Bauer, Edgar, 1820-1886

Edgar Bauer (7 October 1820 – 18 August 1886) was a German writer, journalist and political philosopher associated with the Young Hegelians. The younger brother of Bruno Bauer, he became known in the 1840s for radical political and anti-religious writings. His 1843 book Critique's Quarrel with Church and State led to a conviction for sedition and four years' imprisonment at Magdeburg. After his release, Bauer took part in the German revolutions of 1848–49, becoming active in Berlin's democratic and radical political circles. Following the defeat of the revolution, he went underground and lived in exile in Hamburg, Altona, Denmark and later London. During his London years he worked as a journalist, moved among German political émigrés including Karl Marx, and from 1852 supplied reports on the émigré milieu to the Danish authorities while also publishing in support of the Danish position in the Schleswig–Holstein question. After the Prussian amnesty of 1861 he returned to Berlin, where he became editor of the Preußisches Volksblatt and continued to write on Denmark's behalf before the Second Schleswig War. In his later years, Bauer moved from his earlier anti-religious radicalism toward Christian and conservative journalism, a turn that marked a lasting break with his brother Bruno. After returning to Altona in 1869, he wrote in defense of Schleswig-Holstein church autonomy under Prussian rule before settling in Hanover in 1873. In his early writings Bauer remained within the Young Hegelian milieu and was associated with anti-theism, radical democracy and socialism. Marx and Engels polemicized against him and his brother in The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1846). Some later anarchist writers treated Bauer's early work as an influence on German anarchism.