Gregor Gog, King of the vagabonds: "General strike for a lifetime"

On Christmas Eve 1933 two men run through the frosty night - behind them Nazi Germany, before them the saving Switzerland, among them the brittle ice of Lake Constance. They risk their lives because the lake is only partially frozen. But staying in Germany would be even riskier. One of the men is Gregor Gog, then famous as the "King of the Rovers".

At the age of 19, Gog first set out on a hike to escape the "muckrigen, miekrigen custody" of his home in the province of Poznan. Gog hired as a sailor in 1910 and toured India, Japan and the South Seas islands. During this time, Gog also visited sailing circles organized by sailors and got to know the anarchist writings of Leo Tolstoy, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.

In the First World War Gog was assigned as a gunner on the "SMS Fuchs" - and the anarchist theory was the first practice: Gog deliberately shot wrong, mutinied several times, hurled his superior a boot in the face.

After spending several months in custody and participating in the November Revolution in 1918, he founded the "Commune on the Green Path" in Bad Urach, south of Stuttgart, with like-minded anarchists. The communards cultivated potatoes and beans, bathed naked in the river and held political discussions. Much to the annoyance of the villagers, who soon scolded about the "red angle" and "small Moscow".

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Gog, describing his contemporaries as empathetic, mischievous, sometimes self-righteous, scolded him: "Germany is the classic land of the petty bourgeois and philistine." He who governs the country is indifferent to him unless he is disturbed in his business and digestion. Shabby and characterless as he is, he always stands 'on the ground of the facts', may also perish the world. " The guests of the municipality included the writer Erich Mühsam and the later GDR culture minister Johannes R. Becher, who cured his morphine addiction there.

Gog worked as an unskilled worker in the Stuttgart forest and kept on traveling: in the mid-twenties around 70,000 vagabonds tapped the country roads through Germany. By 1933, the number had risen to half a million, most of whom lived on "fencing" (begging) and hired themselves as day laborers. The conservative bourgeoisie reacted in panic at the "light-shattering plague" and the "work-shy Gesindels" and harassed the already distressed people with raids, workhouses and blows.

Vagabonds "to educate the revolutionary"

In this climate Gregor Gog founded in 1927 the "Brotherhood of the vagabonds". She did not want to infiltrate the state but infiltrated or ousted the state. "Only when this hollow, stupid, deadly world is broken, only when the 'hostel for all' is realized here on earth," wrote Gog, "only then is our mission fulfilled! Well, what we are building is a new one World!" Gog organized vagabond art exhibitions, mediated sleeping arrangements and assignments to the unemployed nationwide.

Also in 1927 Gog was editor-in-chief of the new magazine "Der Kunde". The first street newspaper in Europe appeared "in casual succession" about four times a year with about 1,000 copies. Because it was also available in pubs and thermal rooms, the readership was much larger. It has published tips for street life, political essays, travelogues, poetry, and many drawings. The tome cost 30 pennies, but "customers on the road pay nothing".

The name derives from the Rotwelschen designation "customer"; This was the term used at that time for traveling craftsmen and beggars who were "knowledgeable" through their accumulated experience. Gog's purpose was to encourage the street paper to "rouse thoughtless, cowardly customers without a backbone, to tear them out of the bourgeois sphere in which they are still so profound, to educate them as revolutionaries, to fighters, to help them, in themselves the citizen to overcome". The bourgeois press reported indignantly and called Gog the "king of the vagabonds".

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Bea Davies, Patrick Late
The King of the Rovers: Gregor Gog and his brotherhood

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160

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At the end of 1928, a leaflet caused quite a stir throughout Germany: the Brotherhood drummed up the Tippel brothers and sisters to the "First International Vagabond Congress" on Pentecost 1929 in Stuttgart. Shortly before the police started building roadblocks around the city, scores of vagrants were raided and arrested. The population was so intimidated in the run-up that padlocks were sold out all over Stuttgart.

Despite all the harassment, about 600 participants met from 21 to 23 May 1929 in the Freethinker Garden on Stuttgart's Killesberg. Gog's opening speech was one of the highlights of the vagabond movement:

"The customer, more revolutionary than a fighter, has made the full decision: a general strike for life!" Lifelong General Strike! Only by means of such a general strike is it possible to make the capitalist, Christian imperial society fall to shaky, tottering! know of the mischief of the work at this time - we are consciously 'lazy'! Yes, we vagrants call our blazing way-word into the time: dearer we dare to support than this world even longer! The state falls with the church the spiritual night-house, the night of darkness, which veils the fact that behind this world is another.All suffering comes from artificially created borders that exist only on paper.Well then: we know neither borders of the nation nor of the people, our will is to lift the borders! "

"These rag bundles wrinkled together with twine"

The writers Maxim Gorki, Sinclair Lewis and Erich Mühsam sent greetings. The press response was enormous and mostly hostile: "Unfortunately, the rubber truncheon for remedy against mental pollution is not allowed," ranted the "Schwäbische Merkur". And the Berlin "BZ at noon" wrote: "This elegant, well-maintained city was not particularly delighted by the idea that thousands of cracked bacon hunters, this bundled bundles of rags wallpaper Stuttgart's clean streets and scare away the wealthy strangers." Gog responded to the hostility in a combative manner: "If the authorities had previously disturbed us, we are now worrying the authorities."

Four years later, the Nazis smashed the fraternity of the vagabonds, deporting many clients as "anti-social folk pests and ballast extermination" into KZs and murdering them. "The highway lost itself in the jungle of fascist barbarism, and the German bourgeoisie has always wanted that for us," Gog noted bitterly in his diary.

The once-convinced anarchist joined the communist KPD in 1930 "to turn the vagabonds into a reserve army of the fighting proletariat." Gog saw in the KPD the only political force that could stop the Nazis. But many freedom-loving vagabonds rejected both political camps and turned their backs on the Brotherhood.

In April 1933, Gog was deported to the Heuberg concentration camp and tortured there for months. Under circumstances that were not completely clarified, he managed to escape from the concentration camp. Together with his assistant he reached Switzerland after crossing Lake Constance, but was expelled in June 1934 because of his political views of the country.

Finally, Gog was granted asylum in the Soviet Union. There the convinced Communist was obliged by his comrades to the war work service - despite heavy illness and malnutrition. Completely exhausted, Gog died on 7 October 1945 and was buried in the communist cemetery in the Uzbek capital Tashkent.