page_title: Helene Minkin
section_title: Freiheit
hierarchical_section_title: Helene Minkin / Works / Freiheit
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Titelblatt der Freiheit vom 10. März 1888
context_page_description: Helene Minkin was a Russian-Jewish anarchist immigrant who settled in New York City and had close ties with three of the U.S. anarchist movement's most notable figures – Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the notorious anarchist spokesman, Johann Most – Minkin's common-law husband. Working closely with Most, Minkin contributed to the German anarchist paper Freiheit, and took over editorial responsibilities during her husband's many incarcerations as well as after his death in 1906. She later went on to write her memoirs, which were later translated and published as a collection, Storm in My Heart: Memories from the Widow of Johann Most, which provides her personal perspective of her and Most's lives, as well as a close look into the conditions of late 19th- and early 20th-century immigrant life in the United States.
context_section_description: Though Minkin's involvement in Freiheit began with mundane tasks under Most's supervision, Minkin became instrumental in its survival as the controversial paper would often lead to Most's imprisonment, which would have - without Minkin - become leaderless. After becoming involved in the Socialist Party in Germany, Most was imprisoned, as he had been before, for his political views and eventually forced to leave his home country. Most relocated to London, where he would begin publishing Die Freiheit (later known simply as Freiheit), as means to promote his special brand of radical politics, which within a few years shifted from slightly left of his former party associate, Karl Marx, to what he eventually acknowledged as anarchism. Through Freiheit - which he brought with him from London upon his immigration to the U.S. in 1882 - and his lectures, Most found himself in the center of the growing German anarchist movement in the Lower East Side of New York City - where he would eventually meet Minkin.
  The paper was often controversial; encouraging propaganda of the deed or direct political action or taking responsibility for a Frankfurt bombing of a police station. Such claims as well as instructions to build explosives published by Most within Freiheit and in his pamphlet, Science of Revolutionary Warfare, further contributed to the public's generalization of anarchists as violent criminals despite a relatively low body count compared to other radical groups such as white nationalists. This rhetoric once again lead to imprisonment, particularly after the paper once again supported assassination after the death of McKinley at the hands of an anarchist in 1901. When others from their circle failed to step up to maintain Freiheit in Most's absence, Minkin stepped in as editor and manager for two years while he was imprisoned. Without Minkin's contributions and her nurturing of Most's continued political activity, Most would have let the paper fold and his influence wane.
caption: Front page of Freiheit, published March 10, 1888
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