author
Stephan Born
1824–1898
A printer turned revolutionary, he helped organize one of the first national workers’ movements in Germany and later wrote a firsthand memoir of the upheavals of 1848. His life connects radical politics, journalism, and the long afterlife of Europe’s failed revolutions.
1 Audiobook
Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers
by Stephan Born
About the author
Born in 1824 in Lissa, in the Prussian province of Posen, Stephan Born was originally named Simon Buttermilch. Trained as a typesetter, he became active in radical political circles in Berlin and joined the wave of democratic and socialist activism that swept across the German states in the 1840s.
He is best known as a founder of the General German Workers' Brotherhood, often described as the first national trade-union organization in the German workers' movement. During the revolutions of 1848–1849 he worked as an organizer, journalist, and political activist, taking part in the Dresden uprising before the revolutionary movements were defeated.
Afterward, he settled in Switzerland, where he worked mainly as a teacher and journalist rather than remaining a central figure in party politics. He later wrote Erinnerungen eines Achtundvierzigers (“Memoirs of a Forty-Eighter”), a valuable eyewitness account of the revolutionary era. He died in Basel in 1898.