The writer and philosopher Salomo Friedlaender, who saw himself as a synthesis between Immanuel Kant and Charlie Chaplin, grew up in a Jewish-liberal family. He initially studied medicine and later philosophy, German and art history. Friedlaender’s doctoral thesis was on Schopenhauer, and in 1911 he published the treatise “Friedrich Nietzsche, eine intellektuelle Biographie”. In 1906, he moved to Berlin, where he met Paul Scheerbart, Ludwig Meidner, Alfred Kubin, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader. Together with Hausmann and Baader, he planned - in 1915 – the publication of a journal entitled Die Erde (The Earth). Friedlaender also wrote for Die Aktion, Der Sturm and Die Neue Jugend. In 1919, together with the Stirnerbund, he founded an association for “individualistic culture”. He also published numerous grotesqueries under his pseudonym Mynona (an inversion of “anonym”). Friedlaender’s major philosophical work “Schöpferische Indifferenz” appeared in 1918. The extent to which his philosophical writing influenced the Berlin Dadaists is demonstrated clearly by the Hannah Höch Archive of the Berlinischen Galerie. Friedlaender emigrated to Paris in 1933, where he died in 1946.
It proved possible to acquire part of Salomo Friedlaender’s estate with support from the Preußische Seehandlung in the year 2000. It comprises documents by and about Mynona and Paul Scheerbart, texts, invitations to readings, programme leaflets and photographs.