Ludwig Rubiner

Ludwig Rubiner (12 June 1881 – 27 February 1920) was a German poet, literary critic and essayist, generally seen as a representative of the expressionist movement that originated in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. His most important works include a manifesto entitled, "Der Dichter greift in die Politik" ("The poet engages in politics", 1912) and a stage-drama, "Die Gewaltlosen" ("Men of non-violence", 1919), which he dedicated to "dem Kameraden, meiner Frau Frida" (loosely, "My comrade wife Frida"). His "Kriminalsonetten" have even led to his being seen by some as a prophet of Dadaism. Sources may also identify him by his literary pseudonym as Ernst Ludwig Grombeck. Ludwig Rubiner was born in Berlin. Wilhelm Rubiner, his father, was a journalist and popular novelist who had migrated from Galicia, which at that time was a crown land of Austria-Hungary. His mother's name is not known. Although his family provenance was Ashkenazi Jewish, Ludwig Rubiner attended a Protestant secondary school in Berlin. Then, on 10 October 1902, he enrolled at Berlin University to study Medicine. After a term he switched to the Philosophy faculty, where he remained a student till 1906, studying Music, Art History, Philosophy and Literature. During his university years he was a member of the "Berliner Freien Studentenschaft", participating in the organisation's literary activities, delivering lectures on radical authors such as Tolstoy, Strindberg and Wedekind while also involving himself in theatrical productions. Impatient with the "petty bourgeois" manifestations of university life, Rubiner found himself drawn towards Berlin's avant-garde society. He developed as taste for mysticism and the anarchist philosophy associated with Max Stirner. In the circles in which he mixed Friedrich Nietzsche was hugely fashionable at this time, but Rubiner was content to dismiss Nietzsche's world-view as "nur farbige Sentimentalität" ("flowery sentimentality"), while Stirner's 1845 book, "The Ego and Its Own" he eulogised as "dem bedeutendste Manifest des Jahrhunderts" ("the most significant manifesto of the [nineteenth] century").