BOCK, Hans Manfred.

Anarchosyndicalism in the German Labour Movement: a Rediscovered

Minority Tradition. In: LINDEN, Marcer van der; THORPE, Wayne. Revolutionary Syndicalism:
An International Perspective. Aldershot; Brookfield: Scolar Press; Gower Publishing Group, 1990.
p. 59–79.

“Before the socialist unions went through the centralizing process during the (p. 59) 1880s and
1890s, alliances of workers drawn from different trades and represented in locally-based democratic
assemblies constituted the normal form of organization of workers’ associations in Germany. This
union tradition embodied certain quasi-syndicalist characteristics: structures of direct workers’
representation and democratic decision-making, locally and vocationally limited forms of
organization, and cooperative goals”. (p. 59-60)

“The main reason for maintaining the existing local form of workers’ organization lay in the laws of
association, which until 1900 prohibited centrally organized associations from engaging in political
activity. The localists attached the highest importance to being militant social democrats; they
considered themselves to be the avant-garde of German social democracy”. (p. 60) – Inicialmente,
se distanciaram do sindicalismo revolucionário justamente pelo apoio ao SPD.

“After five years of open conflict with the rapidly expanding centralized trade unions, the
locally organized unions founded their own umbrella organization at Halle in May 1987,
which in 1901 adopted the name Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften (FVdG — Free
Association of German Unions). The largest localist organizations came from the building trades.
Masons, carpenters and potters made up nearly half of the delegates at the founding congress in
1897. […] Accordingly, the most important representatives and leaders of the FVdG came from
the building trades. The best-known localist organizer, Gustav Kessler (1832-1904), was a
former government building trade master. His successor, Fritz Kater (1861-1945), originally a
radical social democrat like Kessler, was a skilled mason who in 1903 took on the leadership of the
FVdG. The highest body of the FVdG was the five-member Business Commission,
headquartered in Berlin, which ensured a necessary minimum of communication among the
local organizations. Towards this goal, it published the association newspaper, Die Einigkeit,
from 1897 up to the outbreak of war in August 1914, with a printing of 2650 in 1897 and 12 800
in 1907. The FVdG's capacity for agitation was increased after September 1911 by the
publication, also in Berlin, of the ‘social revolutionary organ', Der Pionier (1912 edition: 4500
copies), and by the newspaper Der Kampf, published in Hamburg between 1912 and 1914. The
strongest regions of recruitment for the FVdG were the industrial area of central Germany (Halle)
and […] in the Ruhr area”. (p. 60)

“Several related factors explain the rapid marginalization of the localist unions: for example, the
much more effective strike support, self-help, and protection possibilities of the centrally organized
unions; the overestimation of the capacity for self-organization and militancy of unions organized and
agitating locally; the increasing tendency in the new century towards collective bargaining through
trade associations instead of direct settlements between capital and labour in the plants; and certainly
also the FVdG's long-lasting loyalty to social democracy, which prevented it from becoming a clear-
cut alternative to the large, established labour organizations”. (p. 61)

“In the beginning the FVdG conceived of itself as the avant-garde of social democracy in the union
movement. A phase of antiparliamentary, general strike agitation followed after 1904, and in 1908 a
formal break with the SPD finally came, along with an increasing programmatic approximation to
the example of revolutionary syndicalism, particularly in its French version”. (p. 61)

“ During this phase the SPD kept out of the rivalry between the centralist and localist unions, but
considered it necessary in 1903 to mediate between them in Berlin. On the one hand, the great
charismatic, unifying figure of the SPD, August Bebel, and other party leaders, (p. 61) called on
the FVdG to fuse with the centralized Freien Gewerkschaften; on the other the localists won
sympathy from the radical wing in the party. Between 1904 and 1908 the differences between the
General Commission of the Freien Gewerkschaften and the FVdG reached a critical point,
particularly in the debate on the mass strike in the German labour movement. In 1904 the FVdG
embraced the general strike theory of Raphael Friedeberg (1863-1940), a social democratic
medical doctor who had become an antiparliamentarian and who had made contact with the
localists in 1903. By adopting this antiparliamentary general strike agitation, the FVdG extended
its rejection of the representative system of delegation and decision making from union life to
the political system”. (p. 61-62)

“The FVdG's April 1906 congress adopted a new programme supporting all endeavours that
acknowledged socialism and defending the idea of mass strikes, including the general strike.
Conflicts between the social democrats and the FVdG multiplied between 1904 and 1908 for
various reasons, among them Friedeberg's anarchosocialist influence in the FVdG, the
organization's occasional refusal to support SPD candidates in Reichstag elections, and its
disclosure of secret agreements between leaders of the SPD and the Freien Gewerkschaften to
avoid mass strikes. After the 1906 SPD party convention questioned the compatibility of
simultaneous membership in the FVdG and the SPD, the January 1908 congress of the localists put
the absorption of their organization by the centralized Freien Gewerkschaften to a vote. About a third
of the 18 000 members switched to the centralized unions. At the congress, the leader of the FVdG,
Kater, who had that year left the SPD after 20 years of membership, portrayed French revolutionary
syndicalist methods of class struggle as an example for the FVdG, although he rejected
'syndicalist' as a political label for the organization. The break with the SPD did not yet mean a
drawing together of the FVdG and the German anarchists, loosely linked since 1903 in the
Anarchistische Föderation Deutschlands, prior to the War”. (p. 62)

“Although the FVdG press, like that of the Anarchistische Federation, was banned in August
1914, its flexible structure saved the FVdG from being completely destroyed during the
War. The Business Commission's internal circular was published until February 1917. Between
1917 and 1919 the FVdG cadres still active, particularly in Berlin and the Ruhr area, were the
organizing basis for the creation of revolutionary syndicalism in Germany. During the same years
the potential for a radical opposition developed within the labour movement. Fuelled by
criticism of the unaccountability of union leaders, (p. 62) of their acquiescence to national war
policies, of their containment of the revolutionary stirrings after the November 1918 revolution, this
potential provided a social basis for the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a mass
movement in the immediate postwar period”. (p. 62-63)

“The revolutionary syndicalist movement combined the traditions and remnants of the FVdG, the
radical opposition in the unions, and additional social forces that were mobilized in the political
and civil upheaval between 1917 and 1919. It reached its peak as a mass movement in 1919-
1920, when revolutionary syndicalism had already lost its importance in other countries, such as
France. It found its permanent organizational framework in the Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands
(Anarcho-Syndikalisten) (FAUD — Free Labour Union of Germany (Anarchosyndicalists)) from late
1919 until 1933. […] It declined during the transition from the revolutionary period to the period
of Weimar stability after 1924, shrinking from a mass organization to a sect. And yet it stabilized
itself up to the economic crash of 1929 at a level higher in every respect than that of the FVdG
before 1914. With its prevailing communist-anarchist outlook, its considerable potential for
agitation, and the enduring effects on its members of political and cultural socialization, the FAUD
remained relatively the strongest element within the antiauthoritarian camp of the Weimar Republic.
After 1933, moreover, the remaining FAUD supporters proved their qualities by their opposition to
national socialism in Germany and by their activities in the Spanish Civil War and in
emigration”. (p. 63)

“The Weimar Republic witnessed a rather new phenomenon in German political culture: the
formation of a relatively widespread antiauthoritarian movement. Workers radicalized by their
opposition to wartime and postwar policies of the Freien Gewerkschaften, and forces newly
politicized in the revolutionary upheaval at war's end, came together in the antiauthoritarian
camp. Along with the refounded Anarchistische Foderation, renamed in June 1914 the Foderation
der Kommunistischen Anarchisten (FKAD — Federation of Communist Anarchists of Germany),
this camp included the newly formed FAUD, and the Allgemeine Arbeiter Unionen (General
Workers' Unions). […] On the levels of personnel, ideology and organization, there were open
borders and fluid crossings and interactions between the three components of the antiauthoritarian
camp, made up of the anarchist, the anarchosyndicalist and the unionist tendencies. (p. 63)
Their common denominators were antiauthoritarianism, antiparliamentarism, antimilitarism,
and their rejection of political parties; their conflicts arose mainly over organizational competition
and personal rivalry between the leaders”. (p. 63-64)

“Those workers who broke with the Freien Gewerkschaften because of their wartime policy and
their collusion with the capitalists after the War, or those for whom membership in a reformist
union was beyond consideration […] joined the revolutionary labour organizations that were
springing up everywhere. Among them, the FVdG had an advantage in recruiting the radicalized
workers because it already had at its disposal established organizers, a relatively clear programme
for action, and an interregional network of contacts. In September 1919 in the Ruhr area, after
the great miners' strikes of the previous Spring, the FVdG became the radical alternative and the
most prominent force supporting the organization of a regional Freie Arbeiter-Union
Syndikalisten' (FAU — Free Workers Union (Syndicalists)). The Freie Arbeiter-Union
Deutschlands (Syndikalisten) (FAUD — Free Workers Union of Germany (Syndicalists)), was
founded on that model as a national organization in December 1919 in Berlin. On the eve of
1920 all three components of the antiauthoritarian camp still participated in the foundation of
the FAUD. With the foundation of the FAU in the Ruhr area, the FVdG expressly adopted
syndicalism for the first time in its new name, thereby completing the last step of its long process
of identification with the French version of revolutionary syndicalism. The anarchists returning
to Germany in 1919 from years of emigration, such as Rudolf Rocker and Augustin Souchy,
who initially also had close contacts with the FKAD, contributed substantially to the FVdG's final
embrace of syndicalism. In 1919 the FKAD declared the best revolutionary organizations to be
those of economic class struggle, such as syndicalist labour organizations. On the other hand,
the foundation of the Rhineland—Westphalian FAU constituted a compromise between the
syndicalist-oriented FVdG, and the revolutionary labour organizations influenced ideologically
and materially by revolutionary industrial unionism on the model of the Industrial Workers of the
World in the USA”. (p. 64)

“From the beginning, the revolutionary industrialist organizations had been closely connected with
the left wing of the KPD, founded at the end of 1918, and they soon went their own way, which
carried them away from the FAUD, although occasional reciprocal connections remained. (p.
64) The revolutionary industrialist organizations appeared under various names and tried in three
national conferences from February to December 1920 to unite in a common confederation, the
Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (AAUD —General Workers Union of Germany)”. (p. 64-
65)

“Founded in February 1920, the AAUD, in whose pre-history the leftwing communist
opposition in the KPD had played an important role, came during 1920 increasingly under
the influence of the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands (KAPD — Communist
Labour Party of Germany), which came about through a split in German communism in April
1920. […] The submission of the AAUD to the tutelage of a Marxist party meant a breach
between the majority in the unionist movement and the FAUD, which rejected on principle not only
Marxism but any political party. The KAPD and its revolutionary unionist supporters were barred
from the Communist International in 1921, remained detached from the world communist
movement and isolated in the antiauthoritarian camp, splintered in 1922, and led a marginal
existence until 1933. But already in October 1921 a part of the unionist movement had rejected the
role of the KAPD, or any political party, as the guiding light of revolution. This branch of the
unionist movement established an independent existence as the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union
Einheitsorganisation (AAUE — General Labour Union Unity Organization)”. (p. 65)

“The contacts between the AAUE and the FAUD were never wholly severed; AAUE
representatives, for example, participated regularly as guests at the congresses of the FAUD”.
(p. 65-66)

“[…] most FKAD supporters also worked with the FAUD. Not ideological differences but
personal animosities and excessive group pride prompted the FKAD leaders, from March
1923, to distance themselves from the FAUD. In 1924, a mainly Berlin-based dissenting group
broke with these policies. It established itself as the Anarchistische Vereinigung (Anarchist Alliance)in
1927, with the energetic support of the poet and anarchist intellectual, Erich Mi_ihsam (1878-1934).
It remained in close contact with the FAUD”. (p. 66)

“The FAUD […] did not escape the tendency to internal fragmentation. From 1920 it lost
members to independent unionism, and was subject in 1923-1924, like the AAUD and the
AAUE, to measures of state repression. […] Of the antiauthoritarian organizations the FAUD
retained the strongest power of attraction, which radiated out into the AAUE and the anarchist
movement. From the beginning of 1925 efforts were made to build up `antiauthoritarian blocs,'
which were meant to bring members of the FAUD, the AAUE and FKAD together. These attempts
were at first successful at the local level (Frankfurt/Main, Hagen, Hamburg, Berlin), but scepticism
prevailed among the leaders of the various organizations. Those active in the blocs found it
easiest to cooperate in antimilitarist and antireligious agitation”. (p. 66)

“In addition to participation in the antiauthoritarian blocs and the entry of part of the AAUE into
the FAUD, the links between the AAUE groups and the anarchosyndicalist organization
remained numerous and varied. (p. 66) An example is the approach made in 1925 by the Freie
Jugend, one of two anarchosyndicalist youth organizations, to AAUE theorist Otto Ruhle. […]
Another AAUE splinter group from the central German industrial area, known as Proletarischer
Zeitgeist after a periodical that had been appearing since 1922, most closely approximated the
communist anarchism also advocated by the FAUD. But in its quest for 'the antiauthoritarian
organization' and 'libertarian socialism', it remained critically aloof from both the FAUD and the
FKAD. Mutual interaction and convergence also occurred between the FAUD and the
Anarchistische Vereinigung at the end of the 1920s in Berlin. After his release from imprisonment
for his leading role in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of April 1919, Erich Mahsam became an
advocate of unity of action between all revolutionary organizations from the KPD to the FKAD.
While the FKAD increasingly and ever more dogmatically cut itself off from syndicalism after
1925, the cooperation of the FAUD and the Anarchistische Vereinigung in matters of publication
and agitation grew very close, and the Vereinigung became the tactically most flexible part of
organized anarchism in Germany”. (p. 66-67)

“After the First World War the traditional organization of German revolutionary syndicalism, the
FVdG, found among socially and regionally diverse groups a new and extensive resonance. The
Ruhr replaced Berlin as the most important area of recruitment and the metalworkers and
miners displaced the building trade workers as the dominant socioprofessional groups. Berlin
remained the seat of the Business Commission and the centre of revolutionary syndicalist
agitation. But as the FVdG membership in the Ruhr area grew during 1919, antagonism also
grew between Dusseldorf and Berlin”. (p. 67)

“The FVdG/FAUD became a mass organization in the revolutionary years as a result of the
influx of metalworkers and miners in the Ruhr area. (p. 68) The strongest factor encouraging
entry into the FVdG of both organized and unorganized workers was widespread criticism of
the policy of foregoing strikes during the War and of settlements with employers during the
revolutionary postwar years. These policies were regarded as causally linked to the bureaucratic
autonomy of the Executives of the Freien Gewerkschaften. Denunciation of the collusion between
'the social democratic and centralized union bureaucracies and the capitalists' had been the main
tenet of FVdG propaganda ever since its first postwar congress in December 1918. The congress
recommended federalist organization and direct action tactics as the centrepieces of revolutionary
policy. Such propaganda fell on fertile ground during the period of activism by the Ruhr miners
from December 1918 into the second half of 1919. Fritz Kater, who campaigned through the Ruhr
area in December 1918, noted in August 1919 that the FVdG's membership had grown to 60 000.
At the FAUD's founding congress in December 1919, 47 060 members were represented from
the Ruhr”. (p. 68-69)

“ The FVdG's criticism of centralized, inert bureaucracy provided a plausible interpretation of the
behaviour of the established unions. The FVdG recruited successfully by pointing to its low
administration costs, and therefore low membership dues, and to the local and regional autonomy
encouraged by syndicalist federalism. By endorsing workers' direct action, it provided a
justification for workers' actions in the Ruhr area which generally began spontaneously and
which were more or less violent”. (p. 69)

“The FAUD's Berlin Business Commission looked upon the growth of the organization in the
Ruhr area with mixed feelings, because these newly recruited members had to be considered first
and foremost as disappointed members of the centralist unions and not yet as wholly convinced
syndicalists. The conflicts between the 'keepers of the principles' in Berlin and the newly
recruited syndicalists in the Ruhr area led to a large secession that early threatened the newly
won mass base of the organization. Early in November 1920 the Freie Arbeiter-Union
'Gelsenkirchener Richtung' (Free Labour Union 'Gelsenkirchen Tendency') emerged, incorporating
oppositional miners' associations from central Germany and from Upper Silesia. It initially
claimed 90 000 members in the Ruhr area. (p. 69) In this part of the FAUD advocates of
syndicalism and unionism competed for a time. In 1921 the Gelsenkirchener Richtung fell under
the influence of the KPD and abandoned the antiauthoritarian camp. It alone among German
syndicalist and unionist organizations joined Moscow's Red International of Labour Unions.
Other oppositional tendencies in the Rhineland-Westphalia FAUD, concentrated mainly in
Dtisseldorf, spoke through the newspaper Die Schopfiing from 1921 to 1924. Although its
militants did not suddenly abandon the FAUD, their activities did hasten its disintegration.
Influenced by the FKAD, their anarchist rigidity and local activism sometimes prompted them to
expect too much from their members, which led to a crumbling of the local groups. Their
pronounced opposition to all forms of organization was partially influenced by individualist
anarchist propaganda. […] Accompanying the internal erosion of the FAUD's mass base in the Ruhr
area were the pressures of the French—Belgium occupation of 1923 — the destitution, unemployment
and administrative persecutions — which led to an even greater loss of members. After 1929 there
were barely traces left of FAUD-linked miners, who once constituted its mass base. The
socioprofessional composition of the FAUD membership in that region was back to that of pre-
1914, mainly highly specialized craft workers in the building and textile industries, such as tile
layers and ribbon weavers”. (p. 69-70)
“The exodus of members from the FAUD in the rest of Germany was less severe than in the Ruhr
area”. (p. 70)

“The formal structure of the FAUD, established at its founding congress in December 1919,
closely followed the French example. At the local level an association of all trades was to be
established. If more than 25 members in the association came from the same trade or branch of
industry, they were to found a local union for that trade. (The question whether the FAUD
should be organized by trade or industry was long left open — and Fritz Kater, representing the
FVdG tradition, preferred organization by trade — until industrial organization was finally declared
mandatory in 1927.) All the local branches were to join together horizontally in municipal or
regional workers' exchanges. There were 32 such exchanges at the first national meeting in June
1922, fourteen in the Ruhr area, seven in the mid-German industrial area, and eleven in large cities.
The local unions were to join together vertically in one of twelve industrial federations. Five such
federations were actually established at the national level (miners, metalworkers, building trade
workers, woodworkers, textile and transport workers). This rather complicated organization plan,
which was to provide the foundation both for the current struggle and the future reconstruction
of economy and society, meant permanent educational work. Within this federalist model of
organization local branches were to retain the greatest possible autonomy, and their statutes
were to be adapted to local conditions so long as they did not contradict the FAUD's principles”.
(p. 71)

“This formal structure of FAUD was supplemented by complementary organizations designed to

assure maximum independence in their specific affairs to youth and women. The youth affiliated
with the FAUD were organized in two groups. The Freiefugend(Free Youth) was inspired by Ernst
Friedrich (1894-1967), later an internationally known anarchist antimilitarist. The Freie jugend were
in close contact with the FAUD for only a short time. In mid-1919 they began to produce a
newspaper, Freie Jugend. They placed the revolutionizing of the individual consciousness above
working in an organization, and by 1927 at the latest had lost their contacts outside Berlin. The
Syndikalistisch-Anarchistische Jugend Deutschlands (Syndicalist-Anarchist Youth of Germany) was
founded in mid-1922 as an independent organization. It published a newspaper, lunge
Anarchisten (circulation 2000 4000). Only in 1925 did its members show a strong interest in
maintaining close ties with the FAUD of the adults. Although women were not represented very
strongly in the FAUD, the syndicalists attached great importance to them as organizers of
consumption, a function of their role as housewives. Women's leagues, set up in the FAUD in
1920 to deepen the discussion of the situation of proletarian women, had a national membership of
about 1000 in October 1921, but declined from 1923”. (p. 71)

“Finally, a more demanding commitment by the FAUD, borne by its officials in the Berlin Business
Commission, was that to the International Working Men's Association, an international syndicalist
association founded in Berlin in December 1922. (p. 71) […] By 1920 the Business Commission,
under the influence of Rudolf Rocker, was working against the syndicalists' affiliation with
the communist Red International of Labour Unions. That the FAUD leadership took the initiative
in founding the International meant that Berlin became an international meeting point for
foreign anarchists and syndicalists in exile or transit, and secured for the German syndicalists a
leading theoretical role on an international level between the wars”. (p. 72)

“The most important strategic decision during the FVdG's phase of reconstruction after the War
was the recommendation by its national conference in December 1918 that members join the left-
wing parties and adopt the slogan of the revolutionary struggle for the 'Dictatorship of the
Proletariat’. […] They viewed the reconstituted syndicalist organization as a social-
revolutionary union that should stand at the side of the Unabheingigen Sozialdemokratische
Partei Deutschlands (German Independent Social Democratic Party) and the nascent KPD, as
it had once stood at the side of the then still revolutionary SPD”. (p. 72)

“This immediate postwar position was abandoned step by step. The KPD initiated a campaign
against syndicalists within its ranks at its second convention in October 1919. Simultaneously
Rudolf Rocker's anarchosyndicalist programme began to take hold in the FVdG/FAUD. Rocker
(1873-1958), whose theoretical work determined the FAUD's subsequent development, tried
to create a synthesis between communist anarchism and the organizational and tactical
principles of revolutionary syndicalism. (p. 72) His 'Declaration of the Principles of
Syndicalism', adopted almost unanimously at the FAUD's founding congress in December 1919,
remained the most important document in the history of German syndicalism. But the declared
intent of combining within the FAUD the functions of a collective economic organization of class
struggle, and those of a radical cultural organization, in which the heightening of the
individual member's revolutionary consciousness should take precedence, remained an
unsolvable problem in practice. The adoption of Rocker's strategic conception was symbolically
accomplished at the Düsseldorf congress in October 1921 by appending Anarchosyndicalists' to the
FAUD's title. In terms of practical policies, this new identity meant sharper demarcation between
the FAUD and the KPD and the Communist International after 1920, the rejection of the
Bolsheviks' conception of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', and, finally, the FAUD's demand
that its members withdraw from the left-wing parties”. (p. 72-73)

“In keeping with the policies of the FVdG, the FAUD's Business Commission rejected wage scale
bargaining and organized support funds, and it disapproved on principle syndicalist
participation in elections to the factory councils, legal since 1920”. (p. 73)

“In contrast to other labour organizations, the FAUD had a notably intense effect of political and
cultural socialization on its members. A core group of convinced anarchosyndicalists
crystallized, in socioeconomic composition almost without exception, workers, whose
numbers Rocker's private correspondence several times put as between 2000 and 3000. They were
responsible for the remarkably large number of FAUD periodicals, no less than 71 of which have
been identified on the national and regional level. They were the initiators of regional and local
agitation and direct action, and even in the years of the FAUD's organizational decline they
remained the thoroughly committed, solid core of German anarchosyndicalism, (p. 74) whose
inner cohesion grew as their isolation at the local level mounted. The publishing house brought
into the FAUD by Fritz Kater and named after the union's obligatory newspaper, Der
Syndikalist',produced a variety of pamphlets and books of significant quality and quantity on
political and cultural topics. […] During and especially after their active years with and for the
FAUD, which came to an end in 1933, Nettlau, Rocker and Souchy were translated into Spanish
and other languages and their writings became international classics of interwar anarchism. Between
1925 and 1933, when the first three volumes of Nettlau's Geschichte derAnarchie appeared, the
FAUD strengthened its day-to-day activities against cultural reaction in Germany. To accomplish
these goals the FAUD worked from 1928 with the Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker
(Community of Proletarian Freethinkers), and with the libertarian children's groups influenced by
the Gemeinschaft. The FAUD sought likewise to increase its publicly-directed cultural activities
by founding the Gilde freiheitlicherThichelfreunde (Guild of Libertarian Friends of Books) in 1929,
only about half of whose members were also FAUD members”. (p. 74-75)

“The degree of the anarchosyndicalist core group's conviction was demonstrated after the
destruction of their organization in 1933. FAUD members formed resistance groups, particularly
in the Ruhr area but also in others, smuggled illegal periodicals and brochures mainly from The
Netherlands into national—socialist Germany, and distributed them at great personal risk. As late as
1938, 88 anarchosyndicalists were arraigned in a Ruhr area court for ‘acts preparatory to the
commission of high treason’. Up to 1940 activists organized escapes of threatened
antiauthoritarians over the German-Dutch border. In Amsterdam exiles founded a central office of
the Deutsche Anarcho-Syndikalisten (German Anarchosyndicalists). After the Spanish Civil War
broke out in 1936, the close contact built up over the years between the FAUD and the
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo resulted in a reunion, also under the name Deutsche
Anarcho-Syndikialisten, of numerous German anarchosyndicalists who had emigrated to Spain”.
(p. 75)

“Some anarchosyndicalists who returned from emigration, or survived the

concentration camps and prisons of Hitler's Germany, (p. 75) united once again in the
Föderation Freiheitlicher Sozialisten (Federation of Libertarian Socialists) in 1947, and published
Die Freie Gesellschaft from 1949 to 1953. The most important attempt to reintegrate the remnants of
the anarchosyndicalist tradition, this effort failed in the mid-1950s. The continuity of the
anarchosyndicalist movement in the Federal Republic of Germany was interrupted for almost 20
years, while corresponding attempts to reconstitute the movement in the early years of the
German Democratic Republic were crushed by a wave of arrests. An antiauthoritarian movement of
a new generation came into being in the Federal Republic during the students' revolt of the late
1960s. Their interest in the history of anarchism and of revolutionary syndicalism was selective
and predominantly theoretical. […] The student movement brought about a rediscovery of
the writings of the interwar antiauthoritarian camp, as well as a public debate in the period
bridging the 1960s and 1970s about anarchism, an effort in part to stigmatize the students in
revolt. […] The 1970s, in the wake of students' revolt, saw numerous undertakings by new local
anarchist organizations, for which Otto Reimers (1902-1984) and Augustin Souchy served as living
links to the antiauthoritarian camp between the wars. Initiated mainly by the young, the anarchist
organizations and communication centres remained for the most part ephemeral phenomena.
Among the most stable, relatively speaking, are the Freie Arbeiter Union (Free Labour Union),
which was refounded in 1977 and which supports the syndicalist International, and the Forum
Libertare Information, which took up the history of anarchosyndicalism in Germany among
other things in the magazine, Schwarzer Faden. Although difficult to quantify at present, these
attempts to revive the anarchosyndicalist movement in West Germany have had a not
insignificant resonance in the political culture and public discussions of such new social movements
as the alternative movement, the women's movement, the ecology movement and the peace
movement”. (p. 75-76)