence of the club's members. After a sharp debate over political tactics, however, the meeting ended in a complete victory for the presidium, and the club asked the presidium to withdraw its resignation.^[5]

The increasingly revolutionary course of the Democratic Club formed part of the background to the disturbances in Charlottenburg and Berlin in August 1848. On 20 August, participants in a meeting called to found a democratic club in Charlottenburg were attacked by a crowd armed with clubs. According to a report cited by Gamby, some of those attacked fled to the house of Bauer's brother Egbert, where Edgar and Bruno Bauer were dragged into the street and beaten and the house was wrecked. The Berlin Democratic Club responded with a large placard, said to have been written by Edgar Bauer, calling on the public to resist the reaction, and a mass demonstration then marched on the ministers. As the unrest spread, the crowd first forced its way into the interior minister's hotel. Later, after constables tried to disperse the demonstrators, the crowd smashed the windows of the minister president's hotel. On 22 August, the authorities proposed a law against unauthorized popular assemblies and conspiracies, and arrest warrants were issued for the leaders of the demonstration, including Bauer. When police officers came to arrest him on 27 August, he was away from home. During the house search a railway worker who arrived at the apartment identified himself as Edgar Bauer and was arrested, but was quickly exposed when he was brought before the chairman of the Democratic Club.^[6]

Bauer then went underground to avoid arrest. He first went to Vienna, where Gamby suggests that he was in close contact with the revolutionaries then active in the Austrian capital. There he contributed an article, "Aristokraten und Plebejer" (Aristocrats and plebeians), to Hermann Jellinek's Kritischer Sprechsaal (Critical forum). The article attacked the aristocracy and the Catholic Church from a plebeian social standpoint. Bauer remained in Vienna until October 1848. Reports then placed him back in Berlin, though before the police could arrest him he had again disappeared, reportedly for Breslau. In February 1849, Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia, wrote to General Friedrich Graf von Wrangel that Bauer had been under orders of arrest for three months, could not be found, and yet was said still to be visiting public places in Berlin. Despite military occupation, the state of siege, and the dissolution of the National Assembly, the democratic movement in the city remained active. By February 1849, however, Bauer appears to have left Berlin permanently.^[7]

Flight to Hamburg and Altona

After the defeat of the revolution, Bauer left Berlin for Hamburg in February 1849. He lived for a time in the suburb of St. Georg, contributed to the radical Altona newspaper Die Reform (The reform), and established contact with the publisher Hoffmann und Campe, which agreed to publish his new periodical Die Parteien. Politische Revue (The parties. Political review).^[7] The journal was planned as an irregular review, with one issue every four weeks. Bauer wrote its contents himself. It covered political developments in Berlin since 1848, the movement for German unity, and the reaction in France during and after the February Revolution.^[7] Only three issues appeared, the last two as double issues. Gamby argues that the journal shows Bauer still adhering to the programmatic indeterminacy of his earlier writings. In Die Parteien, Bauer treated democracy and socialism as distinct parties and expressed sympathies for both, but regarded neither as the final political form.^[7]

Bauer remained in Hamburg only briefly. By spring 1849 he was working for the Norddeutsche Freie Presse (North German free press) in Altona, founded by the Schleswig-Holstein politician and later German-American Forty-Eighter Theodor Olshausen. It was the largest newspaper in Holstein and a leading radical democratic paper of the Schleswig-Holstein progressive movement.^[7] He began there as a proofreader and joined the editorial staff when a position opened in summer 1849. Bauer later served as editor in chief, which Gamby places in 1850 and 1851, after the paper had begun to decline as the Schleswig-Holstein cause neared defeat in the First Schleswig War and Prussia withdrew its support.^[7] By 1851, Bauer had been won over to the Danish side in the conflict.^[7][4]

Exile in London

In 1851, to avoid arrest, he escaped to Denmark and then to London, where he lived in exile for several years. During this period he often met Karl Marx in London, but their relationship was strained.^[8] According to Eric v.d. Luft, during one argument Bauer struck Marx in the face.^[9]

Amnesty and conservatism

In 1861, an amnesty enabled Bauer to return to Germany. By now thoroughly conservative, he had renounced anarchism, socialism, democracy, atheism and critical philosophy. He settled in Hanover, became a Prussian civil servant and in 1870 founded the conservative periodical Kirchliche Blätter (Church gazette).^{[citation needed]}

Final years and death

Bauer suffered a stroke in 1884 that temporarily left him paralyzed. The paralysis gradually receded, but he never fully recovered and later became fully incapacitated.^[10] At the time, Bauer's son William had emigrated to the United States, worked on the Mississippi railroad, and was seriously ill in Colorado Springs.^[10]

Bauer died in Hanover on 18 August 1886 after a heart attack. His widow sought assistance from George Quaade [da] in selling his library, but Bauer's papers, including letters and diaries, have not been recovered.^[10]