Margarethe Hardegger: Anarchy, Bohemia and the Women's Movement

Margarethe was born in Berne on 20 February 1882. She was raised as an only daughter, her brother having died a short time before her birth. After training with the telephone company, for which her father worked, she came of age in 1902 and promptly embarked on legal studies. It was at this point that she met Philipp August Faas whom she married in spite of her opposition to marriage. They produced a daughter, Olga. Margarethe and her husband made a living from translation work and private tutoring. It was during those years that significant political contacts were being made and in fact it was shortly after that that she founded the Cernesi Textile Workers’ Union, whilst her husband joined the Social Democratic Party. Their second child, Lisa, was born in 1904. Margarethe started associating with anarchist and anti-militarist circles. She met ‘the workers’ doctor’ Fritz Brupbacher and radical syndicalists from francophone western Switzerland. In 1906 she launched the newspaper Die Vorkämpferin of which a French version - L’Exploitée - was also published.

In 1907 she took part in the very first international socialist women’s conference in Stuttgart and that same year met Ernst Frick, an anarchist from the Zurich-based Der Weckruf group. For all her professed anti-militarism, she leapt to Frick’s defence and furnished him with an alibi that rescued him from conviction for a barracks bombing, something that was to bring her into trouble with the courts later. 

Margarethe became more and more resolutely a supporter of non-violence, atheism, birth control and female suffrage. In the meantime, her husband, with whom relations had become strained, moved away to Vienna to start a career as a singer. In 1908 Margarethe took part in the anarchist congress held in La Chaux-de-Fonds, during which she put the case for free love and had an opportunity to rally to the defence of another anarchist from the Il Risveglio group who had been involved in political activity in Russia. Together with a number of Czech anarchists, she organised an evening event in Berne in honour of Gustav Landauer, with whom she fell in love. Thanks to her connections with Fritz Brupbacher, she got to know James Guillaume, Senna Hoy and Karel Vohryzek (the latter often involved in smuggling activity). When Vohyrzek was arrested, in his pockets they found a note from Brupbacher mentioning Margarethe by name. As a result of this and other vague matters in which she was involved, she became a suspect and as a result was sacked by the trade union confederation.

In the meantime, Landauer had set up his Sozialistischer Bund (Socialist League) which Margarethe also joined, helping actively to establish Der Sozialist. This review saw itself not merely as a political vehicle but also as a platform for philosophical reflection, the attempt being made to build links between the masses and the elite. Hardegger wrote: “Since we see ourselves as an association with an eye on the future, being a cultural movement, we do not want a movement founded on class struggle but rather upon the liberation of the whole of humanity. We need comrades with feelings and thoughts and determination.” The Bund’s aim was to set up a self-sufficient community founded upon mutual aid. In Munich in 1909 she blended into bohemian circles where she struck up a connection with Erich Mühsam, working with him on the TAT Group project, the object of which was to strengthen links between the sub-proletariat and the artistic world: people like Oskar Maria Graf, Georg Schrimpf, Franz Jung and Karl Otten were prominent in this, as were Zurich-based Ernst Frick and Robert Scheidegger. 

Returning to Berne to tend to her ailing mother, Margarethe returned also to her studies. At this point she fell out with Landauer who had belittled something she had written about free love, dismissing it as “garbage”. In 1912, Hardegger had to face a host of charges relating to her dealings with anarchists. After three months in prison, she was released on mental health grounds. At about the same time, her husband, Faas, secured a separation. Margarethe pulled out of the Bund to devote herself full-time to political activity. Even though she had drifted apart from Landauer, she clung to the libertarian ideals she shared with him and turned the apartment she had inherited from her recently deceased father into a commune.

Her campaign in favour of abortion and birth control brought the “anarchist trouble-maker” back to prison in 1915 where she served a year. In 1918 Hardegger joined a women’s movement in Coira. Then, with her new partner, Hans Brunner, she set up another commune in the Zurich area. 

Moving to Minusio in the canton of Ticino with her older daughter she set up a similar experiment in an old mill (the Villino Graziella near La Baronata). Its outer wall bore this quote from Landauer: “Socialism is the determined striving of people united in their desire to make a reality of a new ideal”. When that commune too failed, Hardegger set up the Pestalozzi Committee for the protection of war orphans.

Her libertarian activity carried on until her death on 26 September 1963. 

Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli (Milan) No 27, July 2006 https://centrostudilibertari.it/it/bollettino-27

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.