Franz Mehring

Franz Mehring (born February 27, 1846, Schlawe, Pomerania, Prussia [now Sławno, Poland—died January 28, 1919, Berlin, Germany) was a radical journalist, historian of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and biographer of Karl Marx.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

Originally a middle-class democrat, he moved gradually leftward, for a time with the General German Workers’ Union of Ferdinand Lassalle, then (1883–88) at the head of the left-liberal newspaper Berliner Volkszeitung, and finally to his affiliation with the Social Democrats in 1890. Thereafter, he edited the socialist Leipziger Volkszeitung and served on the staff of the party’s official publication, Neue Zeit (“New Age”). In 1914 he joined with his radical left colleagues Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in opposing Germany’s participation in World War I and in 1916 sided with the revolutionary-pacifist Spartacists. His contributions to the historical literature of German socialism included Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemocratie, 4 vol. (1897–98; “History of German Social Democracy”) and Karl Marx: Geschichte seines Lebens (1918; “Karl Marx: A Biography”).