Salomo Friedlaender

Salomo Friedlaender (4 May 1871 in Gollantsch – 9 September 1946 in Paris) was a German-Jewish[1] philosopher, poet, satirist and author of grotesque and fantastic literature. He published his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona, which is the German word for “anonymous” spelled backward. He is known for his philosophical ideas on dualism drawing on Immanuel Kant, and his avant garde poetry and fiction. Almost none of his work has been translated into English.

Between 1894 and 1902, Friedlaender studied medicine, philosophy, German literature, archaeology, and art history in Munich, Berlin, and Jena. He wrote his dissertation on Arthur Schopenhauer and Kant. He approached the contemporary problems of his day through the lens of Kantian philosophy, in the footsteps of his teacher, the neo-Kantian Ernst Marcus. His most philosophical work, Die schoepferische Indifferenz (1918), Friedlaender built upon Kant's ideas to move beyond the classical dualism of subject and object in a purified, absolute self.

In 1906, Friedlaender moved to Berlin and began to publish literary writing under the pseudonym Mynona. He wrote several novels and countless poems and grotesques which were widely published in Expressionist periodicals such as Der Sturm and Die Aktion. He was part of the Berlin expressionist circle of Herwarth Walden, Else Lasker-Schueler, and Samuel Lublinski and an attraction at their public readings.

In 1933, he fled to Paris to escape the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. In Paris, he wrote about confronting the will to annihilation of the Nazis by answering torture with laughter.

He died in poverty after being refused assistance to emigrate to the United States during World War II.