Paul Grottkau

Paul Grottkau (1846–1898) was a German-American socialist political activist and newspaper publisher. Grottkau is best remembered as an editor alongside Haymarket affair victim August Spies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the leading American radical newspapers of the decade of the 1880s. Later moving to Milwaukee, Grottkau became one of the leading luminaries of the socialist movement in Wisconsin.

Paul Grottkau was born and raised in 1846 in Berlin, Prussia (now part of Germany), the son of a relatively prosperous noble family.

Grottkau was trained as an architect. Part of this training process involved Grottkau's learning the crafts of stonemasonry and building, activities which brought him into contract with members of the working class and first introduced him to socialist ideas.

Grottkau was initially highly influenced by the electorally-oriented ideas of Ferdinand Lassalle. By 1871 Grottkau was already a member of the General German Workingmen's Association and worked as an organizer for the burgeoning social democratic movement. He also served as editor of the official organ of the Bricklayers Union, Grundstein, and as editor of the radical Berliner Freie Presse.

This political activism placed Grottkau in the sights of the German police. Faced with arrest by the authorities under the Anti-Socialist Laws, Grottkau emigrated to the United States of America in 1878. A talented writer and orator, Grottkau found his way to the German émigré community in Chicago, where he immediately landed a job on the staff of the Social Democratic Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago Workers' News).

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