Missratene Söhne

Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam lived according to their own self-designed blueprints of resistance. These countermodels for life were aimed at the bourgeois world their fathers had helped to build (in the so-called Gründerzeit). They viewed rebellion and revolution as a suitable way of life. Carolin Kosuch shows, on the one hand, how these three thinkers from German-Jewish bourgeois families fled from a reality dominated by their fathers to a remote past; on the other hand, she points out how deeply rooted their synchronized efforts were in their common aspiration to overcome modernity. The study provides in-depth insights into the relationship between generational experience and critique of the real world.