Rubiner, Ludwig

The son of an entertainment writer of East Jewish origin, he studied musicology, art history, philosophy and German studies in Berlin from 1902 to 1906. He published his first poems in the anarchist-antimilitarist journal Kampf. In 1909 he travelled to Russia, in 1912 he went to Paris; in 1915 he had to leave France and fled to Switzerland as a radical opponent of the war, where he wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and edited the exile magazine Zeit-Echo in 1917-18. His idealisation of the Russian Revolution led to his expulsion from Switzerland at the end of 1918. In Berlin he was involved in the founding of the Proletarian Theatre in 1919, where Rubine died on 27 February 1920 as a result of a lung disease.