This book examines the transatlantic connections of the German anarchist movement between 1878 and 1914. 

Connecting three “nodal cities”—London, New York City, and Berlin—Transatlantic German Anarchism links strategic German anarchist hubs and charts the ideological, cultural, and financial continuity that was essential for the movement’s survival. Building upon the transnational turn in anarchist studies, the book breaks with the methodological nationalism of previous studies on German anarchism under which political exile groups were considered peripheral and inconsequential. Instead, based on hitherto neglected German-language anarchist newspapers as well as the surveillance files of Berlin’s Political Police, it reveals German anarchists’ patterns of transatlantic mobility and their small but active communities in centers of revolutionary exile. It shows how these émigré communities provided vital continuity to a suppressed movement.

Demonstrating how German anarchists abroad strategically combined their radical resistance culture with German cultural elements to grow, maintain, and reinforce a movement amongst the wider German immigrant circles, the book’s transnational perspective shows that German anarchism was able to mature into a serious and well-connected movement in the relative safety of exile.