From 1982 to 1983 I helped the almost blind anarchist Augustin Souchy to do his mail. He dictated letters to me to famous politicians all over the world, all of whom he knew personally and addressed with a friendly "Du" - and who answered him promptly and just as amicably. At our weekly meetings, he told me about his experiences with many personalities whom I knew either only from books or only from hearsay. That Lenin had picked him up at the Second International in the Czar's Rolls-Royce and tried to convince him on the ride from the hotel to the meeting place that political anarchism was only a petty-bourgeois childhood disease. He associated with August Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg - was friends with Erich Mühsam and Gustav Landauer, Leon Trotsky visited him shortly before he was murdered. Souchy was on the road in all countries of the world and tried, among other things, to convince small farmers to found egalitarian cooperatives on the model of the Spanish Republic. Even at over 90 years of age, he spoke with youthful vigor and enthusiasm about the ideas he pursued throughout his life: That only an anarchist form of society would make peace and prosperity possible for everyone. Only a few weeks before his death I recorded a conversation with him on an old tape recorder, but forgot to release the pause button. Only the second attempt a week later succeeded - but much more stiffly than the first time, as far as I can remember.
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