Mina Neuwirth (1891-19??)
Mina Neuwirth was born in Bucharest in 1891, into a modest family of Jewish extraction. Her parents, Bernard and Clara, came from Tulcea and had moved to Bucharest prior to Romania’s annexation of Dobruja in the wake of the 1877-1878 war. In addition to Mina, there were another four siblings: Samuel, Golda, Piorko and Raşela.
After attending the Focşǎneanu girls’ secondary school, she started offering private lessons, most likely in the French language, of which she had a pretty good command. She was politically active from the age of 15, as a regular member of the România Muncitoare Socialist Circle and a contributor to the Revista Ideei for which she provided translations from French and some original texts. During her time as a contributor to Revista Ideei, she tried to highlight educational issues, work, the social status of women, marriage, etc. In addition, in the article she signed in Revista Ideei No 1 (1908) – entitled “Neînţelegere” (Incomprehension) she argued the need to overcome the misunderstandings between revolutionary socialists and anarchists regarding lots of issues and campaigns they had in common and on which all revolutionaries should have seen eye to eye. In the best “Muşuo-ist” tradition (called after the celebrated Romanian anarchist Panait Muşoiu) and this espousing an anarchist line – Mina stressed the plurality of struggles and outlooks and cautioned all her contemporary socialists against walking into the trap of centralism, sectarianism and, ultimately, an authoritarian view of revolutionary struggle.
Conservatives, liberals and radicals are brothers when it comes to defending themselves against their enemies – the social democrats, the revolutionary socialists and the anarchists. So how come the latter are always at loggerheads with one another? Let us see; each of them champions a doctrine. Fine. It is only right that they should come up with as many opinions as possible, as many ideas as possible, because true progress lies not in uniformity; quite the opposite. Yet these people commit the sin of sectarianism and retreat into their own doctrines and venerate them and will not countenance any other. Therein lies the great ill, a very great ill.
In 1907 she translated Frederic Stackelberg’s text Femeia şi revoluţia (Woman and Revolution) which appeared in its entirety in No 9 of the Revista Ideei. The translation seems to have been published in pamphlet form a few months later as part of the Library of Revista Ideei collection. In connection with this, Mina Neuwirth drew the attention of the Siguranţa (Romaian secret police) to herself.
Then as now, the raising of funding for the publication and distribution of books and pamphlets was a pressing issue. To that end, on 11 January 1908, Mina had written a letter to Adolf Reichmann, an anarchist on the police wanted list, asking him to make a financial contribution to be repaid in pamphlets or as a loan. The letter and the publication of the pamphlet drew the attention of the newly established Siguranţa, which assigned a number of agents to monitor Neuwirth’s every move. In addition to her attendance at talks given by the România Muncitoare Circle, police reports mentioned visits made to “the anarchist Panait Muşoiu”. From the daily paper Dimineaţa of 22 February 1908, we learn that Mina and her sister Golda were called in by the Siguranţa and threatened with deportation if they persisted in frequenting socialist and anarchist gatherings. In the mean-time, the police searched her accommodation, seizing any revolutionary matter they could find.
On 8 December 1908 an attempt was made on the life of the then prime minister Ion C. Brǎtianu. On his way home from a session of the Senate, the Liberal leader was shot three times in the back, but survived. The attack, mounted by a worker from the CFR railway works at the instigation – it seems – of undercover Siguranţa agents, triggered a fresh wave of crackdowns on socialists and anarchists. One of those arrested was Mina, only 18 years old at the time. While in custody, she was threatened with physical violence by the policemen questioning her. Even though nothing was uncovered that linked her to the assassination attempt, Mina was kept under Siguranţa surveillance, who urged her yet again to desist from her anarchist propaganda: “On threat of deportation”, she reported, “I was forbidden to have any contacts with workers or to pass my knowledge on to anybody else. In other words, I was being allowed to study but not to commit the crime of articulating my ideas” In one briefing about her, one officer noted a conversation between Mina and her sisters. She was especially aggrieved by the crude sexual remarks directed at her and her girlfriends by Siguranţa agents standing under their windows.
Subjected to relentless fear of being deported from the country or placed under arrest, or being molested or kept under strict surveillance, Mina Neuwirth attempted suicide on 20 February 1910, shooting herself in the chest. Her case was widely reported in the press of the day, which speculated at some length about what could have prompted this young woman to such an extreme action. After a few days in hospital she was questioned by the public prosecutor and pressed to explain the reasons for her attempted suicide, Mina insisted that she had been driven to it by the harassment to which she had been subjected and the fact that “police officers had been making her life impossible.” The authorities, of course, denied all responsibility, arguing in a press release that “she had been subjected to that regimen due to the circumstances of the time”, but that Judge Popovici “had now advised her to focus of recovery and forget what she had had to put up with from the police in the past”.
In spite of all this, Mina refused to give ground and remained politically active, joining the Margulis-Gherber anarchist group in Bucharest (as the police described it in their reports), it being one of the groups that had grown up around the Revista Ideei during the period leading up to the Balkan wars.
Shortly after that, the authorities decided that Mina Neuwirth constituted a threat to “order and public safety” and so an order was issued that she was to leave the country “within twenty-four hours”, as provided for in the 1881 legislation. We cannot say for sure whether that expulsion order was or was not enforced by the authorities. But the fact is that Mina Neuwirth carried on contributing to the Revista Ideei over the ensuing years, writing two original articles and – with Ştefan Ionescu – translating Kropotkin’s study Brainwork and Manual Labour. The text appeared in the October 1912 edition of Revista Ideei, No 120. The same essay appeared in pamphlet form in March 1913, in a translation by Lelia Pavlovici (with the official approval of Kropotkin), published by the Socialist Publishing Circle. That pamphlet ran to four editions, the latest in 1944.
Mina resurfaces in the documentary record only in 1921 when, on 16 January, she sent the Victims of Persecution Coordinating Committee a letter calling for material support for jailed comrades and the launch of committees to aid political detainees. Mina Neuwirth popped up again among the delegates to the foundation congress of the Romanian Communist Party in May 1921. She was scheduled to deliver a report entitled “Mişcarea femininǎ” (The Women’s Movement), but never got to do so because the forces of order burst into the congress, arresting participants by the dozens. Also arrested in the same circumstances was a long-standing militant close to Panait Muşoiu – the writer Iuliu Neagu Negulescu, who had spent his time in custody writing a utopian novel, Arimania sau Ţara (Arimania in the Land of Good Understanding) that he took until 1923 to have published. We have no further information regarding Mina Neuwirth or what she got up to after these events. Whether she carried on frequenting communist circles or where her political trajectory took her after that, we do not know. Be that as it may, the most striking thing about her was the determination she displayed and which showed itself primarily in how she handled obstacles and repression and ploughed ahead with her activities, and also the unselfishness of her political outlook. It might be said that Mina was one of the voices of the “Muşuo-ist” school of thought that was in favour of “undiluted socialism”. Quintessentially non-dogmatic, her outlook was rooted in acknowledgment of the autonomy of the person and the group, regarding the need for a liberation struggle that would not – under the colours of the revolution – replicate the hierarchies of domination, but would result from a convergence of struggles and revolutionary solidarity: an outlook inspired by the ideal of anarchy, the notion of freedom, well-being and equality for one and all.
By the Anarhiva Collective
Original articles from Buletinul Anarhivei, Year IV, No 2, 2024, pp. 11-13
Translated into Italian by Abi, in Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli No 66 (Milan) February 2025
Mina Neuwirth portrait (1910) from https://anarhiva.com/items/show/555
Translated by: Paul Sharkey.