Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist (in fact the pharmacy is still there).
He hated the school where he was sent, which was known for its authoritarian discipline and its unsparing use of corporal punishment. Erich was often a victim of "the unspeakable flailings which were supposed to beat out of me all my innate feelings" because his rebellious nature often clashed with the school regime. In 1896 he wrote an anonymous piece for the socialist paper Luebecker Volsboten denouncing one of the school's most brutal teachers. This caused a scandal and Erich was expelled for taking part in socialist activities.
Erich had wanted to be a writer and poet from an early age and he left Luebeck to pursue this aim in Berlin in 1900. He got involved in a group called Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society) which combined socialist ideology with experiments in communal living. Here he met Gustav Landauer who introduced him to anarchist communist ideas. Muehsam contributed to Kampf, the anarchist paper of his friend Senna Hoy, who later died in terrible conditions in a Russian prison.
In 1904 Erich went to Ascona in Italian Switzerland to live in the artists' colony of Monte Verita (the writer Herman Hesse, the dance theorist Laban, the psychotherapist Otto Gross and many Daddaists and Expressionists lived there at one time or other).
He began writing plays there, the first of which, The Con Men, mixed new political theory with traditional dramatic forms. He also continued contributing to many anarchist papers, which drew the attention of the German authorities. He was considered one of the most dangerous anarchist agitators.
He moved to Munich in 1908 and took part in the cabaret movement. He did not care much for writing cabaret songs, but he achieved much notice because of them.
In 1911 he founded the paper Kain which advocated anarchist communism. He castigated and ridiculed the German state, fighting capital punishment and theatre censorship, and prophetically analysing international affairs. The World War that he had predicted led to the suspension of Kain.
At first Erich publicly supported the war, but by the end of 1914 was persuaded that he had been wrong, saying that, "I will probably have to bear the sin of betraying my ideals for the rest of my life". He threw himself into anti-war activity taking part in various actions. He supported the strikes that were beginning to break out. As these became more widespread and began to take on a revolutionary nature, Erich was among those arrested and imprisoned