Born in Prussia two years before the 1848 revolution, Franz Mehring lived long enough to be a founding member of the Communist Party of Germany in December 1918. He was the first significant biographer of Karl Marx, and his biography remained the standard reference on Marx’s life for half a century. Mehring also wrote a major history of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) over a century ago that is still worth reading today.

He was a pioneer of Marxist writing on literature, and for over two decades he was widely regarded as the most brilliant socialist journalist in Germany, if not the whole of Europe. He died of illness in January 1919, during the last throes of the Spartacist uprising and the German revolution of 1918–19, and just two weeks after the murder of his comrades and friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Franz Mehring clearly lived a remarkable life and left behind a weighty body of work: the old East German edition of his collected works includes fifteen large volumes, even though it omitted most of his earlier writing and some other material. Yet his name is still not very well known to the English-speaking public.