Zenzl Mühsam

Zenzl Mühsam (born Kreszentia Elfinger; 27 July 1884 – 10 March 1962) was a political activist who was involved, with her husband, Erich Mühsam, in the Munich Soviet ("workers' council") of 1919.

Fifteen years later, after her husband had been murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp near Berlin, she made her way to Moscow, hoping to arrange for the publication of her husband's political writings. Eight months after her arrival, identified as a "Trotskyist spy" she was caught up in the political purges of the late 1930s and first arrested in April 1936. She was unable to leave the Soviet Union for another eighteen years, spending much (though not all) of that time in prisons or labour camps. She survived. Her first job was as a domestic servant, working at the home of a local butcher: she was dismissed after a few months.

During the early 1920s she was organising sewing meetings in support of "Russia Aid" ("Russland-Hilfe"), and she took part in the first congress of Red Aid ("Rote Hilfe"), a left-wing welfare organisation closely linked to the recently founded Communist Party. and to the Comintern in Moscow. It was here that she got to know Elena Stasova, a Russian communist whom one source identifies as "Lenin's former secretary". On 28 April 1923, while her husband was still in prison, Zenzl Mühsam wrote a personal letter to Lenin asking that he arrange for Erich Mühsam to be transferred to Moscow. She even wrote to the papal nuncio, hoping to invoke papal intervention with the authorities. Newly widowed, Zenzl Mühsam turned to friends and comrades for support, notably Meta Kraus-Fessel (although the two quickly fell out).

Keen to preserve both her husband's legacy and her own liberty, she transferred Erich Mühsam's copious collection of papers to a comrade called Ernst Simmerling who was in turn able to pass them to the relatively safe care of his brother in law, Rudolf Rocker, an anarcho-syndicalist who around this time successfully fled to the United States. Zenzl Mühsam herself relocated from Berlin to Dresden, relatively close to the German border with Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia at this stage was still an independent country, and its capital, Prague, was the destination of choice for a large number of political refugees keen to avoid imprisonment or worse in the new Germany.

Her demands for a public investigation into her husband's death did not endear Zenzl Mühsam to the Nazi authorities, and when she was warned by the American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, that she was about to be arrested by the Gestapo, on 15 July 1934 she crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.

In July 1956 a solemn ceremony took place in which 94,000 micro-filmed pages of the Erich Mühsam literary archive were handed over from the Maxim Gorky Institute to the (East) Berlin Arts Academy. Zenzl now launched a campaign to have her husband's output posthumously published in East Germany. In 1958 at the East Berlin "Club of the Creatives" ("Klub der Kulturschaffenden") an event was organised to celebrate, had he lived for longer, what would have been Erich Mühsam's eightieth birthday. Meanwhile the publishers "Volk und Welt" published a (savagely shortened) selection from his poetry.