Collectors: Rudolph Rocker
As a young man Rudolph Rocker (Mainz 1873 - New York 1958) travelled in Europe as journeyman bookbinder. During his trips he met several socialists and anarchists. Back home he joined the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) but soon left the party being uneasy about its dogmatism and intolerance towards dissenting opninions. Rocker turned to the anarchist movement and would become one of the leading theoreticians of the anarchosyndicalist movement.
In 1892 Rocker fled the country to escape imprisonement because of his political activities. He went to Paris where he met Elisée Reclus who at that time started to adhere the anarchist movement. When anarchists started to be chased in France he fled again and went to London. In 1895 he settled in the Jewish immigrant quarter in the East End in London.
Inspired by the lively Jewish anarchist movement he found in the East End Rocker, though being a Gentile, learned Yiddish and became the editor of the Yiddish communist-anarchist weekly Der Arbeyter Fraynd (The Workers Friend). He joined the Jewish anarchist movement and held countless speaches for their meetings. In a Jewish anarchist circle he met his life-long partner Milly Witkop. Peter Kropotkin became one of his close friends
At the outbreak of the First World War Rocker was considered a hostile foreigner and sent to a internment camp. Family, friends and sympathising British MP's fought for his release. Ten months before the end of the war Holland granted him asylum.
After the war Rocker went back to Germany. He was one of the founders of the Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (FAUD) and wrote for its journal Der Syndikalist. He wrote a biography of John Most and his memoirs of the period in the internment camp.
In 1933 Rudolph and Milly fled Germany. Rockers valuable library containing about 5000 books was burnt by the Nazis. After a long journey the couple ended up in the USA. Rocker wrote a large number of articles and books - amongst others his memoirs - and held lecture tours. When Milly died in 1955 Rudolph spend a lot of time with his son Fermin in New York where he died in 1958.
In the periode from 1960 till 1993 Rockers son Fermin donated the IISH his fathers archive containing correspondence between Rocker and his wife Milly Witkop-Rocker, written during his internment in England 1914-1918, and extensive correspondence with leading figures in the international anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. Further, there are manuscripts of his memoirs, of Nationalism and Culture, and Anarcho-syndicalism and many other manuscripts and correspondence of third parties. Finally there are also documents concerning the Internationalen Arbeiter-Assoziation (IAA), Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (FAI) and other documents on the Spanish Civil War.
The archive measures 4.2 metres and is indexed.
Finding Aid: Inventory
The inventory was published as IISH Working Paper no. 39:
Elly Koen and Tiny de Boer, Inventar des Nachlasses von Rudolph Rocker (1873-1958) (Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG 1998).
The archive of Rudolph Rocker is microfilmed by IDC Publishers.