Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew 9783110368598, 9783110373950

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
Messianic Radicals: Gustav Landauer and Other German-Jewish Revolutionaries
‘Poetic Anarchism’ versus ‘Party Anarchism’: Gustav Landauer and the Anarchist Movement in Wilhelmian Germany
Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber
Between Utopia and Redemption: Gustav Landauer’s Influence on Gershom Scholem
Gustav Landauer’s Tragic Theater
Gustav Landauer and the Literary Trends of his Time
Toward a German-Jewish Construct: Landauer’s Arnold Himmelheber
Gustav Landauer’s Early Novella Geschwister: Dying to Communicate
Gustav Landauer’s Reading of Spinoza
Gustav Landauer and Gerhard Scholem: Anarchy and Utopia
Ina Britschgi-Schimmer: Co-Editor of Gustav Landauer’s Letters
Gustav Landauer and his Judaism
Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude: Gustav Landauer’s Development as a Human Being and Jew
My Father, Gustav Landauer
Index
Contributors

Citation preview

Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew

Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Anya Mali in collaboration with Hanna Delf von Wolzogen

ISBN 978-3-11-037395-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036859-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039560-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/München/Boston Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Abbreviations  vii Paul Mendes-Flohr Introduction  1 Paul Mendes-Flohr Messianic Radicals: Gustav Landauer and Other German-Jewish Revolutionaries  14 Ulrich Linse ‘Poetic Anarchism’ versus ‘Party Anarchism’: Gustav Landauer and the Anarchist Movement in Wilhelmian Germany  45 Michael Löwy Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber  64 Martin Treml Between Utopia and Redemption: Gustav Landauer’s Influence on Gershom Scholem  82 Anthony David Gustav Landauer’s Tragic Theater  92 Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann Gustav Landauer and the Literary Trends of his Time  107 Philippe Despoix Toward a German-Jewish Construct: Landauer’s Arnold Himmelheber  121 Corinna R. Kaiser Gustav Landauer’s Early Novella Geschwister: Dying to Communicate  132 Hanna Delf von Wolzogen Gustav Landauer’s Reading of Spinoza  155 Yossef Schwartz Gustav Landauer and Gerhard Scholem: Anarchy and Utopia  172

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 Contents

Wolf von Wolzogen Ina Britschgi-Schimmer: Co-Editor of Gustav Landauer’s Letters  191 Chaim Seeligmann Gustav Landauer and his Judaism  205 Ernst Simon Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude: Gustav Landauer’s Development as a Human Being and Jew  213 Brigitte Hausberger My Father, Gustav Landauer  233 Index  238 Contributors  241

Abbreviations GLAA GLAJ Lebensgang I/II

Mauthner Briefe Aufruf 1911/1919 Beginnen Meister Eckhart 1903/1920

Revolution

Der Sozialist

Shakespeare I/II, 1920/1923 Skepsis 1903/1923/1978

WM 1921 WA III

Macht und Mächte Gespräch

Sensation

NG

Gustav Landauer Nachlass, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, No. Gustav Landauer Nachlass, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Varia, No. Gustav Landauer, Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, ed. Martin Buber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, 2 vols., (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1929). Gustav Landauer–Fritz Mauthner: Briefwechsel 1890-1919, ed. Hanna Delf, (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994). Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, (Berlin: Socialist Bund, 1911; 2nd ed. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1919). Beginnen: Aufsätze über Sozialismus, ed. Martin Buber, (Köln: Marcan-Block, 1924). Gustav Landauer, trans., Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen, (1903; 2nd ed., Berlin: K. Schnabel, 1920). Die Revolution, vol. 13, Die Gesellschaft. Sammlung sozialpsychologischer Monographien, ed. Martin Buber, (Frankfurt/ Main: Rütten & Loening, 1907; new ed., Berlin: K. Kramer, 1974). Der Sozialist, Berlin: 1891-1899; Der Sozialist. Organ des Sozialistischen Bundes, ed. Gustav Landauer, (Bern/Berlin: 1909-1915; repr. Vaduz, 1980). Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen, (1920), 2nd ed. (Potsdam: Rütten & Loening, 1948). Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik, (Berlin: Marcan-Block, 1903; 2nd ed., Köln: Marcan-Block, 1923; repr. Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1978). Gustav Landauer, Der werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber, (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1921). Gustav Landauer, Dichter, Ketzer, Außenseiter: Schriften zu Literatur, Philosophie, Judentum, ed. Hanna Delf, vol. III of Gustav Landauer, Werkausgabe, (Berlin: Akademie, 1996). Gustav Landauer, Macht und Mächte: Novellen, (Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1903; 2nd ed. Köln: Marcan-Block, 1923). Gustav Landauer im Gespräch: Symposium zum 125. Geburtstag, Conditio Judaica 18, ed. H. Delf and G. Mattenklott, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). “… die beste Sensation ist die Ewige … ” Gustav Landauer – Leben, Werk und Wirkung, (Düsseldorf: Theatermuseum, Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, 1995). Die Neue Gemeinschaft: Ein Orden vom wahren Leben. Vorträgen und Ansprachen, part 2, Das Reich der Erfüllung, ed. Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1901).

Paul Mendes-Flohr

Introduction

Idealist war ich immer, Idealist bin ich und das will ich bleiben. Amen … . Güte, grosse, unendliche Güte thut uns noth, und die will heute so warm aus mir hinausströmen in alle Welt. Gustav Landauer1

In February 1912, the forty-two-year-old Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) addressed a group of young socialist Zionists in Berlin. His topic was pointedly entitled “Judaism and Socialism.” Acknowledging his bond to his fellow Jews, he reflected on the “Jewish renaissance,” the awakening sense of Jewishness among erstwhile assimilated Jews. The renewal of a Jewish consciousness, he suggested, is born “first and foremost” of a new appreciation that Jewishness is “an indomitable fact, a natural characteristic that there is something that by nature bonds Jews to one another. One is a Jew, even if one does not know it or wish to confess it.” The socialist anarchist Landauer further observed that this reawakened consciousness obliged the Jews to face fateful decisions, and hence the need for leaders beholden to a spiritual vision: “For when a nation stands once again at a turning point when it should initially become what it could and what its inner possibility demands of it, then the poets, then the prophets are needed.” These leaders, Landauer held, should emerge from the ranks of Jewish socialists, who would ally the re-born nation with a cause greater than itself – the command to create a compassionate and just social order. Some socialists will understandably seek to shape the “national community as the basis of the new society. Hence, many Jewish socialists will decide that what is initially needed is a [new] Jewish community.” But, Landauer continues, for other Jewish socialists “the Galut, exile as an inner disposition of isolation and longing, will be the utmost calling that bonds them to Judaism and to socialism. For these [lonely] individuals Judaism and socialism will be the same; they will know that Judaism and socialism have

1 “An idealist I always was; an idealist I am and I will remain so. Amen … . Goodness, abundant, endless goodness is what we need most; and goodness will warmly flow from me throughout the world.” The epigraph is taken from G. Landauer, “Aus meinem Gefängnis-Tagebuch,” Der sozialistische Akademiker I (1895), nos. 13-18, 319. Cited in Ruth Link-Salinger, Gustav Landauer. Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1977), 47, n. 103.

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charged them to demand [human] solidarity and justice.”2 A year later Landauer had the occasion to elaborate this gracious and elegant explanation of why he could not align himself with Zionism. In an essay provocatively entitled, “Are these Heretical Thoughts?”– frequently cited in the present volume – he asserts that “the Jews can only be redeemed with [all of] humanity, and that the two are one and the same: to pursue persistently the messiah in [national] banishment and dispersion, and to be the messiah of the nations.”3 In the same breath, he gently rebukes the Zionists for posing a false dilemma of having either to be true to one’s Jewish identity and cultural memory or to embrace world culture and court the inevitable scandal of assimilation. The embrace of world culture, he defiantly affirmed, need not vitiate one’s Judaism. On the contrary, Judaism and other cultural affiliations may dwell parallel to one another in mutual enrichment. The modern Jew is a complex amalgam of many cultures, and the demand for a “simplification” of his or her cultural identity and loyalty is both insipid and invidious. Similarly, Landauer regarded himself to be both a socialist – or rather an anarchist – and a Jew. He saw no contradiction between these commitments, nor even a necessary tension between them. This volume of essays explores various aspects of Landauer’s parallel fidelities as a Jew and as an anarchist. He fashioned his anarchism as a form of Kultursozialismus, with a view to enlisting culture – theater, music, literature – to nurture the values and attitudes necessary for the “realization” of socialism. This conception of the political function of culture goes back to the German romantics who assigned to aesthetic education the exalted task of transforming a society’s moral and spiritual sensibilities. Hence, Landauer’s critique of Marxism, which he faulted for placing what he regarded to be a false emphasis on the objective forces of political economy. True socialism, he argued, would emerge only through the moral and spiritual regeneration of human beings; it cannot be imposed from above either by governmental fiat or by the decree of a revolutionary vanguard: “Revolution is not what revolutionaries think it to be.”4 There is nothing inevitable about socialism, no inner dialectical logic guiding history. A revolutionary change of the moral fabric of human relations in all spheres of life – economic, social and interpersonal – is indeed the exigent need, but it will only come about with the maturing of the “will to revolution,” with the resolute decision to break with history, to fold back the sad millennial record of social injustice, and begin 2 Landauer, “Judentum und Sozialismus,” Selbstwehr (7 February 1912); also in Die Arbeit. Organ der Zionistischen Volkssozialistischen Partei (June 1920). Reprinted in WA III, 160f. 3 “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” in Vom Judentum, published by the Jüdischer Studentenverein, Bar Kochba (Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1913), 250-57; also in WA III, 170-74. 4 Letter to Fritz Mauthner, 5 October, 1907. Lebensgang I, 172.

Introduction 

 3

anew. Marking a radical caesura with history, revolution paves the way “toward something that has yet to come – [that is] not yet in the world.”5 The revolutionary must look forward beyond history, adopting an unabashed Utopian vision. Tellingly, Landauer solicits the support of the second-century Platonist, Maximus Tyrius (c. 125-185), whom he cites as having declared: “Here, now, you will see the road of passion, which you call ‘decline’ – because you make [your] judgment on the basis of those who have already passed away thereon – which I, however, call ‘salvation’ (Rettung), basing myself on the order of those yet to come.”6 The envisioned “radical disjunction between history and redemption,” echoed traditional Jewish apocalyptic messianism.7 But rather than waiting for a divinely appointed redeemer to usher in the eschaton, Landauer transposed the axis of hope to human deed (Tat), that is, to concrete, small deeds – acts of love, kindness, empathy and the creation of utopian communities (Siedlungen), implanted as seeds of redemption within and in opposition to the present social reality; their efflorescent multiplication would ultimately overwhelm the dominant structures of economic and political power and, reigning supreme, witness the dawn of a humanity born anew. The desired revolution would thus evolve without resorting to violence. Nor would it be secured by establishing new configurations of state power. The state, any state, Landauer averred, is inherently tyrannical; even when associated with the most noble ideals, a state is but an organized form of violence. Authentic socialism, therefore, cannot be realized through the auspices of a state. “In our souls we take no part in the compulsory unity of the state, since we wish to create a genuine human bond, a society pro-

5 Cited, without source, by Link-Salinger, Gustav Landauer, 60. 6 Landauer, Revolution, epigraph to volume. Translated by Ruth Link-Salinger in Gustav Landauer, 60. Cf. the concluding sentence of Die Revolution: “Nur das können wir wissen: daß unser Weg nicht über die Richtungen und Kämpfe des Tages führt, sondern über Unbekanntes, Tiefbegrabenes und Plöltzliches.” Ibid., 118. Landauer held firm to this meta-historical – one may even say, given its apocalyptic overtones, anti-historical – view of revolution. In the midst of the Bavarian Revolution, Landauer wrote: “Das Chaos ist da: neue Regsamkeit und Erschütterung zeigen sich an; die Geister erwachen; die Seelen heben sich zur Verantwortung; die Hände zur Tat; möge aus der Revolution die Wiedergeburt kommen; mögen, da wir nichts so sehr brauchen als neue, reine Menschen, die aus dem Unbekannten, dem Dunkel, der Tiefe aufsteigen, mögen diese Erneuer, Reiniger, Retter unserm Volke nicht fehlen; … möge den Völkern … aus dem urtief Ewigen und Unbedingten der neue, der schaffende Geist zuströmen, der erst recht neue Verhältnisse erzeugt; möge aus der Revolution Religion kommen, Religion des Tuns, des Lebens, der Liebe, die beseligt, die erlöst, die überwindet.” Preface, signed 3 January 1919, to the second edition of Landauer’s Aufruf, xvii. 7 This formulation is from Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael A. Meyer et al. (New York: Schocken, 1971), 10.

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ceeding from the spirit and therefore from freedom.”8 Indeed, Landauer’s anarchism was wedded to an unbending pacifism. Hence, his participation in the Bavarian Revolution, which erupted in November 1918, surprised many. At first he heeded the call of his friend Kurt Eisner (18671919), a former student of the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen and leader of the motley band of socialist intellectuals who proclaimed the Bavarian Democratic and Social Republic. Inspired by Eisner’s vision of an ethical “reformation of spirits,” he joined the Revolutionary Workers Council, a sort of advisory committee of fifty radicals, who were charged with the task of directing the revolution toward socialism and genuine democracy (based on decentralized councils or Räte of workers, soldiers, and peasants, as opposed to an “authoritarian,” parliamentarian central government).9 When Eisner was killed by an assassin’s bullet in February 1919, Landauer assumed a role in the preparation of a so-called Second Revolution and in the establishment of a Räterepublik (a republic of workers’ councils) to replace the tottering and defective republic founded by Eisner. Led by a band of anarchist intellectuals, the Räterepublik was declared on 7 April of the same year, which was by chance Landauer’s birthday. Landauer joined the governing central council, which appointed him commissioner for “enlightenment and public instruction.” Within less than a week the Räterepublik was overthrown by the more radical Spartacists, as communists were then called. A few weeks later, on the first of May, troops of the German federal government entered Munich and with dispatch brutally suppressed the revolution. Although no longer playing an active role in the revolution, Landauer was apprehended and on the second of May bludgeoned to death by soldiers of the reactionary White Guard. The pacifist Landauer met a violent death on behalf of the revolution. He was a martyr of the revolution. His friend Martin Buber (1878-1965) eulogized him as a latter-day Jesus, as a Jew who sacrificed his life for humanity, a suffering servant in the cause of redemption: “In a church in Brescia I saw a mural whose whole surface was covered with crucified men. The field of crosses stretched to the horizon, and on all of them hung men of different shapes and faces. There it seemed to me was the true form of Jesus Christ. On one of those crosses, I see Gustav Landauer hanging.”10 Against his better judgment, Buber explained, Landauer joined the revolution. As an act of solidarity with the workers and fellow socialists, he reluctantly 8 Cited in Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work. The Early Years. 1878-1923 (London and Turnbridge Wells: Search Press, 1982), 235. 9 Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community. The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 296-305. 10 Buber, “Landauer und die Revolution, “Masken. Monatsschrift des Düsseldorfer Schauspielhauses, XIV (May 1919), 291.

Introduction 

 5

participated in the revolution, despite the likelihood that circumstances would eventually force his comrades to resort to what he feared most: political and – worse, perhaps – also physical violence. But, Buber insisted, “Landauer fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution.”11 He joined the revolution in order to ensure that it would eschew violence – and reject all instruments of governance that diminish human dignity – and be the redemptive, eschatological event it promised to be. But he was soon consumed with dark premonitions of (as he wrote just months prior to his tragic death) “the frightful danger that listless routine and thoughtless imitation might take hold of the revolutionaries and render them philistines of radicalism, of resounding words, and violent gestures, and that they would not know or wish to know that the transformation of society can only come about through love, work – through stillness (Stille)” – in other words, through undemonstrative, quiet deeds.12 Revolution as socialist praxis was a matter of personal virtue, of sacrificial love. “Now is the time to bring forth a martyr (Opfer) of a different kind, not heroic, but a quiet, unpretentious martyr who will provide an example for the proper life.”13 When Landauer wrote these words in 1911, words that would later be inscribed on his tombstone, he understood martyrdom as a metaphor for selfless idealism and not as the giving of one’s life for one’s ideals.14 Landauer became a martyr in both senses: he was remembered as one who had given his life for the revolution that he had hoped would herald the ethical and spiritual regeneration of humanity, and as one who embodied the humane virtues envisioned by that revolution. Landauer’s thought and life thus merge into one skein. He was a man of letters and genuinely a man of Geist, with all the inflections that the term bears in German, and which are only inadequately conveyed by the English word “spirit.” The life of intellect and culture was also the life of the spirit, which for Landauer had an explicit religious quality. Socialism, he explained, means abandoning both God (i.e., formal religion) and the material and personal ambitions of the world, “in order to serve God and the world.”15 True religion will emerge from the revolution, “the religion of deed, of life, of love that ensouls, redeems (erlöst), overcomes. What remains of life? We all eventually die, we all are destined to die … . Nothing lives on but what we have made from out of ourselves, what we have

11 Buber, “Recollection of a Death” (1929), in Buber, Pointing the Way. Collected Essays, trans. and ed. by Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 120. 12 Landauer, Preface to the second edition of Aufruf, written in January 1919. 13 Ibid., 152: “Jetzt gilt es, dazu noch Opfer anderer Art zu bringen, nicht heroische, sondern stille, unscheinbare Opfer um für das rechte Leben ein Beispiel zu geben.” 14 Lunn, Prophet of Community, 342. 15 Aufruf, xvi.

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set in motion; creation (Schöpfung) lives on, that which is created (Geschöpf), not only the Creator (Schöpfer). Nothing lives but the act of the honest hands and the rule (das Walten) of pure, genuine Geist.”16 The life of the Geist – of intellect and deed – was thus one for Landauer.17 Hence, also Landauer’s engagement on behalf of all the disinherited members of society was necessarily complemented by his activity as a literary and theatre critic, novelist, translator, scholar of mysticism, philosopher of language, and author of studies on Shakespeare. For Landauer, culture and politics occupied the same spiritual space; both were compelled by the same passionate, unyielding commitment to illuminate and effectively approach the Utopian horizon of human possibility and hope. This is the governing thesis of this volume, which has its origins in a conference – “Gustav Landauer: Anarchism and Judaism” – held in Jerusalem in December 1998. Co-sponsored by The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the Goethe Institute (Jerusalem), and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Herzliyah, Israel), the conference hosted scholars from Austria, France, Germany, Israel and the U.S.A. to assess Landauer’s ramified literary and political activities, his life as a Jew and anarchist. The conference was occasioned by an exhibition on Landauer prepared by Michael Matzigkeit, a curator at the Theater-Museum Düsseldorf, which was brought to Israel at the initiative of Christiane Günther, the director of the Jerusalem Goethe-Institute.18 She approached Gabriel Motzkin, then serving as the director of the Rosenzweig Center, and suggested that a conference be held in conjunction with the exhibition. Paul Mendes-Flohr was invited to organize the conference. With the collaboration of Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, co-editor of the collected writings of Gustav Landauer, Mendes-Flohr developed a program for the conference and identified the most prominent scholars currently engaged in research on the legacy of Landauer.19 On behalf of the Rosenzweig Center, Maria Diemling attended to logistics of the conference. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Cf. “Der Geist gibt dem Leben einen Sinn, Heiligung und Weihe; der Geist schafft, zeugt und durchdringt die Gegenwart mit Freude und Kraft und Seligkeit; das Ideal wendet sich vom Gegenwärtigen ab, dem Neuen zu; es ist Sehnsucht nach der Zukunft, nach dem Besseren, nach dem Unbekannten. Es ist der Weg aus den Zeiten des Niederganges heraus zu neuer Kultur.” Ibid., 9. 18 ‘… die beste Sensation ist das Ewige … ’ Gustav Landauer – Leben, Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Matzigkeit (Düsseldorf: Theatermuseum der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf/ Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, 1995). 19 Gustav Landauer Werkausgabe, ed. Gert Mattenklott and Hanna Delf (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1997), vol. 3.

Introduction 

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The papers in this volume were originally presented at the conference, with the exception of three: Paul Mendes-Flohr’s article, which is an adaptation of a previously published essay;20 a memoir of Landauer by his second daughter, Brigitte Hausberger (1906-1985), which is based on an interview conducted in October 1976 by Paul Avrich, published by him in 1995 and reprinted here with the permission of Princeton University Press;21 and an essay by Ernst Simon (1899-1988), first published in German in 1921, which pays homage to the martyred Landauer and records his impact on post-World War One Central European Jewish youth.22 The essay was conscientiously translated by Carl Ebert and is printed here with the kind permission of Uriel Simon. In light of the intervening years since the conference, the contributors were asked to update their articles, taking into consideration the most recent scholarship. In this respect, the present volume reflects the current state of research on Landauer, building upon a volume published in 1995: Gustav Landauer (18701919). Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeption seines Werkes.23 The first chapter, penned by Paul Mendes-Flohr, situates Landauer in the political discourse of his contemporary German-Jewish radicals. The second essay by Ulrich Linse examines Landauer’s distinctive brand of anarchism from the more general perspective of the German anarchist movement of his day. This essay is followed by Michael Löwy’s analysis of what on the face of it was the improbable friendship between Landauer and Martin Buber – and not only because Buber was barely five foot two and Landauer close to six foot six. Raised in the traditional Jewish home of his paternal grandparents in the Austrian-Hungarian province of Galicia, Buber had well-defined Jewish commitments, whereas Landauer came from an assimilated home in South West Germany and subscribed to a cosmopolitan ethos. Yet, as Löwy deftly shows, an “elective affinity” evolved from their very first encounter in 1899 and over the next two decades until Landauer’s tragic death, crystallized into a symbiotic relation of mutual influence. The pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) fashioned himself to be a religious anarchist. In his contribution to this volume Martin Treml traces the affinities between Scholem’s and Landauer’s anarchism, and notes the resonance of the latter in Scholem’s conception of mystical myths. 20 “‘The Stronger and Better Jews.’ Jewish Theological Responses to Political Messianism in the Weimar Republic,” in Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era, ed. J. Frankel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 159-93. 21 Paul Avrich, ed., Anarchist Voices. An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton: Prince­­ ton Univ. Press, 1995), 33-37. 22 E. Simon, “Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude,” Der Jude, 6 (1921-1922), 457-475. 23 The volume is edited by Leonhard M. Fiedler, Renate Heuer, and Annemarie Taeger-Altenhofer, and published by Campus Verlag in Frankfurt/Main.

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He further discerns a striking parallel between Landauer’s conception of revolution as a continuous, unending dialectical process between “utopia and topos,” or social renewal, followed by inevitable conservative calcification, and in its wake a renewal of the utopian regenerative impulse – and Scholem’s notion of restorative and utopian messianism. Anthony David offers a novel perspective of Landauer as a dramaturge of the Bavarian Revolution, in which his tragic death at the hands of vengeful reactionaries could be seen in retrospect to have been a symbolic coda of what he regarded to be inherently tragic but ethically necessary attempts to change the course of history. As David puts it, Landauer “choreographed his death according to a very precise theory of history, art, and society. He knew full well that he and the revolution aesthetics served both to nurture socialist sensibilities that overcome the invidious individualism of bourgeois society and, at the same time, to inculcate a sober existential realism about the human condition and the dark hope that progressive politics would secure the promise of human decency and solidarity. In elaborating this thesis, David probes Landauer’s understanding of the intimate relation between aesthetics, honed through literature and theater, and politics. Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann reconstructs the evolution of this dialectical coupling of aesthetics and politics in Landauer’s thought through his efforts to define a distinctive voice in the vibrant bohemian literary circles of fin-de-siècle Berlin. What he would eventually call his “cultural anarchism,” she notes, had two formative, overlapping moments, one expressly literary and the other political. Under the sway of his friend Fritz Mauthner’s language skepticism, and drawn to a mystical epistemology, he rejected the prevailing literary naturalism. His quest for a mystical communion with a noumenal reality beyond the grasp of language did not blunt his social conscience, however. In consonance, he developed a distinctive form of anarchism. Wary of the position of those anarchists who held that to be politically effective it was necessary to jettison all traces of bourgeois culture to reach the masses, Landauer resolutely refused to relinquish a commitment to Bildungskultur. Rather he deemed it a political imperative to share with the masses the aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities of high culture. The anarchistic political ethos is thus to be furthered by aesthetic pedagogy directed to the proletariat. At bottom, he held, personal and communal renewal are one. Landauer articulated this vision primarily as an essayist, playwright, dramaturge, novelist, and lecturer on cultural topics (on such themes as Shakespeare’s plays). In a detailed analysis of Landauer’s novella Arnold Himmelheber, Philippe Despoix demonstrates how Landauer detached Bildungskultur from its prevailing affinities to bourgeois morality and values, and transformed it into a Nietzschean-inflected affirmation of eros and life. Challenging bourgeois familial and

Introduction 

 9

sexual taboos, Landauer the novelist also questions the culture of shame and guilt engendered by the Jewish Law and Christian love. The protagonist of the novella thus exclaims, “There is no sin, there is only life.” The liberation of the individual from a culture of repression is correlated to the forging of interpersonal and communal bonds that can be genuinely called love. Within the vision of this aesthetic utopia, Despoix points out, Landauer advocated a renewal of Judaism as post-traditional anarchistic ethic – an ethic in support of a Diasporic identity that resists all ideological self-enclosure and fixed cultural fidelities. Corinna Kaiser explores the same theme in Landauer’s early, unpublished novella Geschwister (Siblings), which unyieldingly questions the incest taboo. Penned in 1890 by the then twenty-year-old aspiring writer, the novella presents a sympathetic portrait of the trials and tribulations of a brother and sister who, despite daunting social and psychological obstacles, are determined to realize their compelling libidinal love for each other. Their ultimate failure to give full, uninhibited expression to their love is marked by suicide; hand in hand they submerge themselves in the depths of the sea. The possible melodramatic effects of their ill-fated love, as Kaiser deftly shows, is softened by the narrative strategy of inter-textual citation and reference to literature that deals with sibling love. Imbricating the narrative with a rich array of inter-textual references and allusions allows Landauer not only to subvert bourgeois morality, but also to point to the utopian vision of all barriers frustrating genuine fraternal love between all human beings. Spontaneous (anarchic) love is to displace the bourgeois code of duty and social conformity. There is even a further, deeper message embedded in Landauer’s literary style: language itself proves inherently incapable of expressing human experience at its deepest emotional level. In this regard, as Kaiser argues, Geschwister powerfully anticipates Landauer’s seminal study of 1903, Skepsis und Mystik, which as its subtitle indicates was inspired by his mentor and friend Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Landauer elaborated Mauthner’s “godless mysticism” as a means to overcome the epistemological and ontological limits of language. Toward that end, he developed a mystical anthropology by which an individual isolates herself from the invidious influences of the “surrounding” culture and social structures. By retreating into one’s self, one sinks into “eternity,” which is present in every moment of ordinary lived time, but which contains time as a whole and, pari passu, transcends time. Utopia is thereby moved from the future into the eternal presence, whereby the individual experiences “primordial” unity of the world. A mystical pantheism is thus the true road to socialism; the realization of genuine human community is not dependent on the socio-political dialectics of history. As Hanna Delf von Wolzogen argues in her contribution to this volume, Landauer marshaled the support of Spinoza to propagate “the idea that ‘true’ knowledge

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does not take place from without, but rather is bound up in the ‘knower’ … .” Landauer thus aligns his mystical anthropology with Spinoza’s Ethics and the rational acknowledgment of the divine order of the world as leading to self-knowledge and release from an individuated ego. This reading of Spinoza, Hanna Delf von Wolzogen observes, also prompted Landauer to affirm his ties to his ancestral Judaism and “to consider Jewish tradition in a new light, unfettered by the restrictions of proscribed orthodoxy.” Spinoza also provided Landauer with a unique perspective by which to examine the legacy of Shakespeare as advocating individual introspection and the creation of a new world order and a new human being from within one’s self. Landauer’s distinctive conception of anarchism as primed by a mystical self-understanding was refracted through the study of the writings of medieval Christian mystics, principally of Meister Eckhart. In the chapter on Landauer and Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem, Yossef Schwartz avers that Landauer had a profound intuitive understanding of the psychological and ethical presuppositions of Eckhart’s teachings, even though these would only be given clarion articulation as the result of later scholarship that considered Eckhart’s more metaphysically informed Latin texts and those that reflect his relationship to Maimonides, in particular the belief that the philosopher has a pedagogical and political responsibility to the masses. It was precisely this ethic that Landauer discerned in Eckhart’s teachings and which recommended Eckhart to him as a spiritual guide, indeed as one “deeply involved in the philosophical questions that Landauer himself explores in his Skepsis und Mystik.” From the perspective of the political theology, a secular blending of messianic-mystical or antinomian anarchism, that Landauer crafted in great measure from his reading of Eckhart, Schwartz argues that Scholem’s religious anarchism demonstrates but superficial similarities to that of Landauer’s mystical anarchism. The most telling and far-reaching difference between them, Schwartz concludes, is the unbridgeable gulf between “Landauer’s universal anarchist position” and Scholem’s Zionism and his corresponding attempt to reformulate what he held to be the fundamental Jewish ethos with “rhetoric taken from the arsenal of modern nationalism.” In March 1919, shortly before he left his home and family to join the government of the Räterepublik, Landauer wrote his last will and testament, in which he named Buber as the executor of his literary estate. Buber dedicated himself with unflagging devotion to the task of assembling and publishing Landauer’s ramified writings. Among the four collections he edited,24 that of Landauer’s 24 Buber edited the following volumes: Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten und Loening, 1920), 2 vols.; Der werdende Mensch. Aufsätze über Leben und Schriftum (Postdam: Kiepenheuer, 1921); Beginnen. Aufsätze über Sozialismus (Köln: Marcan-Block, 1921);

Introduction 

 11

correspondence surely presented the most daunting challenge. Landauer’s correspondents had to be identified and located, their letters read, and those selected for publication had to be annotated. Close to six hundred letters were finally published in two volumes, totalling 899 printed pages. Wolf von Wolzogen provides a “biography” of the fraught gestation of the edition of Landauer’s correspondence by focusing on the relationship between Buber and his editorial assistant, Ina Britschigi-Schimmer (1881-1949). She proved to be an exceedingly resourceful and indefatigable collaborator. Upon completion of the project, she felt that given the extent of her part in the editing she deserved to be designated on the title page as a co-editor. Although acknowledging her prodigious editorial labors, Buber insisted that in accord with Landauer’s testamentary mandate, he was obliged to take upon himself full editorial responsibility for the volume. Hence, he was ethically, if not legally obliged to indicate on the title page that he edited the correspondence “with the collaboration of Ina Britschgi-Schimmer” (Unter Mitwirkung von Ina Britschgi-Schimmer herausgegeben von Martin Buber). Britschgi-Schimmer’s intense engagement in the editing of the correspondence led her to explore Landauer’s ambiguous Jewish identity, a project she never fully realized. The late Chaim Seeligmann (1912-2009) shared this interest in Landauer’s Judaism. Born in Landauer’s native city of Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany, Seeligmann claimed an intimate familiarity with Landauer’s tenuous Jewish roots; indeed, his father was personally acquainted with Landauer and his family. His essay, translated from the German by Eric Jacobson, thus has an implicit autobiographical dimension. Stemming from an assimilated family with a marginal affiliation to Liberal Judaism, much like Landauer’s family, Seeligmann argues that despite its attenuated Judaism, the Jewish milieu of Landauer’s youth somehow “allowed the individual to preserve his or her own inner Jewish essence (jüdische Substanz).” Over the years Landauer’s abiding Jewish sensibility increasingly gained, in great measure due to Buber’s influence but not only, voluble expression. Seeligmann also identified with Landauer’s anarchism and ethical socialism, which upon his emigration to Palestine in 1935 he sought to integrate into the ethos of the kibbutz he joined and remained a member until his death just shy of his 97th year. Ernst Simon (1899-1988) also traces Landauer’s incremental self-affirmation as a Jew, parallel to his intellectual and spiritual development, indeed, to his maturation as a human being, as the essay’s title – Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude – suggests. Originally published in Buber’s cultural review Der Jude in 1922, Simon’s essay was addressed to German Jews seeking to clarify their own and “in collaboration with Ina Britschgi-Schimmer,” Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten und Loening, 1929), 2. vols.

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Jewish identity and its relation to their most pressing intellectual and ethical concerns as human beings. Accordingly, Simon presented to them Landauer’s legacy as paradigmatic. Landauer’s engagement in politics as an ethical calling both challenges the cynical abuse of political power and resists the equally cynical withdrawal into “sheltered solitude.” Landauer’s homo politicus is at root a homo religiosus whose “ego is never full of the overflowing sense of his own existence; it is always imbued with God, the world, and one’s brethren of earth.” It is from this perspective that one is to appreciate Landauer’s utopian socialism. He was no naïve idealist, however. Fully cognizant of the complex discordant reality of the world, his utopians and revolutionaries are buoyed by an “uncanny assuredness of a dream” – a “will to delusion” that arises from knowledge of the world. Similar to Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918), Landauer taught that discontent with the existent political and social order leads one to embrace utopia, fairy tales, fantasy, and the hope of an alternative, more humane reality. The political imperatives issued by the utopian impulse are directed to the here and now. Hence, he objected to Zionism, fixated on a future resolution of the Jewish Question, which he deemed to be a movement that substitutes verbal litanies of idle messianic hope for concrete political deeds. Although Simon faults Landauer for not acknowledging the ongoing Zionist settlement in Palestine and the practical work of reconstructing the land, he enjoins Landauer’s prophetic warning against the dangers of “vacuous nationalism.” Yet due to his failure to perceive the utopian possibilities of Zionism, Simon avers, Landauer gave his life for the chimerical hopes of revolution. Nonetheless, his legacy has a profound Jewish dimension: To establish the sacred in the midst of life – “that is the hallowed law of Judaism.” The volume concludes with a memoir by Brigitte Hausberger, Landauer’s youngest daughter. In the late 1920s she married the Vienna-born physician Dr. Igor Peschkowsky, who upon emigrating to the U.S.A. changed his name to Paul Nicholas, after his father, Nicolai. The eldest of their two sons is Mike Nichols (b. 1930), the renowned film director and Oscar laureate. In April 1938 Mike and his brother joined their father who had settled in New York City a few months earlier. Brigitte would, however, manage to reunite with them in 1940, escaping the clutches of the Nazis via Italy. After her husband died, she married Dr. Franz Hausberger, a research physician who emigrated to the U.S. after the war and settled in Philadelphia. Her memoir, as noted above, is based on an interview conducted at her home in Philadelphia on 28 October 1976. Anya Mali meticulously prepared the manuscript for publication, a demanding task exacerbated by the fact that, since most of the participants in the volume are not native English speakers, their contributions often required fundamental rewriting. Her attentiveness to stylistic and conceptual detail has immeasurably

Introduction 

 13

enhanced the quality of this volume. In translating citations from German she was graciously aided by Dorthe Seifert and Ashraf Noor. Itta Shedletzky assisted in identifying arcane sources. Julia Matveev and Heike Wagner of the Rosenzweig Center provided much appreciated technical assistance in preparing the manu­ script for publication. At a critical hour in the process, Sam Berinn Shonkoff pitched in with unfailing resourcefulness to reorganize the footnotes. Erik Dreff conscientiously prepared the index. I am especially grateful to Margaret M. Mitchell, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for arranging a subsidy in support of the preparation of the index. I wish to record my gratitude to all the individuals named above, as well as Julia Brauch of de Gruyter, for their invaluable collaboration in the realization of this volume. Jerusalem, July 2014

Paul Mendes-Flohr

Messianic Radicals: Gustav Landauer and Other German-Jewish Revolutionaries The false Messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah. He is the changing form of the changeless hope. He separates every Jewish generation into those whose faith is strong enough to give themselves up to an illusion, and those whose hope is so strong they do not allow themselves to be deluded. The former are the better, the latter the stronger. Franz Rosenzweig1

In the midst of the Bavarian Revolution of 1918-1919, a group of students at the University of Munich organized a study circle to discuss the urgent social and political questions of the day. To distinguish themselves from the right-wing Corpstudenten, they fancied themselves to be a Freistudentenschaft, and met weekly in a local bookshop.2 In January 1919, they were addressed by Max Weber, who was soon to assume a professorship at the university.3 In a room packed to overflow1 The epigraph by Franz Rosenzweig is from “The False and True Messiah: A Note to a Poem by Jehuda ha-Levi,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1961), 350. I wish to dedicate this article to the memory of Ernest Frankel and Ernst Akivah Simon, who exemplified the cultural sensibilities and human ideals of German Jewry. 2 Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 16. The Freistudentenschaft was formally known as the Freistudentischer Bund, a left-leaning liberal student group with branches throughout Germany. 3 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 707. Karl Löwith, who attended the lecture, gives the date of the lecture “Science as a Vocation” simply as during the winter semester 1918-1919 (Löwith, Mein Leben, 16). Although there is considerable disagreement among Weber scholars, most now tend to follow Marianne Weber, who in her biography of her husband holds that the lecture took place in January 1919. See also Wolfgang Schluchter, “Excursus: The Question of the Dating of ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation,’” in Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, ed. Günther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 113-116. On the basis of his research, Schluchter himself believes that ‘Science as a Vocation” was actually delivered as early as November 1917 (114-115). There is a reason, however, to doubt the veracity of Löwith’s report, which is given in vivid detail, although it is, of course, possible that Weber delivered the same lecture twice or had given substantially different lectures under the same



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ing, Weber spoke to the enthralled students about the moral tasks and sociological boundaries of scholarship in the modern world. This lecture, delivered freely and without a pause, was recorded by a stenographer and later published under the title “Science as a Vocation.” Two months later, Weber once again addressed the students on a parallel theme, “Politics as a Vocation.”4 In these now-famous lectures, the sociologist offered, in striking contrast to the heated rhetoric of the day, a cold analysis of what he regarded to be the misconceived idealism of the youths then ruling the streets of Munich.5 Indeed, Weber had a profound appreciation of the ideals that inspired the youthful and older intellectuals (some of whom he knew personally and held in great esteem) who led the revolution that erupted in November 1918 and came to a brutal end in May 1919.6 He shared, to some degree, their conviction that – with title. Löwith claims that the lecture he heard was virtually identical to the printed version that was prepared on the basis of a stenographer’s protocol of Weber’s oral presentation. See Löwith, Mein Leben, 16. It may be noted that Löwith was first demobilized from the Kaiser’s army in December 1917, commencing his studies at the University of Munich shortly thereafter (13). Accordingly, if we are to lend credence to his testimony that he attended Weber’s lecture, it would have to have been sometime after the November 1917 date suggested by Schluchter. 4 Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 707. Löwith merely notes that Weber delivered a second lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” but he does not specify the date (Mein Leben, 17). Contradicting the February date given by Marianne Weber, Schluchter cites a Munich newspaper that announced: “Prof. Max Weber (Heidelberg) will speak on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ on Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., January 28 [1919] at the Kunstsaal Steinicke.” See Roth and Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision, 114. Schluchter acknowledges that Weber may have postponed the lecture to a later date. 5 Löwith, Mein Leben, 17: “In [Weber’s] statements, the experience and knowledge accumulated were concentrated; everything sprang directly from the inner self and was thought through with the most critical intellect, forcibly and intensively, thanks to the human emphasis that his personality placed on it. The renunciation of any easy solution corresponded to the acute formulation of the questions posed. He tore apart all the veils of wishful thinking, and yet everybody could not but feel that at the heart of this clear intellect there was a deeply earnest humanity. After the innumerable revolutionary addresses of the literary activists, Weber’s words were a relief [Erlösung].” 6 Weber was particularly fond of Ernst Toller, who served as chairman of the Central Council of the short-lived Räterepublik proclaimed in April 1919. After the suppression of the revolution, Toller was placed on trial for high treason, and Weber at the trial voluntarily attested to his moral integrity. He also told the court that Toller was weltfremd, utterly unaware of the realities of the world, and ironically added, “in a fit of anger, God made [Toller] a politician” (Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 661). It is also of interest to note that in his lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” in which he delineated the limitations of a politics of Gesinnungsethik (an ethics of ultimate ends), Weber seems to have had in mind his young friend Toller (Roth and Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision, 116). Cf. also Toller’s reflections on the failure of the revolution: I have always believed that socialists, despising force, should never employ it for their own ends. And now I myself had used force and appealed to force; I who hated bloodshed had

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defeat in the First World War and with the collapse of the old regime – Germany had the unique opportunity of reversing the sins of the older generation. What he objected to was the messianic enthusiasm of the students and the attendant assumption that with goodwill alone they could usher in a better, utterly just world in which pure morality would be the sole principle of governance; in which public life, free of bourgeois cynicism, would once again be suffused with spiritual and ethical meaning; in which knowledge (by which he meant science and scholarship) would cease to serve sinister, impersonal ends and be transformed into the sole instrument of personal edification and relevance.7 Such a vision, Weber held, was indeed noble; and yet it reflected an utter lack of understanding of the complexity and nature of the modern world. The principal error of the well-intentioned but benighted idealists, in Weber’s view, was their unwillingness to accept the “disenchantment of [a] world” in which all mystery had been removed from existence by the ascendancy of reason as the fundamental ground of genuine knowledge and social organization. Further, Weber pessimistically noted that in the rational, bureaucratic order characteristic of the modern era, “precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have [forever] retreated from public life.”8 caused blood to be shed … . I meditated on the position of the men who try to mould the destiny of the world, who enter politics and try to realize their ideas in the face of the masses. Was Max Weber right after all when he said that the only logical way of life for those who were determined never to overcome evil by force was the way of St. Francis? Must the man of action always be dogged by guilt? Always? (Ernst Toller, I Was a German: An Autobiography, trans. E. Crankshaw [London: The Bodley Head,1934], 275). Despite the image of the revolutionaries as being youthful, not all were actually that young. Among the principal Jewish activists in the Bavarian Revolution, only Toller was still in his twenties; in 1918, Kurt Eisner was fifty-one; Gustav Landauer, forty-eight; Eugen Leviné, thirty-five; Erich Mühsam, forty. 7 See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), 129-156. On the apocalyptic mood of the supporters of the Bavarian Revolution, see Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Knopf, 1970), 225f. Also see Hansjörg Viesel ed., Literaten an der Wand: Die Münchner Räterepublik und die Schriftsteller (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980); and Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 1918-1919 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 304-331. For the messianic rhetoric typical of the Bavarian revolutionaries, see the speech by Kurt Eisner – who served as the first president of the Bavarian Republic – at the festivities celebrating its establishment: “The world seems shattered, lost in the abyss. Suddenly in the midst of darkness and despair the sounds of trumpets ring out, proclaiming a new world, a new mankind, a new freedom.” Quoted in Stephen Lamb, “Intellectuals and the Challenge of Power: The Case of the Munich Räterepublik,” in The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic, ed. Anthony Phelan (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985), 140. 8 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155.



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If meaning were to be found, it was in pianissimo, in the purely personal and internal realms of existence.9 Weber concluded his first lecture with a sermonic rebuke of those who were impatient with the world as it was and thus longed for redemption: “[For them,] the situation is the same as resounds in the beautiful Edomite watchman’s song of the period of exile – the night of exile – that had been included in Isaiah’s oracle: He calleth to me, … Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, but it is still night: if ye will enquire, come again another time (Isa. 21:11).”10 And Weber added in a grave tone that deeply moved his audience:11 “The people to whom this was said has enquired and tarried for more than two millennia, and we are shaken when we realize its fate. From this we want to draw the lesson that nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently.”12 One is to reconcile oneself to the night of exile, forgo the hope of redemption and fulfill the ‘‘‘demands of the day’ in one’s personal relations as in one’s vocation.”13 Weber’s association of the naive, romantic messianism of the Munich radicals with the fate of the Jews and the vain, self-defeating longing for redemption may have been an oblique reference to the fact that so many of the young radicals were Jews. Indeed, he was troubled that Jews – among others, Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Leviné, Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller – were playing such a conspicuous role in the Bavarian Revolution.14 Weber was convinced that the inevitable defeat of the revolution and the equally inevitable backlash would lead to the heightening of anti-Semitism15 – as in fact it did.16 For Jewish radicals, 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 128. The translators of Weber’s lecture render the citation from Isaiah according to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. I have, however, translated the citation anew in order to reflect Weber’s own translation of the Hebrew text. 11 Löwith, Mein Leben, 149f. 12 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 156. 13 Ibid. 14 For a detailed discussion of the Jews in the Bavarian Revolution, see Werner T. Angress, “Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,” in Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution, 1916-1923, ed. Werner Mosse (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1971), 234-251. 15 Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 648f.: Weber despised antisemitism, but he regretted the fact that in those days there were so many Jews among the revolutionary leaders … . He said that on the basis of the historical situation of the Jews it was understandable that they in particular produced these revolutionary natures. But given the prevailing ways of thinking, it was politically imprudent for Jews to be admitted to leadership and for them to appear as leaders. He thought in terms of Realpolitik and saw the danger that basically desirable political talents would be discredited in the minds of the public. 16 See Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980), 27f.; Saul Friedländer, “Die politische Veränderung der Kriegszeit und ihre Auswir-

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of course, such considerations could not compromise what they regarded as a matter of principle; worse yet, they were a betrayal of humanity’s hope – a hope that the philosopher of revolutionary politics, Ernst Bloch, unabashedly identified as messianic. But the revolution primed by messianic hope (according to this German-Jewish philosopher) was not to be viewed as a chimerical attempt to rush the gates of paradise. It was rather a defiant refusal to accept the misery of human existence. For hope, Bloch explained, is a projection of a future that transcends existing realities; hope allows humanity to envision an alternative, happier world; hope, as such, has inspired revolutionary politics from time immemorial. Bereft of an eschatological vision and passion, a forlorn humanity would haplessly resign itself to the indignities and injustices of the established order. Hence, for Bloch, the type of realism recommended by Weber would only serve to deny hope and to perpetuate human misery, both material and existential. Humanity would be doomed were it to reconcile itself to the disenchantment of the world. The refusal to do so was not to be construed as naive optimism; it was rather born of an unflinching recognition of prevailing evil. “The messianic,” Bloch explained in Geist der Utopie (a volume he wrote in the wake of the horrors he witnessed during the First World War), “discerns the future precisely in the dark of the lived moment.”17 Hope is a brave confrontation with evil; it resists all temptation to deny evil’s fearsome reality with the anaesthetizing categories of the sociologist and political scientist. Hope recognizes evil to be evil, as a force to be overcome if humanity is to endure with dignity. Thus, revolutionary politics, according to Bloch, was in the first instance an angry protest against evil. But the revolutionary, he added, is preeminently an agent of hope, of a hope emboldened by what he called “a revolutionary Gnosis.”18 Painfully aware of human suffering and injustice, Bloch’s revolutionary discards all illusion that the world is ruled by a benevolent, caring God, and he unapologetically assumes the Gnostic view that the world, as presently constituted, is not our home. A homeless humanity is adrift in a universe governed by

kungen auf die Judenfrage,” in Mosse and Paucker, Deutsches Judentum, 50-54. On the role of Jews in the revolution in Bavaria – and elsewhere in Germany – and the anxieties this aroused in the Jewish community, see Donald L. Niewyk, “The German Jews in Revolution and Revolt, 1918-19,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4, The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914-1921, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 41-50. 17 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (repr. of 2nd ed. of 1918, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 237. On the messianic aspect of this radicalism, see Klaus Schreiner, “Messianism in the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 311-362. 18 Bloch, “Nachbemerkung” [1963] in Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 347.



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satanic forces,19 which in the modern period have tightened their grip by promoting the disenchantment of the world and the attendant cynicism masquerading as rational sobriety: “The devil once again totally dominates us; even if one does not wish to believe in him, one sees his cloven foot, and he, the devil, absolutely undisturbed, rules us as apparently pure nothingness, as utter disenchantment [Entzauberung], intrinsically blocking human beings from mystery.”20 Bloch regarded it as the task of revolutionary politics to rescue “mystery” – the misty climes in which the human spirit allows itself to hope – in order to restore to humanity the vision of the eschaton, the vision of a future in which one will be truly at home in the world. Bloch thus sought to illuminate the spiritual and moral passion informing the revolutionary ethos – duly defined by him as “the categorical imperative with revolver in hand”21 – by demonstrating its fundamental continuity with the eschatological imagination. Indeed, his entire œuvre (embracing sixteen volumes)22 may be regarded as a sustained meditation on messianism as “the a priori of [all genuine] culture and politics.”23 Despite his frequent reference to Jewish messianic lore and teachings, Bloch would resolutely reject the characterization of his thought as specifically Jewish. The sources of his thought were eclectic: Jewish, Christian and pagan. He recruited innumerable traditions to illustrate what he regarded to be the basic, albeit often repressed, eschatological impulse of humanity throughout the ages. Moreover, he discerned this impulse not only within religious traditions, but also in art and, above all, in music.24 Although he did not hesitate to cite Jewish sources, they did not enjoy any particular preem-

19 The reference to Satan is not merely rhetorical; by hypostatizing the source of human suffering as the work of Satan, Bloch seeks to underscore that “evil” (a metaphorical term that serves to apostrophize “unjustifiable” suffering) is both fundamentally antagonistic to human nature and a power to be boldly confronted. 20 Quoted in Irving Fetscher, “Unzeitgemäss und spekulativ: Ernst Blochs ‘Geist der Utopie,’” Neue Züricher Zeitung, weekend edition, 10-12 November 1979, 69. 21 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 302. 22 Sixteen volumes of Bloch’s collected writings have thus far been published by Suhrkamp Verlag of Frankfurt, now Berlin. 23 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, quoted in Fetscher, “Unzeitgemäss und spekulativ,” 69. 24 See Ernst Bloch, On Music, trans. Peter Palmer, intro. David Drew (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 243: “Music as a whole stands at the farther limits of humanity, but at those limits where humanity, with a new language and hallowed by the call to achieved intensity, to the attained world ‘we,’ is first taking shape. And this ordering in our musical expression means a home, indeed a crystal home, but one derived from our future freedom; a star, but one that will be a new Earth.”

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inence in his writings. Certainly Bloch did not regard himself as spiritually and intellectually beholden to Judaism.25 Furthermore, his “revolutionary Gnosticism,” with its denial of the world as God’s creation (not to speak of his avowed atheism)26 put him at extreme odds 25 Bloch’s Jewishness is frequently noted in connection with his messianism, but how his ancestral faith may have influenced the development of his thought is rarely explicated. See the insightful comments by van Asperen: [It is difficult] to designate precisely to what extent Bloch’s Jewish origin has influenced his ideas … . Bloch certainly did not have a traditional Jewish upbringing … . Yet we know that as a student he counted quite a few East-European Jews among his friends with whom the questions of Jewishness were discussed … . Bloch at least had a conscious confrontation with his Jewishness. [To be sure, he was not a Zionist,] but he was aware of the typical contribution of Jewish spirituality. [He regarded] the Jews as the symbol of the utopian attitude … . [But] he states explicitly that Judaism is not an anthropological quality, but a Messianic attitude which transcends national boundaries. Thomas Münzer showed it, says Bloch, the Rothschilds did not. (G. M. van Asperen, “Hope and History: A Critical Inquiry into the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch,” [Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Utrecht, 1973], 18f.). The question of the Jewishness of German Jewish revolutionaries and radical thinkers has exercised many. See, e.g., Rolf Kauffeldt, “Zur jüdischen Tradition im romantisch-anarchistischen Denken Erich Mühsams und Gustav Landauers,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, 69 (1984): 3-28; Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism” New German Critique 34 (Winter, 1985): 78-124; and Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe; trans. H. Heaney (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992.) Cf. Scholem’s comment that “acknowledged and unacknowledged ties to their Jewish heritage are evident [in] the writings of the most important ideologists of revolutionary messianism, such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse,” in Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in his On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, (New York: Schocken, 1976, 287). Scholem’s use of the term “ties” in this context is ambiguous, for he merely demonstrates parallels between “the messianic idea of Judaism” and that of the writers mentioned. Specifically, there is a tendency in the literature to regard the Jewish radicals of the Bavarian Revolution and the Weimar Republic as votaries of the Jewish messianic tradition, noting that this tradition promotes a this-worldly Redemption and, accordingly, historical activism. The question of the Jewishness of the Jewish revolutionaries and radicals, however, is more complex than whether they represent (even unconsciously and by virtue of some peculiar ethnic sensibility to which they may have been heirs, often supposedly despite themselves) any particular tendency within the Jewish messianic tradition. First, why in this particular generation? How would one explain the revolutionary politics of the many non-Jews who shared the messianic vision of their Jewish comrades? My own preference is for a historical-sociological explanation of the kind reportedly suggested by Weber. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 648: “On the basis of the historical situation of the Jews it was understandable that they in particular produced these revolutionary natures.” For an attempt at such an analysis, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Jewish Intellectuals: A Methodological Prolegomena,” chapter 1 of his Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990). See also Löwy, Redemption and Utopia, ch. 3. 26 This is not to say Bloch was devoid of a religious sensibility. See Gershom Scholem, “Wohnt Gott im Herzen eines Atheisten? Zu Ernest Blochs 90. Geburtstag,” Der Spiegel, 7 July 1975, 110-114.



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with the most fundamental theological presuppositions of Judaism.27 There is thus a paradox in the fact that his conception of the overarching task of philosophy as developing an “epistemology of the future” seems to have been inspired by Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), a philosopher who explicitly sought to ground his work in a systematic elaboration of what he regarded to be the basic Jewish principle of messianic hope. In July 1908, Bloch submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Würzburg.28 His dissertation, which was devoted to a probing appraisal of Heinrich Richert’s theory of knowledge, was written before Bloch’s adoption of Marxism and Hegelian dialectics. Yet the dissertation already displayed the rudiments of his philosophy of hope, presented in a critical Auseinandersetzung along with Hermann Cohen’s conception of hope and the future as philosophical categories.29 Significantly, on completing his dissertation, Bloch sent a copy to the famed neo-Kantian philosopher of Marburg with a dedication: “For Herr Geheimrat Hermann Cohen with high esteem. Ernst Bloch.”30 27 Heterodoxy per se, of course, would not disturb Bloch. He self-consciously and proudly identified with religious heretics, regarding them as the custodians of the eschatological impulse in their respective communities. But heterodoxy and heresy are positions that emerge dialectically from within a specific tradition; they bear the imprint of a spiritual and intellectual struggle with that tradition. Accordingly, heresy is to be distinguished from simply contrary opinions. In this respect, it is questionable whether Bloch’s gnosticism and atheism are to be deemed Jewish heresies. 28 Ernst Bloch, Kritische Erörterungen über Rickert und das Problem der modernen Erkennthistheorie. Inaugural dissertation (Ludwigshafen: 1909). 29 Ibid., 71-75. For a detailed discussion of Bloch’s dissertation, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “‘To Brush History Against the Grain’: The Eschatology of the Frankfurt School and Ernst Bloch,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51, no. 4 (December 1983), 636-640. In his dissertation, Bloch refers exclusively to Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1902), a purely philosophical work that makes no reference to Judaism. (Cf. Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis.) Yet in the preface to the first edition of the 1902 work, Cohen makes oblique but striking reference to his Jewish creed. In decrying Germany’s retreat to nationalism from its earlier humanistic and universal ideals, he expresses his conviction that it is but a temporary relapse. He ascribes his “optimism” to his reassuring experience as a teacher at the University of Marburg and to his “faith in the religious truth of prophetic messianism.” See “Vorrede zur ersten Auflage,” in Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1914), xiif. In 1908, when Bloch was working on his dissertation, Cohen forcefully presented his concept of prophetic messianism in a widely reviewed essay, “Religiöse Postulate,” a lecture held at the second conference of the Verband der deutschen Juden on 13 October 1907. (See Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, intro. Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Bruno Strauss ([Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke, 1924], vol. 1, 1-14). For a list of reviews of the lecture, see ibid., 335. Also see Cohen’s systematic discussion of the twin prophetic concepts of the “future” and “messianism” in Ethik des reinen Willens (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1904), 405-411. It is plausible that at the time he wrote his dissertation Bloch was familiar with these works. 30 Cf. the copy of Bloch’s dissertation deposited in the Hermann Cohen Archive, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, varia COH 121/B62.

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Cohen introduced the categories of “hope” and the “messianic future” into philosophic discourse, linking and explicitly developing them on the basis of Jewish sources.31 He sought to show that the biblical, or rather, prophetic vision of a messianic future was not only the basis for, but also the most refined expression of, the Enlightenment’s doctrine of progress and the moral unity of mankind.32 To be sure, Cohen was aware of the fact that, as a collective singular, the “future”33 – denoting a common historical experience – and “humanity” – as

31 Cohen tended to maintain a fast division between his strictly philosophical and Jewish writings. In the former, he developed the categories “messianic hope” and “future” on the basis of his idealistic method. See Nathan Rotenstreich, “Hermann Cohen: Judaism in the Context of German Philosophy,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover: New England Univ. Press, 1985), 51-63; Paul Natorp, “Zu Cohens Religionsphilosophie,” in Cohen und Natorp, ed. Helmut Holzhey (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1986), vol. 2, 112-114, 137. Cohen’s Jewish writings were collected in three volumes as Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften. For an English selection of these writings, see Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope, intro. and trans. Eva Jospe (New York: Norton, 1971). Cf. Cohen’s posthumous Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan (New York: Ungar, 1972). One important exception to Cohen’s separation of his strictly philosophical and Jewish interests is his massive revision of Kantian ethics, Ethik des reinen Willens, in which he discussed anti-Semitism (Judenhass) as grounded in a misunderstanding of the Jews’ notion of honor (Ehre) and their persistence as a people in the Diaspora. Jewish fidelity, Cohen argued, is not a matter of “atavism” but rather of an allegiance to the prophetic mission “to prepare the union of states in the messianic idea of a united mankind,” (ibid., 499f.). In the same volume (399-409), Cohen also discussed in extenso the prophetic (he refrains from saying “Jewish” in this context) concepts of the future and messianism. 32 See William Kluback, The Idea of Humanity: Hermann Cohen’s Legacy to Philosophy and Theology (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987). 33 Jürgen Gebhardt, “Messianische Politik und ideologische Massenbewegung,” in Von kommenden Zeiten: Geschichtspropheten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim H. Knoll and Julius H. Schoeps (Stuttgart and Bonn: Burg, 1984), 49-52. The emergence of the “future” as a collective singular was correlated with the crystallization of the modern concepts of “history” and “progress.” Cf. ibid., 50: Future originally meant a spatial advent, the arrival of someone or something. This was the chief meaning until the seventeenth century. Only first in the early modern period does the term attain a temporal meaning, denoting also the temporal point of the advent [i.e., a future age]. It is important to note the role that the word [“future”] played in the language of the Church , the Bible … where it marked but the eschatological event. It entirely corresponded to the old Latin concept of status futurus, which signifies the future things, the last things … . As a collective singular, “future” developed first in the eighteenth century out of the general concept of a future time … . Henceforth, it denotes the temporal space and content that follows the present time. The concept of a future historical age, of course, could have existed avant la lettre, indeed, that is what Cohen endeavors to show with regard to prophetic messianism.



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a moral attribute of “mankind”34– were unique to the modern period. But he sought to show that these concepts were also implicit in the ideational structure of biblical Judaism. Thus, as he declared in a lecture of 1907 (the year in which Bloch was working on his dissertation) “from the very first, the One God implied a mankind united in the ideal of morality.”35 For Cohen, “messianism,” which was also a term of modern coinage, referred to a vision of redemption without the mediation of God’s appointed Messiah whose miraculous advent was awaited by traditional Jewry.36 The freeing of the conception of a messianic future from a dependence on the miracle of a personal Messiah – a Son of David dispatched by God – was typical of modern Liberal Judaism, particularly as it had evolved in nineteenth-century Germany.37 A depersonalized messianism was one of the essential tenets of Liberal and Reform Judaism.38 Cohen argued that this transformation of the messianic concept was an immanent, dialectically necessary development within Judaism, “The ideality of the Messiah, his significance as an idea, is shown in the overcoming of the person of the Messiah and in the dissolution of the personal image in the pure notion of time, the concept of the age. Time becomes future and only future.”39 Cohen’s conception of prophetic Judaism as anticipating the precepts of modern humanism provided a systematic, and eloquent, articulation of German-Jewish liberal sensibility and what Reform and Liberal Jewish theologians referred to

34 Hans Erich Bödeker, “Menschheit, Humanität, Humanismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1982), vol. 3, 1063-1128. Cf. H. Cohen, Religion of Reason, ch. 13. Cohen attributed to Kant the decisive move in rendering mankind a moral concept: The exact terminological meaning of the word “mankind” in Kant is, to be sure, first of all determined by opposition to the empirical man as understood in psychological and historical experience, so that mankind is equivalent to the moral rational being. However, in his terminology the term does not refer exclusively to the rational being derived from the methodology of ethics. Mankind occupies the most important position in all his formulations so that there is no doubt that it has for Kant a universal, cosmopolitan meaning (ibid., 241). 35 Cohen, “Religiöse Postulate,” in Strauss, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, vol. 1, 6. 36 The term “messianism” was apparently first coined by the Polish-born mathematician Józef Maria Hoene-Wronski (1778-1853) to characterize a conception of absolute intellectual and political progress. See Gebhardt, “Messianische Politik,” 44-46. 37 Steven S. Schwarzschild, “The Personal Messiah; Toward the Restoration of a Discarded Doctrine,” in Arguments and Doctrines: A Reader of Jewish Thinking in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1970), 521-537; Max Weiner, “Der Messiasgedanke in der Tradition und seine Umbiegung im modernen Liberalismus,” in his Festgabe für Claude Montefiore (Berlin: Philo, 1928), 151-156. 38 See Schwarzschild, “The Personal Messiah,” 526f. 39 H. Cohen, Religion of Reason, 249.

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as the ideals of ethical monotheism.40 Moreover, with his claim that monotheism had foreshadowed the ethical idealism of Germany’s finest spirits, especially the teachings of Kant, Cohen did much to strengthen the self-esteem of German Jewry.41 But his intention was not merely apologetic. Indeed, throughout his life he vigorously sought to guard the honor of middle-class Jewry as it sought acceptance in a world presumably beholden to liberal values.42 Cohen was no mere liberal, however. For him, the prophetic heritage of Israel enjoined a committed concern for the poor and disinherited members of society: “The messianic God does not represent merely a future image of world history, however. He demands – by virtue of the eternal ideas conjoined in Him – political action [in the present] and continuous, tireless participation in various concrete national tasks. It is the duty of every Jew to help bring about the messianic age by involving himself in the national life of his country.”43 Cohen’s moral-religious commitments led him to endorse socialism,44 observing that the politics of the prophets “is nothing other than what nowadays we call socialism.”45 For him, however, socialism was more than a moral slogan. He was sharply critical of capitalism, regarding its system of production as morally unacceptable and, accordingly, advocated the establishment of a cooperative economy controlled by the workers.46 His doctrine of ethical socialism was perhaps his most enduring legacy. Basing himself on the Kantian principle that each human being must be regarded as an end-in-itself, Cohen held that a human being should, therefore, never be treated as a means or a tool by others, “The deepest and most 40 Cf. “[Hermann Cohen’s] thought represents the culmination and representation in systematic form of the ideas which had become the common coin of the Reform movement in the nineteenth century.” Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 206. 41 See, e.g., H. Cohen, “Affinities Between the Philosophy of Kant and Judaism,” in Reason and Hope, 77-89. Cf. “Not all German Jews, of course, had an accurate idea of Kant, nor, for that matter, had all Germans … . But what more could [middle-class German Jews] have desired than [Cohen’s] message of a sort of identity of the Jewish spirit with the doctrine of Germany’s greatest philosophical genius!” Robert Weltsch, “Introduction,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 13 (1968): viii. 42 Franz Rosenzweig, “Einleitung,” in Strauss, Hermann Cohens Jüdische Schriften, vol. 1, xxvi-xxxi. 43 H. Cohen, “Religious Postulates” [1907], in H. Cohen, Reason and Hope, 49. 44 See Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1988), ch. 6; and Steven S. Schwarzschild, “The Democratic Socialism of Hermann Cohen,” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 417-438. 45 H. Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, 559. 46 Van der Linden, Kantian Ethics, 221-236. Noting that Cohen’s ethical socialism is to be distinguished from the reforms advocated by liberals, van der Linden reminds us (333, n. 35) that “socialists typically focus on the conditions of production, whereas [welfare] liberals typically focus on the conditions of distribution.”



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powerful meaning of the categorical imperative is expressed in this [proposition]; it contains the moral program of a new era and the entire future world history … . The idea of the priority of humanity as an end becomes the idea of socialism, which defines each human as an end-in-itself [Selbstzweck].”47 Among Cohen’s students was Kurt Eisner, the leader of the band of largely Jewish intellectuals – philosophers, poets, playwrights, pacifists and anarchists – who launched the Bavarian Revolution. It was Eisner’s conviction that politics could be pursued without violence. Accordingly, as an admirer had affectionately observed, “he had hoped to change Germany by kindness.”48 Eisner had studied with Cohen at the University of Marburg, being particularly drawn to the philosopher’s ethical socialism, which, as he later recalled, touched him to the core of his being.49 To the end of his life – he was assassinated by a crazed opponent of the revolution in February 1919 – he remained true to his teacher’s ideals of a socialism guided by the categorical imperative and the vision of the prophets.50 Were Eisner and his fellow Jewish revolutionaries, indeed, representatives of Judaism or, at least, of Cohen’s conception of prophetic messianism?51 To be sure, the question is more rhetorical than substantive. For one, we have no evidence that Eisner read Cohen as a fellow Jew whose message was addressed to his Jewish loyalties.52 In his socialist writings, Cohen addressed Jews and non-Jews alike. Many non-Jews, of course, were influenced by Cohen’s neo-Kantian conception

47 H. Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, 320, 321 (trans. in van der Linden, Kantian Ethics, 223). 48 Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets Without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1979), 123. 49 Van der Linden, Kantian Ethics, 303. 50 Ibid., 302-307. 51 Having died in April 1918, Hermann Cohen did not witness the Bavarian Revolution. Although he did not rule out “eruptive revolution” in principle when there were no other options left to resist a repressive, unjust political system (cf. van der Linden, Kantian Ethics, 266), it is doubtful whether he would have countenanced the actions of Eisner and his followers. With a passion and devotion equal to that with which he promoted socialism, Cohen throughout his life underscored the patriotism of German Jewry, especially during the First World War. See Steven S. Schwarzschild, “‘Germanism and Judaism’ – Hermann Cohen’s Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen, (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), 129-172, esp. 156f. Moreover, Cohen would never have regarded any act, no matter how dramatic or far-reaching, as ushering in the final Redemption. The eschaton, he taught, lies in the absolute future that is ever-receding into eternity; messianism is, therefore, an asymptotic task. 52 Cf. David Melchior, “[Although Eisner] never left the Jewish community, Judaism and the Jewish heritage … meant to him as good as nothing” (“Stiefkind der Geschichte? Zum 100. Geburtstag von Kurt Eisner,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland 22, no. 7 (1967); quoted by Angress, in Mosse and Paucker, Deutsches Judentum, 247.

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of socialism.53 Further, Eisner’s Jewish comrades were apparently unfamiliar with Cohen’s teachings. If they were aware of them, they were not particularly inspired by them;54 and there is no evidence of any other specifically Jewish teachings that may have informed their politics.55 Yet the question of the Jewishness of the Bavar53 Among the more notable disciples of Cohen’s socialism were Albert Gorland, Paul Natorp, Franz Staudinger and Karl Vorländer. None of these individuals, who did much to disseminate Cohen’s teachings, were Jewish. 54 The term “inspired,” of course, is ambiguous; it may suggest that one’s thought had its source or origins in Hermann Cohen or that one’s thought was given added force or passion through an encounter with Cohen and his writings. In the latter case, it is conceivable that one’s socialism or inclination to socialism had its origins independent of Cohen and that a Jew reading his writings on the prophetic basis of socialism may have derived from them a special sense of Jewish calling, enhancing his or her commitment to socialism. Although it is, indeed, plausible that some Jewish socialists (e.g., Bloch or Eisner) may have been so “inspired” by Cohen, we have no documentation permitting us to present this assumption as a fact. 55 Rolf Kauffeldt has sought to uncover the Jewish sources inspiring the utopian vision and political activism of two leading protagonists of the Bavarian Revolution, Erich Mühsam and Gustav Landauer. Basing himself on an article by Gershom Scholem on the Jewish messianic tradition, Kauffeldt concludes Mühsam and Landauer were “beholden to this tradition” and specifically to that tendency within the tradition emphasizing that Redemption is a public, historical event and that its vision enjoins action in the here and now. “Landauer and Mühsam … assumed precisely the tradition of active messianism and interpreted it according to their social Utopian goal.” See Kauffeldt, “Zur jüdischen Tradition,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, 22. (Kauffeldt refers to Scholem’s article that appeared in English under the title “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality [New York: 1971], 1-36.) For reasons developed throughout this chapter, I find this line of argumentation faulty. I shall simply note here that it is based on an imprudent reading of Scholem, isolating one element in his depiction of the complex dialectics of the Jewish messianic tradition; it is doubtful whether Scholem would have regarded political activism of Jewish utopians as, eo ipso, reflecting the messianic activism of which he spoke. (See the statement, “According to some of its observers, devotees, and critics, [socialism] has in it a great deal of secular messianism. It is a moot question whether that is correct. There is an element of truth to it, but how much is a very big question.” [M. Tsur and A. Shapira, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” in Scholem, Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 26].) Further, Kauffeldt bases his argument on an apodictic assertion that, as Jews, Landauer and Mühsam had, perforce, regarded themselves as commanded by this tradition. However, an assertion, no matter how plausible, cannot be presented as evidence in the absence of compelling documentation. It is true that Landauer does seem to have taken some ethnic pride in the fact that Jews played a leading role in the Bavarian Revolution. On reading an article, “The Revolution and Us,” that Martin Buber published in Der Jude 2 (November-December 1918), Landauer urged his friend to write another article “treating the leading role played by the Jews in the upheaval. The revolution in Munich, for instance, where no one had thought of organizing on a wider scale beforehand, was prepared by seven persons: at the head Kurt Eisner … two ardent young Jews [Mühsam and Toller] were his best and most tireless helpers; another ally was a well-to-do Bavarian farmer who has been blind for seven years; the other three were young workers” (Letter from Landauer to Buber, 2 Decem-



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ian revolutionaries – and other Jewish protagonists of the revolutions that swept Europe in the years 1917-1919 – was frequently raised.56 As Franz Kafka anxiously recorded after having overheard a conversation of German guests at a hotel dining room, “They don’t forgive the Jewish Socialists and Communists a single thing; they drown them during the soup and quarter them while carving the roast.”57 In more polite circles, the question of the Jewishness of so many prominent revolutionaries was posed in order to focus on the apparent Jewish inclination to political activism, a charge that was reinforced by the postwar upsurge in Zionism among German-Jewish youth. Christian theologians suggested that the Jews’ thisworldly conception of redemption was at fault. Typical was a widely discussed essay, “Judentum und Christentum” (“Judaism and Christianity”) by the highly reputed Jesuit philosopher Erich Przywara.58 Published in 1926 in the respected and influential cultural and political monthly, Stimmen der Zeit, this article advanced the argument that the restless “political activism” of the Jews threatened the very foundations of a Christian civilization that was grounded in a quiet, patient faith in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. With the learned inflections of an objective scholar, Przywara maintained that the political passions of secular Jews were dialectically related to Israel’s rejection of Jesus – who had brought to mankind the promise of a genuinely spiritual relationship to God – and to the consequent enslavement of the Jews’ religious imagination to a this-worldly messianism. Przywara held that the messianism of the modern secular Jew, whose humane and high ideals he acknowledged, was but a misplaced idealism. Other Christian writers were less charitable and accused the secular radical Jews of more sinister motives, linking them with the spiritually desiccated and calculating piety of ber 1918, in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. Grete Schaeder [Heidelberg: 1973], vol. 2, 15). In the eulogy he delivered at Eisner’s burial, Landauer also emphasized that the martyred revolutionary was a Jew. See Friedländer, “Politische Veränderungen der Kriegszeit,” in Mosse and Paucker, Deutsches Judentum, 51 (n. 70). 56 In the mind of German and Jew alike, the revolution that enflamed Germany in 1918-1919 was a Jewish affair. As one anti-Semitic author noted, “In Magdeburg it is Brandes; in Dresden, Lipinsky, Geyer and Fleissner; and in the Ruhr, Markus and Levinsohn; in Bremerhaven and Kiel, Grünewald and Kohn; in Pfalz, Lilienthal and Heine (Quoted in Friedländer, “Politische Veränderungen,”51f.) Of course, the fact that Jews were also prominent in the contemporaneous revolutions in Hungary and Russia served to reinforce the popular association of the Jews with revolutionary politics. In fact, according to the exemplary archival research of Werner Angress, among the hundreds who played a leading position in the German revolutions, we find only fifty-two Jews or individuals of Jewish descent, that is, baptized or half-Jews (Angress, “Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,” in Mosse and Paucker, Deutsches Judentum, 301-315). 57 Kafka, Briefe, 1902-1924 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), 275 (cited in Grunfeld, Prophets Without Honor, 123). 58 Erich Przywara, “Judentum und Christentum,” Stimmen der Zeit, 3 (1926): 81-99.

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the Pharisees. Perhaps the most outrageous of these critics was the novelist and cultural critic, Oskar A. H. Schmitz, who (in a special issue of Martin Buber’s Der Jude devoted to a Jewish and Christian exchange on anti-Semitism) published an article with the deliberately antagonistic title “Desirable and Undesirable Jews” (“Wünschenswerte und nichtwünschenswerte Juden”)59 Schmitz identified the former as the Orthodox Jews “who disturb no one [and] can be most desirable fellow citizens with Aryans.”60 The undesirable Jews – deracinated and secular pacifists, socialists, Zionists – are animated by the “demonic” spirit of Pharisaism, which Schmitz defined as a sort of negative messianism. The Pharisees and their latter-day disciples, albeit irreligious, are “bearers of a messianic hope”; they view it as their task to inform the Christians that the Messiah has yet to come and, indeed, that “he must remain unreal, never to be in the here and now.”61 Hence, Schmitz concluded, “the true essence of the Pharisees is their No.”62 By insisting that redemption must be this-worldly, the Jews, in effect, denied the very possibility of true redemption.63 The challenge to Jewish scholars and religious thinkers to clarify the Jewish messianic doctrine and its relationship to political activism also came from within the Jewish community. The postwar generation of Jewish youth, particularly the Zionists among them, increasingly demanded that the Jews as a people return to history and actively seek to shape their own historical destiny in order to achieve what the more enthusiastic would call redemption.64 Within German-Jewish 59 Der Jude, Sonderheft 5: “Antisemitismus und jüdisches Volkstum” (1925): 17-33. 60 Ibid., 25. 61 Ibid., 31. 62 Ibid., 33. 63 Oskar Schmitz fails to explain, or rather does not bother to explain, how contemporary Orthodox Jews – the “desirable” Jews – manage to avoid the deleterious effects of the Pharasaic spirit. For a more comprehensive discussion of the views about Judaism and Jews that were voiced with such intensity during the Weimar Republic by Schmitz and other Christians, see Paul MendesFlohr, “Ambivalent Dialogue; Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Weimar Republic,” in Judaism and Christianity Under the Impact of National Socialism, ed. Otto Dov Kulka and Paul MendesFlohr (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1987), 99-132. For a convenient collection of Jewish and Christian exchanges in this period, see Versuche des Verstehens: Dokumente jüdisch-christlicher Begegnung aus den Jahren, 1918-1933, ed. Robert Raphael Geis and Hans-Joachim Kraus (Munich: Kaiser, 1966). 64 Martin Buber seems to have captured the mood of the postwar generation when he declared, “Youth is the eternal chance for mankind’s happiness [Glückschance], the chance eternally offered to it and eternally squandered by it.” And addressing Jewish youth specifically, he continued, “the Jewish people is deciding its fate today.” Buber, “Zion und der Jugend,” Der Jude 3 (June 1918): 99, 102. Cf. Eva G. Reichmann, “Der Bewusstseinswandel der deutschen Juden,” in Mosse and Paucker, Deutsches Judentum, 511-612, esp. 581-604. A fuller appreciation of the disposition of Jewish youth in this period would require a consideration of the general spiritual



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circles, this problem was primarily illuminated, like so many other theological issues during the period, by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who here, as so often, adopted radically different positions. In striking contrast to the mood of the period, Rosenzweig taught that, by virtue of their conception of redemption, the Jews were to remain apart from history and were to resist the temptation to participate in the perfecting of the world. The “soul” of the Jewish people, “replete with the vistas afforded by [messianic] hope, grows numb to the concerns, the doing, and the struggling of the world … . Its holiness hinders it from devoting its soul to a still unhallowed world, no matter how much the body may be bound with it.”65 Since their exile, Rosenzweig observed, the Jews no longer live in history – which is the affair of sovereign states – but beyond it, blissfully sequestered in a spiritual reality that anticipates the Kingdom of God.66 The Jews’ experience of time is exclusively set by the rhythms of their liturgical calendar. The fixed and elaborate pattern of prayer, commemoration and celebration of the ancient Jewish liturgy orders the year, so that each year replicates the preceding one. Jewish time is, thus, cyclical; it does not grow, it does not include or notice current events. In contrast to the peoples of the world whose life unfolds in history and whose sense of time is shaped both by current events and the fortunes that those events bear, the Jews focus their imagination and their sense of themselves as a Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of destiny) on eternity – a time beyond “the growth of the world,” in which all the contradictions of history will be resolved. As Rosenzweig explained in his magnum opus of 1921, The Star of Redemption:

agitation of postwar German society, which was marked by intense and varied utopian and radical political activities. See Michael Andrizky and Thomas Rautenberg, ed. ‘Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du’: Von Lichtfreunden und Sonnenkämpfern: Eine Geschichte der Freikörperkultur (Giessen: Anabas, 1989). This insightful collection of essays focuses on the German back-to-nature movement and also illuminates what the editors depict as the “mood of departure [Aufbruchsstimmung], the thirst for action and the pathos of belief that reverberated in the 1920s.” The editors similarly note: Those of the young generation fortunate enough to have returned from the inferno of the war were convinced that they were standing at a turning point in history, that a fundamental change of all values, of paradigms, was imminent. The violent ending of the nineteenth century [viz., the demise of the era of bourgeois optimism brought about by the First World War and the revolutions that followed] was regarded as the great opportunity for creating a new, better world (ibid., 50f.). 65 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1970), 332. 66 Franz Rosenzweig was introduced to this distinctly German conception of history by his teacher, Friedrich Meinecke. See Alexander Altmann, “Rosenzweig on History,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover, N.H.: New England Univ. Press, 1988), 124ff.

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[In the circuit of its liturgical year, the People of Israel is] at its goal and knows it [is] at the goal … . It anticipates eternity. The future is the driving power in the circuit of its year. Its rotation originates, so to speak, not in a thrust but in a pull. The present passes not because the past prods it on but because the future snatches it toward itself. Somehow, even the festivals of creation and revelation flow into Redemption … . The meaning of [the eternal people’s] life in time is that the years come and go, one after the other as a sequence of waiting, or perhaps wandering, but not growth … . And so that eternal people must forget the world’s growth, must cease to think thereon. It must look upon the world, its own world, as complete … . As a nationality, [the Jewish people has thus] reached the point to which the nations of the world still aspire. Its world had reached the goal … . Because the Jewish people is beyond the contradiction that constitutes the vital drive in the life of the nations – the contradiction between national characteristics and world history, home and faith, earth and heaven – it knows nothing of war. The Jew is practically the only human being who cannot take war seriously, and this makes him the only genuine pacifist. For that reason, and because he experiences perfect community in his spiritual year, he remains remote from the chronology of the rest of the world. He does not have to wait for the world history to unroll its long course to let him gain what he feels he already possesses in the circuit of every year: the experience of the immediacy of each single individual to God, realized in the perfect community of all with God.67

Although indifferent to the “growth of the world,” the Jews – or rather “the Synagogue” – is not irrelevant to world history; indeed, the Synagogue plays a crucial role in the unfolding of history as an eschatological process.68 As a nation beyond history, the Jews project the image of the future, of the goal of history. As such, the Synagogue constitutes the ontological ground of the future; because of the Jews, the eschatological future is not merely a divine promise or mere utopian goal, but a concrete reality, proleptically foreshadowed in the present. The Synagogue thus embodies humanity’s hope of redemption. Accordingly Rosenzweig evokes the ancient Hebrew benediction recited upon reading the Torah. “Blessed art Thou … who has planted eternal life in our midst.”69 Thus, the Jews are, indeed, an “eternal people,” their eternity referring not so much to their perdurability as to their realization, within historical pre-messianic time, of the future redemption.70 67 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 328-331. 68 In order to underscore Israel’s detachment from history and its organization as principally a community of divine worship, Rosenzweig preferred to speak of the Synagogue. 69 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 298. 70 A similar conception of a prolepsis, or spiritual anticipation, of Redemption, which one enjoys while still physically resident in the historical era, is often used to describe the Christian’s experience of salvation through Jesus Christ. New Testament scholars and Christian theologians refer to this experience as realized eschatology. Within the context of Rosenzweig’s polemic with Christianity, it may be argued that, by characterizing the Jewish experience of Torah and God as realized eschatology, in effect, he is appropriating what Christians had hitherto regarded to be their privileged relationship.



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Rosenzweig thus likens the Synagogue to “a star” that “must burn incessantly,” its flames eternally feeding upon itself. “It required no fuel from without. Time has no power over it and must roll past.” Its eternal flame, Rosenzweig observes, marks it as a “star of redemption.”71 Hovering majestically above history, the “star of redemption” – the Synagogue – beckons the peoples of the world to reach out beyond history to eternity, to a “redeemed” existence freed from the political and existential torments of history. The “star of redemption,” however, is only truly apprehended by the Church because, in regarding itself as the true Israel, it alone takes notice of the Synagogue. Despite itself, perhaps, the Church is challenged by the abiding reality of the Jews as an eternal people. The Synagogue resides where the Church knows it should, but cannot. (And here, Rosenzweig argues, lies the ultimate ground of Christian anti-Semitism).72 By virtue of its mission to the pagans, the Church enters history, associating itself with the struggles and fate of the peoples of the world. There within the bosom of history, the Church as a “supranational power”73 is to lead the peoples of the world to Zion, to the eschatological community in which all will dwell together in common recognition of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.74 In so doing, the Church transforms the divisive histories of the nations of the world into a “world-history” flowing along a messianic trajectory.75 Judaism and Christianity, according to Rosenzweig, are thus joined in a special, albeit unacknowledged, alliance. From the perspective of God’s Heils­plan, both Covenants – the Old and the New – are valid; together, they work to bring the redemption, the Synagogue as a metahistorical community of prayer and the Church through history. “From two sides there is … a knocking on the door of the future.”76 Rosenzweig’s vision of history was informed by his conviction that, on its own, history cannot redeem itself and that, left on its own, history spins upon its own directionless axis, lost in an endless cycle of wars and revolutions. This conviction began to crystallize while Rosenzweig was still a student of history 71 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 298. 72 Cf. Rosenzweig’s letter to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, undated, in Judaism Despite Christianity: The ‘Letters on Christianity and Judaism’ Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, ed. E. Rosenstock-Huessy (New York: Schocken, 1971), 107-115, letter 11. 73 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 329. 74 “[Through Christianity] the messianic hope, the Torah and the commandments have become familiar topics, topics of conversation among the inhabitants of the far isles and many peoples, uncircumcised of heart and flesh” (Ibid., 336). 75 For a detailed discussion of Rosenzweig’s messianic conception of “world-history,” see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” in Mendes-Flohr, Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 138-161. 76 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 350.

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at the university, and especially as he was writing his doctoral dissertation on Hegel’s conception of the nation-state, which he submitted in the summer of 1912.77 But it was later, during the First World War (in which he served as a combat soldier on the eastern front) and its convulsive aftermath, that Rosenzweig concluded that in order to achieve the envisioned era of universal peace and a unity of peoples, history requires a metahistorical reference, an ever-present glimpse of the paradise beyond history. On the stormy seas of history (according to one image employed by Rosenzweig), the clear sight of land keeps the ship of humanity on course toward its destination. Significantly, he originally developed these thoughts without reference to Judaism or any other theological considerations, and, indeed, only later was he to assign a metahistorical role to Jewry.78 Once he had done so, however, he reached the paradoxical conclusion that, for the sake of history, the Jews had to remain apart from history, resisting the allure of Zionism and political activism. Gershom Scholem has commented that, with his doctrine of redemption, Rosenzweig aligned himself with “a deep-seated tendency” within Judaism to deny messianism its apocalyptic sting.79 The traditional conception of messianism, Scholem observed, most often envisions redemption as an apocalyptic event accompanied by a catastrophic disruption of history; accordingly, it is said, redemption breaks into history with a cataclysmic, revolutionary force. To be sure, as Scholem acknowledged, Rosenzweig rejected the “bourgeois” concep-

77 Rosenzweig’s doctoral dissertation was later expanded and published in two volumes under the title Hegel und der Staat (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1920); Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 78 For a discussion of the development of Rosenzweig’s conception of metahistory and history, see Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” 138-161. The roots of Rosenzweig’s messianic thought lie in the Enlightenment and in German idealism as much as in Judaism. With Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and other friends, Rosenzweig shared the conviction that Europe was on the threshold of the Third Millennium prophesied by St. John on the island of Patmos. This notion goes back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich von Schelling and, ultimately, to Joachim of Fiore. Cf. Altmann, “Rosenzweig on History,” 125-128, and Harold Stahmer, ‘Speak That I May See Thee!’: The Religious Significance of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 109115, 121-124. Indeed, an appreciation of Jewish messianic thought in the modern period in general, both secular and theological, cannot be divorced from this ideational context. This is not to say that Jewish messianic thought in this period is not authentically Jewish or that it merely reflects non-Jewish thinking. The latter may, indeed, have informed the Jewish messianic imagination, thereby stimulating and triggering ideas and passions immanent within the Jewish tradition. In that case, one would speak of a dialectical symbiosis between non-Jewish and Jewish messianic thought. Of course, this may be true for all periods of Jewish thought – and not only in the modern period and not only with respect to messianism. 79 Gershom Scholem, “On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 323.



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tion of progress and understood that there must be a radical disjunction between history and redemption.80 But Rosenzweig sought to bridge the chasm and soften the opposition between history and redemption. His notion of an eschatological alliance between the Synagogue and the Church suggested that redemption would be attained without any apocalyptic paroxysms. Certainly, for Rosenzweig, Jewry experiences redemption without passing through the purgatory of an apocalypse. One suspects that Scholem, as a Zionist, was particularly disturbed by the historical passivity sponsored by Rosenzweig’s conception of messianism. For “historical passivity,” Scholem contended, “is … hardly compatible with the deepest impulses of messianism.”81 Whenever messianic faith is a living force within Judaism, he noted, it invariably engenders an apocalyptic mood that rivets the imagination and expectations of the Jew on divine deliverance. The more intense this expectation, the greater the desire to do something to hasten the eschaton, to “force the End.” Hence, according to Scholem, Jewish messianism is characterized by an inevitable tension between a passivity born of a pessimistic view of history and an eagerness to rush headlong into the future.82 Although the tradition seeks to constrain messianic activism, it is, nonetheless, in Scholem’s judgment, a recurring expression of messianism as a vital reality in Judaism.83 Scholem associated Rosenzweig with Liberal Judaism and with “much more ancient” tendencies in Orthodox Judaism that have sought to deny this reality by making “a virtue of historical necessity,” forbidding “the Jewish people any historic initiative, even though 80 Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in ibid., 15; and his “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in ibid., 38. The latter essay was, indicatively, first published in English under the title “Jewish Messianism and the Idea of Progress,” Commentary 25, no. 4 (1958): 298-305. 81 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in On Jews and Judaism, 288. 82 Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 12-17. 83 Scholem’s emphasis on the apocalyptic moment of messianism – he identified it as a potential source of the utopian, history-oriented passion of the Jews – would seem to have led him to regard Zionism, sponsoring as it does the Jews’ return to history and utopian deeds, as a messianic movement. He, however, balked at this conclusion. David Biale explains this apparent inconsistency as stemming, in the first instance, from political rather than theological or scholarly considerations. In the mid-1920s, the right-wing Revisionist Zionists often adopted the rhetoric of messianism to promote policies that Scholem found loathsome and dangerous. He, accordingly, declared, “I absolutely deny that Zionism is a messianic movement and that it has the right to employ religious terminology for political goals.” Biale notes that in his scholarly work, Scholem endeavored to indicate the demonic forces that are often released by apocalyptic messianism. As a Zionist, his problem was, therefore, to show that the movement could tap the messianic energies of the people while pursuing a sober and rational political program. See Biale’s insightful analysis, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 174-188; the quotation from Scholem, 177.

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the alleged commandment of historical passivity [opposed] the deepest impulses of messianism and, in fact, spelled its perversion.”84 Rosenzweig, however, actually had a profound appreciation of the apocalyptic impulse of messianism, phenomenologically, if not theologically. In various obiter dicta, he expressed a most positive regard for the apocalyptic dimension of Israel’s messianic faith. But these comments are contained in his correspondence, first published in 1935. Thus Scholem had no access to them when he wrote his critique of Rosenzweig in 1930; indeed, he based his criticism of Rosenzweig’s messianic doctrine exclusively on The Star of Redemption. In a letter to an anti-Zionist rabbi, for instance, Rosenzweig – who in his last years regarded himself as a non-Zionist as opposed to an anti-Zionist – urged his correspondent to acknowledge the achievements of the burgeoning Hebrew culture in Palestine.85 The “dogmatic” opposition of Liberal Judaism to Zionism, he contended, was not truly religious but rather reflected the politics of Emancipation. The disingenuousness of Liberal Judaism was betrayed no less when, in opposition to Zionism, it appealed to Hermann Cohen’s teaching that redemption is in eternity, in an asymptotic, thus unattainable, future. A Jew of genuine faith, Rosenzweig averred, could not dismiss Zionism simply because of its alleged messianic pre84 Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in Scholem, On Jews and Judaism, 288. These remarks were made in 1974 and with no direct reference to Rosenzweig; however, they clearly apply to Rosenzweig since he represented for Scholem the most sophisticated – therefore, all the more beguiling – articulation of a messianic theology that denied the Jews the promise of living their lives on the historical level. In the same vein, Scholem undoubtedly objected to Rosenzweig’s presentation of Redemption as a purely inward, spiritual experience. Scholem would regard this as a perversion of Jewish teachings, for Judaism, he insisted, “in all forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of Redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community.” (“Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea” in Messianic Idea in Judaism, 1.) Although, for Rosenzweig, Redemption is experienced by the Jews in community (in the praying congregation), it certainly does not have a historical dimension; indeed, as I have noted, Rosenzweig held that, as an eschatological community, the Synagogue is a metahistorical reality. On the other hand, it should be emphasized, he taught that through Christianity, inspired by the Synagogue, Redemption would become a historical, public reality. It will be a reality, however, that is obtained not by virtue of an apocalyptic rupture in history but rather as one that gradually grows and emerges in the public weal; indeed, Redemption is a process that Rosenzweig and his Christian friends associated with the incipient emergence of the “invisible” Church of John at the beginning of the Enlightenment (cf. n. 77). 85 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 159. Indicatively, Rosenzweig supported the participation of non-Zionists in the Jewish Agency and various projects for the upbuilding of the Jewish community in Palestine. (Ernst Simon, interview with me, 1980). On Rosenzweig’s evolving attitude toward Zionism, especially as reflected in his letters and diaries, see Stefan Moses, “Politik und Religion: Zur Aktualität Franz Rosenzweig,” in Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig, ed. W. SchmiedKowarzik (Munich: K. Alber, 1988), vol. 2, 871-875.



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tensions: “I can imagine that one objects to a particular present with ‘You are not yet it.’ How one can, however, do this out of principle for the future, and indeed for all future, without thereby destroying the future, I cannot understand. I have no idea how one can pray for something, which one holds beforehand to be impossible … . The prophets meant an earthly Zion of the future. The eternity, which we Jews mean, lies not in infinity [Unendlichen], but ‘speedily’ in our days. What only comes in eternity … does not come in an eternity.”86 Even Hermann Cohen, Rosenzweig continued, once conceded that messianism can never be a mere asymptotic ideal. “I am still hoping to see the dawn of the messianic age,” the elder philosopher had unabashedly confided to Rosenzweig, adding the traditional refrain, “and speedily in our days.”87 Rosenzweig was even more emphatic in a gloss to one of the poems of Judah Halevi that he translated. On a joyous hymn composed by the Spanish Hebrew poet, one that sings of Israel’s imminent “return home”88 and one that Rosenzweig surmised was written under the impact of one of the many pseudomessiahs who recurrently emerged in Jewish history,89 he commented: The expectation of the coming of the Messiah, by which and because of which Judaism lives, would be a meaningless theologumenon, a mere “idea” in the philosophical sense, empty babble, if the appearance again and again of a “false Messiah” did not render it reality and unreality, illusion and disillusion. The false Messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah. He is the changing form of the changeless hope. He separates every Jewish generation into those whose faith is strong enough to give themselves up to an illusion, and those whose hope is so strong that they do not allow themselves to be deluded. The former are the better, the latter the stronger. The former bleed as victims on the altar of the eternity of the people, the latter are the priests who perform the service at this altar. And this will go on until the day when all will be reversed, when the belief of the believers will become truth, and the hope of the hoping a lie. Then – and no one knows whether this “then” will not be this very day – the task of the hoping will come to an end and, when the morning of the day breaks, everyone who still belongs among those who hope and not among those who believe will run the risk of being rejected. This danger hovers over the apparently less endangered life of the hopeful.90 86 Franz Rosenzweig to Benno Jacob, 23 May 1927, in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann in cooperation with Bernhard Casper (The Hague: M. Nijhof 1979), vol. 2, 593f. 87 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 351. 88 Cf. “Du schick dich an zur Heimkehr ins vielschöne Land.” This line is from the poem Rosenzweig titled “The Happy Tidings” (Die frohe Botschaft) in his Jehuda Halevi: Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte Deutsch, 2nd ed. (Berlin: L. Schweider, 1927), 122. 89 Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi, 238. In this estimation of the circumstances occasioning Halevi’s poem, Rosenzweig is following the nineteenth-century Italian Jewish scholar, Samuel David Luzzatto, whom he cites. 90 Ibid., trans. in Glatzer, 350f.

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In his appraisal of Rosenzweig’s conception of messianism, Scholem seems to have overlooked this passage – contained in a volume published in 1927 and thus available to him when he wrote his critique of Rosenzweig – perhaps because he viewed it as nothing more than a phenomenological aperçu that Rosenzweig failed to integrate into his theology of redemption.91 Indeed, Rosenzweig was not saying here that the Jews should enter history and hasten the Kingdom. Rather, he is saying that the hope for the Kingdom, if it is real and strong – if it is truly aflame in their breasts – recurrently confronts the Jews with the temptation to enter history in order to greet the Messiah. It is a temptation, however, that is to be resisted. For Rosenzweig, the future, at least as experienced by the Jews, was to remain beyond history. To be sure, in his later years, Rosenzweig did develop warm feelings for the young Zionists who were among his followers and co-workers. He learned to respect their commitment to Jewish spiritual renewal and came to admire the cultural achievements of the Zionist movement in Palestine. These sentiments certainly blunted any tendency he may have had to adopt an actively anti-Zionist position; indeed, as noted earlier, to distinguish himself from Jewish opponents to Zionism, he called himself a non-Zionist,92 and looked favorably on the upbuilding of the Jewish community in Palestine.93 He once even acknowledged in a private conversation that “Zionism is perhaps after all one of the nations’s roads into the future. This road too should be kept open.”94 Yet he never endorsed Zionism as an ideology, nor did he seek to adjust his theology to accommodate this movement and its call to the Jews to return to history. For him, the Jews were to remain a metahistorical community, serving as custodians of the future and eschatological hope.

91 There is also a passage in The Star of Redemption ignored by Scholem that indicates a profound understanding of the contemporary Jew’s messianic passion to enter history. Scholem may have similarly dismissed this passage, notwithstanding its phenomenological sensitivity, as ultimately irrelevant to Rosenzweig’s theology of Redemption: The believer in the kingdom uses the term “progress” only in order to employ the jargon of his time; in reality he means the kingdom. It is the veritable shibboleth for distinguishing him from the authentic devotee of progress whether he does not resist the prospect and duty of anticipating the “goal” at the very next moment. The future is no future without this anticipation and the inner compulsion for it, without this “wish to bring about the Messiah before his time” and the temptation to “coerce the kingdom of God into being”; without these, it [i.e., the future] is only a past distended endlessly and projected forward. For without such anticipation, the moment is not eternal; it is something that drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time (227). 92 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 159. 93 Cf. n. 85, above. 94 Cited in Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 113.



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Significantly, Rosenzweig in his later years became increasingly and self-consciously apolitical, an attitude that surely served to reinforce his messianic quietism.95 He was conservative by temperament, and looked upon the collapse of the German Empire and the abdication of the Kaiser with great grief. The revolution of 1918-1919 in particular outraged him. He decried the revolutionaries as “simpletons and peacemongers”96 who had struck an unholy alliance with “fifteenand eighteen-year-old do-nothings playing soldier.”97 Indicatively, he exclaimed, “I believe I’ll never be a democrat again! It is as impossible as pacifism. There will always be government, and there will always be war. Freedom and peace, I regard as lying – beyond.”98 Only reluctantly did Rosenzweig accept the Weimar Republic, and undoubtedly would have regarded himself a “Vernunftsrepublikaner” (“a republican of reason”), a term coined by his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke when he declared, “I remain, facing the past, in my heart a monarchist, and facing the future, I become a republican of reason.”99 In utter contrast to Rosenzweig’s conservative and apolitical disposition, Buber was both a Zionist and a socialist who expressed manifest sympathy for the revolutionaries of 1918-1919.100 His closest and dearest friend was Gustav Landauer, who played an instrumental role in all the varied stages of the Bavarian Revolution. At Landauer’s behest, Buber came to Munich in order to acquaint himself firsthand with the revolution. In February 1919, he spent, in his words, “a profoundly stirring week”101 in the company of the revolutionaries of Munich.102 He met frequently with Eisner and his comrades. As he reported in a letter to his future son-in-law, the poet Ludwig Strauss: The deepest human problems of the revolution were discussed with the utmost candor: in the very heart of events I posed questions and offered replies; and there were nocturnal hours

95 Stefan Meineke, University of Freiburg, “A Life of Contradiction: Franz Rosenzweig and His Relationship to History and Politics,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 36 (1991): 461-490. 96 (Unpublished letter from Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock). 97 Letter from Rosenzweig to his mother, 13 November 1918, in Rosenzweig, Briefe, 618. In the same letter (619), Rosenzweig states his political credo as “the more democracy in peace, that much less revolution and radicalism in war.” 98 Unpublished letter, quoted in Meineke, “A Life of Contradiction,” n. 94. 99 Cited in Phelan, “Some Weimar Theories of the Intellectual,” in The Weimar Dilemma, 26. 100 Buber did question the readiness of the revolutionaries, especially of the Spartacus party, to employ violence. See Martin Buber, “Recollection of a Death,” in his Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Schocken, 1974), 119. 101 Buber to Ludwig Strauss, 22 February 1919, in Martin Buber: Briefwechsel, vol. 2, 29. 102 For a brief memoir of the week in February 1919 in Munich in which Buber also participated in a debate with several of the revolutionary leaders at the Diet of the Bavarian Republic, see Buber, “Recollection of a Death,” Pointing the Way, 119.

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of apocalyptic gravity, during which silence spoke eloquently in the midst of discussion, and the future became more distinct than the present. And yet for all but a few it was nothing but mere bustle, and face-to-face with them I sometimes felt like a Cassandra. As for Eisner, to be with him was to peer into the tormented passions of a divided Jewish soul; nemesis shone from his glittering surface; he was a marked man. Landauer, by dint of the greatest spiritual effort, kept up his faith in him, and protected him – a shield-bearer terribly moving in his selflessness. The whole thing, an unspeakable Jewish tragedy.103

Buber left Munich on the morning of the day, 21 February 1919, on which Eisner was assassinated. Ten weeks later, Landauer would be brutally battered to death by counterrevolutionary troops. Buber was deeply shaken by the tragic death of his friend;104 he viewed Landauer as a martyred idealist, a gentle anarchist who had sacrificed his life in a doomed effort to herald an era of politics without violence.105 Buber would devote himself to honoring the memory and vision of Landauer – a man he would unabashedly eulogize as a “crucified” prophet.106 In his last will and testament, Landauer named Buber as the executor of his literary estate, a task that the latter faithfully fulfilled. With exemplary care, Buber 103 Buber to Ludwig Strauss, 22 February 1919, in Buber, Briefswechsel, vol. 2, 29. 104 For Buber, Landauer’s murder was “a death in which the monstrous, sheerly apocalyptic horror, the inhumanity of our time, has been delineated and portrayed,” quoted in Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878-1923 (New York: Dutton, 1987), 256. On the impact of Landauer’s revolutionary activity and death on Buber, see the sensitive and detailed discussion, ibid., 245-258. 105 A pacifist, “Landauer fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution” (Buber, “Recollection of a Death,” in Buber, Pointing the Way, 120). “When I think of the passionate glance and words of my dead friend, I know with what force of soul he fought to protect the revolution from itself, from violence.” In Buber’s judgment, his friend erred in joining the revolution, and certainly in participating in the government of the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria. “I also believe that no man has ever erred out of purer motives,” quoted in Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 247. 106 As Buber stated in a memorial address: Gustav Landauer had lived as a prophet of the coming human community and fell as its blood-witness. He went upon the path, of which Maximus Tyrius – whose words Landauer used as the motto to his book, Die Revolution [1906] – said: Here is the way of the Passion, which you call a disaster [Untergang], and which you [falsely] judge according to those who have passed upon it; I, however, deem it salvation, since I judge it according to the result of what is still to come. In a church at Brescia I saw a mural whose entire surface was covered with crucified individuals. The field of crosses stretched until the horizon, hanging from each, men of varied physiques and faces. Then it struck me that this was the true image of Jesus Christ. On one of the crosses I saw Gustav Landauer hanging. (Martin Buber, “Landauer und die Revolution,” Masken: Halbmonatschrift des Düsseldorfer Schauspielhauses 14, nos. 18-19 [1919]: 291.) The frontispiece of this edition of the journal reproduces a photograph in full color of the Brescia mural.



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issued various volumes of Landauer’s writings107 and edited two volumes of his correspondence.108 He also published several stirring essays on Landauer,109 and introduced his ideas to the postwar generation, especially to Zionist youth who were to be inspired by Landauer’s concept of communitarian socialism.110 Landauer’s legacy also had a formative influence on Buber’s own thoughts regarding the saliency of interpersonal relations in the shaping of spiritual and communal life.111 But one aspect of Landauer’s legacy seems to have haunted Buber throughout his life: the tragedy of messianic politics. He initially sought to clarify his thoughts on the subject by way of fiction, in the form of a novel. Projected on the image of the apocalyptic struggle between Gog and Magog described in the Book of Daniel, the novel was to explore alternative ways of working for the redemption. In a letter to Rosenzweig, dated January 1923, he apologized for not visiting him, explaining that he was preoccupied with his novel: “‘Gog’ is crowding in on me, but not so much in an “artistic” sense. Rather, I am becoming aware, with a cruel clarity that is altogether different from any product of the imagination, of how much “evil” is essential to the coming of the Kingdom. In thinking about this I had a flash of insight about Napoleon, something I had previously not understood. On the Island of Elba, he once said that his name would remain on earth as long as le nom de l’Eternel … . Nostra res agitur.”112 After two false starts, countless drafts,113 and more than twenty years later, Buber completed his novel, publishing it first in Hebrew in 1944,114 and then in German in 1949.115 Both the title of the 107 See WM; and Beginnen. 108 Lebensgang I/II. 109 See Martin Buber, Der heilige Weg (Frankfurt: 1919); “Landauer und die Revolution,” Masken 16, nos. 28-29 (1919): 282-291; “Der heimliche Führer,” Die Arbeit 2, no. 6 (1920), 36-37; “Erinnerung an einen Tod,” Neue Wege 23, no. 2 (1929): 161-165; and the chapter on Landauer in Buber, Paths in Utopia (London: R. F. C. Hull, 1949). Buber also published several essays on Landauer in Hebrew. 110 See Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman), Gustav Landauer: Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 52-54; and Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 251-252, 271-273. 111 See Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989), 101-126; also A. Schapira, “Werdende Gemeinschaft und die Vollendung der Welt,” afterword, in Buber, Pfade in Utopia: Über Germeinschaft und deren Verwirklichung, 3rd expanded ed. (Heidelberg: 1985), 437-439. 112 Buber to Rosenzweig, 18 January 1923, in Buber, Briefwechsel, vol. 2, 153f. 113 See epilogue to Martin Buber, Gog und Magog: Eine Chronik (Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider, 1949), 401. 114 Martin Buber, Gog u’magog: Megilat yamim (Jerusalem: Tarshish, 1944). Aside from the last seven chapters, the novel was first published in weekly installments in the Tel-Aviv Hebrew daily Davar from 10 January to 23 October 1941. 115 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, quoted in Fetscher, “Unzeitgemäss und Spekulativ,” 69.

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Hebrew and German captured the apocalyptic drama that was chronicled in the novel Gog and Magog: A Chronicle. The English edition, which appeared in 1958, obscured the drama by rendering the title, For the Sake of Heaven: A Chronicle.116 It was actually an anti-apocalyptic tale meant to point to the folly of attempts to usher in the Kingdom of God with one grand stroke – in the case of some of Buber’s Hassidic rabbis, through theurgic prayer promoting that one last battle of “Gog of the Land of Magog.” To Buber this was the road of false messianism leading inexorably not only to inconsolable disappointment, but also to a nihilism, a rejection of our moral task within history.117 There is, Buber insisted, no leaping over history and the laborious – often humble and unnoticed – work of spiritual and moral transformation of society. Redemption, as Buber understood biblical and Jewish teachings, is not as the apocalyptic vision has it, “the end of history,” but, instead, its perfection or, rather, the “sanctification” of the world within history. Hence, as Buber declared in an essay of 1930, “we can only work on the Kingdom of God through working on all the spheres of man allotted to us.”118 No sphere, he emphasized, is more valid or effective than the other: “One cannot say, we must work here and not there, this leads to the goal and that does not.”119 Accordingly, Buber concluded, there is “no legitimately messianic, no legitimately messianically-oriented politics.”120 Again in contrast to Rosenzweig, Buber refused to conclude from this observation that politics was in vain: “The political sphere is not to be excluded from the hallowing of all things. The political ‘serpent’ is not essentially evil, it is itself only misled; it, too, ultimately wants to be redeemed.”121 Buber identified this attitude with that of the Bible, particularly as articulated by the prophets. Indeed, he regarded the apocalyptic attitude – introduced into Judaism from Iranian religions – as a fundamental perversion of the prophetic teaching of the quiet, humble work of hallowing the world and thus preparing it for the messianic kingdom.122 The prophetic attitude – represented for Buber in the simple message of Jeremiah, “Better your ways and your affairs and I shall allow you to dwell in this place” – expresses a faith in freedom, indeed, the necessity of human decision and responsibility, and thus also in history.123 The apocalyptic attitude, Buber maintained, is a flight from human responsibility and 116 Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven: A Chronicle (New York: Meridian, 1958). 117 Buber, epilogue to Gog und Magog, 405. 118 Buber, “Gandhi, Politics, and Us,” in Friedman, Pointing the Way, 137. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: Collier, 1961), 145f. 123 Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” in Buber, Pointing the Way, 196.



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history. Although sharing with the prophets a vision of the Kingdom of God, the apocalyptic message is that this Kingdom will be borne by a radical, “rupture of history” and the advent of a new aeon when, in the words of the Johannine Revelation cited by Buber, “Time will no longer be.”124 Born of a despair in humanity and history, the apocalyptic vision finds solace in an imminent redemption initiated from beyond history and human decision. Hence, from the perspective of the apocalyptic vision, all “is predetermined, all human decisions are only sham struggles. The future does not come to pass; the future is already present in heaven, as it were, present from the beginning.”125 Publishing these reflections in a liberal German journal in 1954,126 Buber added a parenthetical comment that many of his readers must have construed as an oblique indictment of their own failings in what was then the very recent past, “And whenever man shudders before the menace of his own work and longs to flee from the radically demanding historical hour, there he finds himself near to the apocalyptic vision of a process that cannot be arrested.”127 Clearly unlike Scholem, Buber saw the apocalyptic attitude as essentially alien to Judaism; this, in part, was due to the fact that he defined it strictly in terms of its original expression in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, where it indisputably sponsored an eschatology that denigrates history and the efficacy of human deeds. Scholem, however, employed the concept of the “apocalyptic” in a looser sense to characterize the eagerness to anticipate a redemption deemed imminent. Thus, the vision of an approaching redemption beyond history – 124 Ibid., 203. 125 Ibid., 201. 126 Buber, “Prophetie, Apokalyptik und die geschichtliche Stunde,” Merkur 8, no. 12 (1954): 1101-1115. 127 Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” in Friedman, Pointing the Way, 203. The delineation of the difference between the apocalyptic and the prophetic principle was one of the overarching themes of Buber’s writings. In 1932 he published the first of a projected two-volume study on the biblical origins of messianic faith to be entitled Das Kommende (The Coming One). Only one volume appeared: Kingship of God, trans. Richard Scheimann (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967); he never realized his plans to complete the second volume, but he did publish several chapters separately (see “Der Gesalbte,” in Martin Buber, Schriften zur Bibel [Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider, 1964] 725-846). He also devoted a scholarly book-length study to “the prophetic faith” (see his The Prophetic Faith, trans. from the Hebrew by Carlyle Witton-Davies [New York: Macmillan,1949]). Many of his essays are directly or indirectly informed by this theme. See Marie Natalie Barton, “The Jewish Expectation of the Kingdom According to Martin Buber” (Ph.D. dissertation, Theologische Fakultät, Munich: 1968) and A. Schapira, “Messianismus und Erlösung in Martin Bubers Denken,” in Vom Erkennen zum Tun des Gerechten: Martin Buber (1878-1965): Internationales Symposium zum 20. Todestag, ed. Werner Licharz and Heinz Schmidt (Frankfurt: Haag & Hirchen, 1989), vol. 2, 73-85.

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beyond the here and now – Scholem deemed to have, paradoxically, inspired the revolutionary attitude and the quest for radical change within history. In other words, Scholem understood “apocalyptic” in a broad phenomenological fashion, whereas Buber restricted himself to the ideas and moral values associated with the apocalyptic attitude. This does not mean, of course, that his interest was strictly historical or that he did not extend his purview to consider contemporary manifestations of the prophetic and apocalyptic impulse. Buber spoke, for instance, of Marx’s view of the future as “an optimistic modern apocalyptic”: “In [Marx’s] announcement of an obligatory leap of the human world out of the aeon of necessity into that of freedom, the apocalyptic principle alone holds sway. Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared. Yet in a mysterious manner its goal, too, is the perfection, even the salvation of the world. In its modern shape, too, the apocalyptic knows nothing of an inner transformation of man that precedes the transformation of the world and co-operates in it; it knows nothing of the prophetic “turning.”128 Marx’s vision of the future, Buber contended, has thus been falsely attributed to a prophetic origin.129 Far from being a child of the prophets, Marx represented to Buber the insidious hold that the apocalyptic principle has on modern civilization – and not only in the realm of politics. Art, poetry, thought have become bound to an ethos of necessity, often bereft even of Marx’s optimism, and what prevails – veiled as objectivity and amor fati – is an utterly lost faith in the efficacy of human moral decision and responsibility, in partnership with God, to change the course of history. Although eschewing apocalyptic politics, Buber did, at least on one occasion, suggest that the prophetic ethos might lead one to mount the barricades in order to storm the kingdom. The occasion was a lecture that he delivered in April 1925 at a festive gathering in Berlin to mark the opening of the recently founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The lecture, entitled “The Messianic Mystery” (“Das messianische Mysterium”), was a scholarly disquisition on the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53.130 Buber argued at length that the anonymous servant of Deutero-Isaiah must ultimately be understood as the conscience of Israel, as the paragon of faith and responsibility before God. The Suffering Servant, he

128 Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” in Buber, Pointing the Way, 203f. 129 Ibid. 130 Martin Buber, “Das messianische Mysterium (Jesaja 53): Vortrag Martin Buber bei der Berliner Feier anlässlich der Eröffnung der Universität Jerusalem, 6 April 1925.” This hitherto unpublished lecture was published in the original German with a Hebrew translation and an introduction by Theodor Dreyfus in the journal of Jewish thought sponsored by Bar Ilan University, Da’at 5 (1980): 117-133.



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reasoned, performs his task in silence and without glory and public notice. His redemptive role is even concealed from himself. Yet the redemption depends on him. The advent of the Messiah would be but the revelation of the mystery of the Suffering Servant, or rather the suffering servants who humbly transverse history. Hence, the mystery of the Suffering Servant becomes the mystery of the Messiah. God’s suffering servants appear in history, in the “hidden history” that is “world history,” the process of redemption. It is noteworthy, Buber remarked, that Jewish tradition speaks of the Suffering Servants as the nistarim – those “hidden ones” especially celebrated in the Kabbalah and Hassidic lore – who by virtue of their deeds are said to prepare the secret path of redemption.131 Toward the conclusion of his lecture, Buber turned to his audience and begged its indulgence if he were to descend from the plane of the academic and the conceptual to consider the implications of Deutero-Isaiah’s teachings for the “reality” of Jewish and world history. This reality is characterized, Buber argued, by a tension, a creative tension between the nistarim and the meshihiim – messianic enthusiasts “who are all too facilely called false messiahs”: The meshihiim are those who do not want to adapt themselves to God’s unknown ways, and want to turn the everlasting task [die allmalige Aufgabe] into a onetime duty. The meshihiim are those who, in order to realize the Redemption, estrange themselves from the context of Redemption. The meshihiim are those who believe themselves to be the fulfillment and no longer the preparation of Redemption. These are indeed standing in the shadow of the eved [the Servant] – the misunderstood, the elementary misunderstood eved, who is [mistakenly] deemed to be the one-time Messiah, who is lifted to the position of the final, decisive eved. The meshihiim – mighty holy men and weak-minded and semi-scoundrels – stand in his shadow, and through them his shadow directs the hidden destiny of humankind.132

Buber’s audience may have been somewhat baffled by this rather abstruse reference to “the reality of Jewish and world history,” but his message was nonetheless clear, especially when in the closing sentence of the lecture he declared, “The hidden, true history of the world [Weltgeschichte] takes place between the meshihiim and the hidden servant.”133 The messianic enthusiasts – who, to be sure, number morally dubious individuals but also include persons of the most noble intentions – are animated by a genuine prophetic spirit, and, indeed, in conjunction with the more pristine servants of God, those who “hallow” the world with a silent grace, serve to quicken the redemption. 131 Theodor Dreyfus demonstrated that the thesis propounded by Buber in “Das messianische Mysterium” served as the basis of his chapter on “the mystery of the Suffering Servant” in The Prophetic Faith, 202-235. Cf. Dreyfus, introduction to Buber, in Da’at 5 (1980): 117-119. 132 Buber, “Das messianische Mysterium,” 126f. 133 Ibid., 127.

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This apparent retreat from his position that there is no messianic politics may, of course, have been but a momentary lapse; in fact, he chose not to publish the lecture and would never reiterate his approval of the meshihiim in print. But surely Buber’s insistence that the messianic enthusiasts who seek to hasten the kingdom are not to be summarily dismissed as false messiahs reflected his desire to secure the proper appreciation of the idealism of the beloved Gustav Landauer and his fellow Jewish revolutionaries who dared to dream of a just world free of violence.

Ulrich Linse

‘Poetic Anarchism’ versus ‘Party Anarchism’: Gustav Landauer and the Anarchist Movement in Wilhelmian Germany 1 “The Anarchists are no Political Party”1 Gustav Landauer’s life and death coincided with the Kaiserreich, the epoch of Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm I. His ideas “appear to be the negative of the Wilhelmian epoch.”2 They reflect and negate the regnant political culture of the German Kaiserreich. Landauer’s ‘poetic anarchism’3 and the more prevalent ‘party anarchism’ represented two distinct types of German anarchism in the period before World War I. Despite essential differences between the two, they did have one national characteristic in common: prewar anarchism in Germany was thoroughly influenced – even shaped – by the existence of the world’s largest socialist party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The two anarchist streams, however, responded differently to the challenge posed by the SDP. Whereas Landauer completely rejected the Social Democrats’ political model, the ‘party anarchists’ adopted it – at least in part. However, neither of these two anarchist trends was of any relevance in German power politics. Despite the influence they wielded in the cultural sphere, especially in the field of literature,4 the anarchists remained 1 The quote is taken from G. Landauer, “Der Anarchismus in Deutschland,” Die Zukunft 10 (1895), quoted from: Ruth Link-Salinger, ed., Gustav Landauer: Erkenntnis und Befreiung. Ausgewählte Reden und Aufsätze (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 17. 2 Philippe Despoix, Ethiken der Entzauberung. Zum Verhältnis von ästhetischer, ethischer und politischer Sphäre am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998), 108. 3 The term “poetic anarchism” is taken from Kurt Eisner, Psychopathia spiritualis: Friedrich Nietzsche und die Apostel der Zukunft (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1892), 87, where he speaks of the “poetic anarchists” among the social-democratic opposition – “die Jungen,” literally, the “young ones.” 4 Hansjörg Viesel, ed., Literaten an die Wand: Die Münchner Räterepublik und die Schriftsteller (Frankfurt/ Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1980); Heribert Baumann, Francis Bulhof, Gottfried Mergner, eds., Anarchismus in Kunst und Politik. Zum 85. Geburtstag von Arthur Lehning (Oldenburg: Univ. Oldenburg, 1984, 2nd ed. 1985); Ulrich Klan and Dieter Nelles, “Es lebt noch eine Flamme”: Rheinische Anarcho-Syndikalisten/-innen in der Weimarer Republik und im Faschismus (Grafenau-Döffingen: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1986); Walter Fähnders, Anarchismus und Literatur: Ein vergessenes Kapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichte zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987); Despoix, Ethiken; Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus. Dada in Zürich und Berlin (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999); Dieter Scholz, Pinsel und Dolch. Anarchistische Ideen

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on the margins of political life and were more or less ineffective during, and even after, the prewar period.5 At the turn of the century the German anarchist movement had only some two thousand followers;6 Landauer’s libertarian socialism was essentially represented by one person alone, Landauer himself. His isolation, even in relation to his ideological comrades, is surprising given that his anarchism had the same origins as that of the other German anarchists. They all shared a deep-rooted opposition to both Bismarck’s state and to the Social Democratic Party. Bismarck’s Sozialistengesetz, or Anti-Socialist Law (1878-1890), and the resulting ban on the party had stimulated discussion among party leaders and members as to whether reform or revolution was the right path. Even when Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law was lifted in 1890, and the Social Democratic Party regained the freedom to promote its views, the controversy continued to gain momentum. The question now was whether legal action within the constitutional framework was sufficient to bring about the “new society” dreamed of by the socialists, or whether revolutionary action was indispensable to reach that goal. Around 1890, an opposition movement, referred to as “die Jungen,” emerged within the Social Democratic Party and became the vanguard of a new form of anarchism in the German Reich; Landauer was one of the main spokesmen of the group, which sought to guide the party on the road to the new anarchism.7 Whereas the old-style anarchists of the Bismarck era had criticized the lack of in Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1840-1920 (Berlin: Reimer, 1999); Die Rote Republik. Anarchie- und Aktivismuskonzepte der Schriftsteller 1918/19 und das Nachleben der Räte, Schriften der ErichMühsam-Gesellschaft, 25 (Lübeck, 2004); Jaap Grave, Peter Sprengel, Hans Vandervoorde, eds., Anarchismus und Utopie in der Literatur um 1900. Deutschland, Flandern und die Niederlande (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005); Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art. From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); Theresa Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada. Art and Criticism, 1914-1924 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Sebastian Veg, ed., Littérature et Anarchisme, Études Littéraires, 41,3 (Quebec: Université de Laval, 2011); Nina A. Gur’janova, The Aethetics of Anarchy. Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 5 Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack, eds., Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven. Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878-1913, vol. III, 1906-1913 (Berlin: Böhlau, 2004), 239. 6 Ibid., 80. 7 Hans Manfred Bock, “Die ‘Literaten- und Studenten-Revolte’ der Jungen in der SPD um 1890,” Das Argument 63 (1971): 22-41; Herbert Scherer, Bürgerlich-oppositionelle Literaten und sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbewegung nach 1890 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974); Hans Manfred Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918-1923 (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1969), 5-23; Hans Manfred Bock, Geschichte des “linken Radikalismus” in Deutschland: Ein Versuch (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp,1976), 38-73; Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack, eds., Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven. Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der



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revolutionary decisiveness in the Social Democratic Party, thereby reflecting the anger and irritation of those driven out of their jobs – and often out of the country – by Bismarck’s anti-socialist policy, the new anarchists of the 1890s were confronted with a different situation. Anarchist criticism was still being leveled at the Social Democrats – who were accused of being revolutionary in words but not in actions – but this accusation was no longer voiced by victims of political persecution; nor was it fuelled by an ‘underground mentality’ or the zeal of professional revolutionaries. The remarkable success enjoyed by the party, now free of legal constraints, gave rise to a wave of opposition. Millions of voters had elected the Social Democrats to the National Parliament, and so the party now began to concentrate its energies on strengthening its organization. From that point on, party policies were shaped by the members of Parliament, the party secretaries, and the editors of party newspapers – in short, bureaucracy took over. Critics such as Landauer rightly pointed out the contradiction between the Social Democrats’ revolutionary program and the pragmatics of party machinery, between Karl Kautsky’s belief in the automatic dawning of socialism and the absence of any concrete action toward that goal, between the proclaimed revolution and actual reforms. Of course, Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionism” was one possible response to such discrepancies, but this was not what the new anarchists like Landauer wanted.8 But neither did they advocate a return to the violent revolutionary tradition. German anarchism in the aftermath of Bismarck’s reign was new insofar as it sharply dissociated itself from the old anarchism of the Bismarck period, best represented by August Reinsdorf or Johannes Most.9 The old anarchism had been violent in words and sometimes in action. “Propaganda der Tat” or “propaganda sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878-1913, vol. II, 1890-1906 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1989). 8 Landauer, “Rede von der Reichstagsgalerie. Sitzung vom 11. November 1911,” The Socialist, quoted from Landauer, Rechenschaft (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1919), 68. Cf. Gerhard Senft, Essenz der Anarchie. Die Parlamentarismuskritik des libertären Sozialismus (Vienna: Promedia, 2006). 9 Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen (Berlin: Der Syndikalist [Fritz Kater], 1924; Max Nettlau, Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre: Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880-1886 (Berlin: Asy, 1931; new ed., Münster: Thélème Library, 1996); Andrew A. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, vol. I, The Early Movement (Metuchen N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972); Joachim Wagner, Politischer Terrorismus und Strafrecht im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Heidelberg: R. v. Decker, 1981); Dieter Fricke, Rudolf Knaack, eds., Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven. Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878-1913, vol. I, 1878-1889 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1983); Karl Härter and Beatrice de Graaf, eds., Vom Majestätsverbrechen zum Terrorismus. Politische Kriminalität, Recht, Justiz und Polizei zwischen Früher Neuzeit und 20. Jahrhundert, Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, 268 (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2012).

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by deed” had been its slogan, which could entail bomb-throwing or the assassination of state representatives, or at least approval of such crimes.10 The new anarchism adapted itself to the reality of the post-Bismarck era, a period in which there was less state repression and socialist activity was no longer a criminal offense though close police surveillance continued.11 The new anarchists therefore rejected violence, leading their contemporaries to refer to them teasingly as Edelanarchisten, or “salon revolutionaries.” The most notorious advocate of this peaceful anarchism was Gustav Landauer. Like other representatives of “die Jungen” he was influenced by the ideas of Max Stirner, Eugen Dühring, Friedrich Nietzsche or Leo Tolstoy, and turned away from poetic naturalism12 without becoming a neo-Romantic.13 In his 1905 article, “Anarchism in Germany,” he explains that “propaganda by deed as I understand it” could not mean “killing people”; killing could only be an expression of “passion or desperation or craziness.” Landauer’s credo, especially his hope “to regenerate the spirit of man, to recreate the human will and the productive energy of big communities,”14 was the exact opposite. In his view, this spiritual anarchism could not be embodied in a party organization at all, hence his insistence that “the anarchists are not a political party.”15 This, however, was the point on which the majority of Germany’s new anarchists disagreed. They were keen to win support and attract followers by employing the same methods that had proven so effective in the Social Democrats’ camp. As the largest socialist party in the world, the Social Democrats clearly set an overwhelming example for others to follow – one that even anarchists could not ignore. German anarchists also hoped to make progress by means of a strong and efficient organization, 10 Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); Walter Laqueur, ed., Terrorism Reader (New York: New American Library, 1978); Andrew R. Carlson, “Anarchism and Individual Terror in the German Empire, 1870-90” in Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Heinrich Hirschfeld (London: Macmillan, 1982), 175-200; Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” ibid., 201-229; David C. Rapoport, ed., Terrorism, vol. I, The First or Anarchist Wave (London: Routledge, 2005). 11 Andreas W. Hohmann and Dieter Johannes, Der Spitzelbericht. Die Anarchistenüberwachung im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt: Edition AV ’88, 1999); Fricke and Knaack, eds., Dokumente, vols. II-III. 12 In his period of spiritual transition Landauer also came to appreciate the “peasant”-poet Christian Wagner: Ulrich Linse, “Gustav Landauer entdeckt Christian Wagner”, in Wiederentdeckung eines Autors. Christian Wagner in der literarischen Moderne um 1900, ed. Burckhard Dücker and Harald Hepfer (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 88-136. 13 Despoix, Ethiken, 79, 83, 94, 98, n. 81. 14 Landauer, “Der Anarchismus in Deutschland,” 13. 15 Ibid., 17.



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which would enable them to finance the journals and propaganda leaflets that might attract followers. Clearly, they were concerned to avoid the traps that lay on the way, and in their tactics they formed a welcome contrast to the “corrupt” Social Democratic Party, which was becoming increasingly middle-class. The anarchists, for example, considered parliamentary action to be out of the question; in their endeavor to prevent the organization from becoming centralized and bureaucratic, they opted for an elaborate “federal” – in the sense of decentralized – organizational structure. In this way they hoped to lend impetus to the revolutionary drive and spur the movement on to a bright socialist future. This was the point at which Landauer and most other German anarchists went their separate ways. In 1909 the rift took on a programmatic dimension:16 Landauer was looking for supporters for his Socialist League, or Sozialistischer Bund. The majority of German anarchists, who were organized under the Anarchist Federation of Germany, refused to cooperate. Instead, their leader Rudolf Lange tried to strengthen the Anarchist Federation at its sixth conference in Leipzig in 1909 by introducing a new constitution for the organization. The twenty-one paragraphs of that document strengthened the influence of the Berlin center, both tightening and formalizing the organizational structure. Against opponents from within his own ranks, Lange argued that the anarchist movement “must shed its sectarian character” by becoming “a freely chosen but firmly binding association (eine freiwillig eingegangene festgeschlossene Verbindung), that is not opposed to anarchist principles.” He also added: “We are part of the proletarian movement and must take the organizational consequences.”17 Landauer, however, completely rejected the new rules.18 He turned on the anarchists with the same deep resentment he harbored against the Social Democrats, and scathingly criticized the anarchists’ attempt to create an alternative to the SDP, while in fact imitating it – albeit in a limited way. He declared in no uncertain terms that there are two kinds of organizations, which are different in principle: “The first is an alliance of associations or groups, whose members have resolved to act independently [Selbsttätigkeit], who never resign, and who assign certain activities to representatives only for practical purposes, for a limited time and under close supervision. The second creates a permanent bureaucracy and a system of authorities; it is centralized, and the representatives act ‘in their own 16 For details see Ulrich Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 213-230, 281-288. 17 Quotations, ibid., 219. 18 G. Landauer, “Organisationsfragen,” Der Sozialist 1 (1909), in G. Landauer, Auch die Vergangenheit hat Zukunft: Essays zum Anarchismus, ed. Siegbert Wolf (Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1989), 99-103.

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high-handed fashion’ and decide on matters for which they received no mandate from those whom they represent.”19 The first model was embodied in the Socialist League, the second in the Anarchist Federation, which according to Landauer, had institutionalized a “bureaucratic centralization of representatives” instead of stressing the autonomy of member groups.20 Landauer felt that only the “imperative mandate,” should be allowed, in other words, that every political decision made by the representative should be authorized by the electorate. Landauer also charged that by installing Lange as a salaried secretary of the organization, members had “ceased their own activity and replaced it with [that of] a salaried bureaucrat [angestellter Beamter].”21 The result according to Landauer, was an “odd anarcho-democratic party.” “I can see,” he added, “no difference between the statutes of the Social Democratic Party and those of the [Anarchist] Federation.”22 Rendering his final verdict, he announced “you will never reach liberty by means of bondage, freedom by means of bureaucracy.”23 There was another argument underlying this violent attack, but it remained unarticulated. Lange’s aim was to form an organization of the proletariat within the greater proletarian movement. Landauer himself, however, did not consider himself to be one of the proletariat and indeed, thought it should be abolished.24 He could find neither “religion” nor “spirit” in the working classes. He personally detested manual labor, which he considered “stupid,” and had even reproached Tolstoy for having – in all Christian humility – advocated manual labor as a way of solving the social question.25 Landauer saw himself instead as the leader of a reformed elite drawn from the educated classes; he wanted to convince the 19 “Die erste ist ein Bund von Bünden oder Gruppen, deren Glieder zur Selbsttätigkeit entschlossen sind, die niemals abdanken und nur zu praktischen Zwecken, vorübergehend und unter dauernder Aufmerksamkeit bestimmte Tätigkeiten Beauftragten übertragen. Die zweite schafft sich eine dauernde Bürokratie und ein Instanzensystem; sie is zentralistisch, und die Vertreter handeln ‘aus eigener Machtvollkommenheit’ und entscheiden über Dinge, um deretwillen die Vertretenen sie gar nicht entsandt oder gewählt haben.” Ibid., 99. 20 Ibid., 99. 21 Ibid., 102. 22 Ibid., 102. 23 Ibid., 101. 24 Lebensgang II, 308. 25 Gustav Landauer, “Die religiöse Jugenderziehung,” Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, 2 (1891): 134-138; he also refers here to Graf Leo Tolstoj and his “Körperliche Arbeit als Lösung des sozialen Problems,” ibid., 1-7. Concerning Landauer’s attitude to Tolstoj see Edith Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen. Leo N. Tolstoi als Kulturkritiker in der deutschen Diskussion der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 136-149; Wolfgang Sandfuchs, Dichter, Moralist, Anarchist. Die deutsche Tolstojkritik 1880-1900 (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1995); Des-



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workers that they should abandon their excessive “materialistic” aims and that spiritual reform was more important than solving the Magenfrage, the problem of keeping one’s stomach full. Landauer felt that the Marxist concept of “class” should be replaced by that of “community” based on an individual awakening of the “spirit.” As a consequence of these beliefs Landauer rejected the concepts of class struggle and of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as well as the avant-garde role ascribed to the proletariat.26 Also, it should be remembered that he had been strongly influenced by Benedict Friedländer (who himself drew on the writings of Eugen Dühring, Henry George, Henry Charles Carey or Theodor Hertzka), especially by Friedländer’s combination of individual freedom and socialism in the concept of a “Manchester socialism” with its fundamental criticism of the “reactionary schools of socialism,” among which he included the “Marxist state socialists and the communists who employed coercion” (Zwangskommunisten).27 The German anarcho-syndicalist and socialist Robert Michels developed in his 1911 book “Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens” the political theory of the “iron law of oligarchy” (i.e., the rule of an elite, in this case of the party leaders, over the rank and file) as the inevitable result of the necessities of mass organization: “He who says organization, says oligarchy.” In this way socialist parties such as the German Social Democrats – by becoming larger and more complex - would become more centralized and bureaucratic and less democratic and revolutionary. Though Landauer never analyzed its underlying sociological mechanism as Robert Michels had done, he assumed that the newly adopted anarchist strategy of party organization would automatically lead to the deformation of any radical policy, thereby failing to achieve the revolutionary goal of socialism as he understood it. Landauer’s “spiritual revolution” had nothing in common with the traditional revolutionary concept of Marxian socialism. Therefore, he distanced himself not only from the Social Democratic Party and the Anarchist Federation, but also from the revolutionary wing of the Free Union of the so-called Localists.28 Even they, he argued, had had to compromise with capitalism. As far as he was poix, Ethiken, 92-95; Johanna Renate Döring-Smirnov, “Ein Licht mir aufgegangen.” Lev Tolstoj und Deutschland, exhibition catalogue, Literaturhaus München (München 2010). 26 Despoix, Ethiken, 58. 27 Benedict Friedländer, “Hertzkas Freiland,” Freie Bühne für den Entwicklungskampf der Zeit , 1 (1890): 672-680. On Landauer’s adoption of Friedländer, see Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 66-69. 28 Dirk H. Müller, Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Lokalismus, des Syndikalismus und der entstehenden Rätebewegung (Berlin: Colloquium, 1985).

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concerned they shared the error of the “state socialists” in thinking that the laws of social development would gradually lead them to a point in the future when it would be possible to introduce a new social order.29 Yet he also rejected the revolutionary strategy of the anarcho-syndicalists,30 because to him the General Strike was an expression of the destructive class struggle. Landauer objected to such strategies, because he felt the revolution could not and should not be postponed to some indefinite future but had to begin right now through voluntary action. Indeed, this socialist “beginning” or Beginnen was meant to be a constructive one, that is, geared to establishing free and self-determined cooperatives and rural communities.31 This concept of a cultural revolution as an alternative to a seizure of power by force was not so much his own idea, but rather an imitation of the “new life” notion established by the German Life-Reform Movement (Lebensreformbewegung).32 Of course, settlements such as the fruit-growing colony of Eden-Oranienburg and the artists’ experiment with a “new community”(Neue Gemeinschaft) in the Berlin suburb of Schlachtensee had not been anarchist in any way.33 Landauer’s “socialism of self-realization,” or Verwirklichungssozialismus, stressed individual responsibility as the source of community strength, while at the same time emphasizing the political consequences of agrarian reform; this was the reason for returning to the idea of communal settlements of the life-reform variety. Communal settlements thus constituted the embodiment of this notion of building socialism in the present based on individual responsibility. Moreover, they prom29 Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus, 20. 30 See Wayne Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923 (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 1989). 31 G. Landauer, Beginnen. Aufsätze über Sozialismus, ed., Martin Buber (Köln: Marcan- Block, 1924). 32 Diethard Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 18801933 (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1998); Ulrich Linse, “Das ‘natürliche’ Leben: Die Lebensreform,” in Erfindung des Menschen: Schöpfungsträume und Körperbilder, 1500-2000, ed., Richard van Dülmen (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 435-456; Kai Buchhold, Rita Latocha, Hilge Peckmann, Klaus Wolbert, eds., Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Häusser, 2001); Florentine Fritzen, Gesünder leben. Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006). 33 On Landauer’s place in the literary ‘bohemia’ of the Berlin suburbs (Berliner Vorort-Boheme), see Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann and Rolf Kauffeldt, Berlin-Friedrichshagen: Literaturhauptstadt um die Jahrhundertwende. Der Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (Berlin: Boer, 1994); Gertrude CeplKaufmann, “Gustav Landauer im Friedrichshagener Jahrzehnt und die Rezeption seines Gemeinschaftsideals nach dem 1. Weltkrieg” in Gespräch, 235-278; Christoph Knüppel, ed., Gustav Landauer und die Friedrichshagener: Ausgewählte Briefe aus den Jahren 1891 bis 1902, Friedrichshagener Hefte, 23 (Berlin-Friedrichshagen: Brandel, 1999.)



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ised to have an impact in the realm of politics by “freeing up the soil,” as Adolf Damaschke, the “reformer of the soil” (Bodenreformer), put it.34 In this way, despite having a touch of romantic rural escapism,35 Landauer’s communal alternative to party anarchism tried to create the impression that this was not a totally unrealistic enterprise. Landauer’s opponents in the Anarchist Federation, however, maintained that establishing cooperatives and communal settlements was no revolutionary strategy at all, but rather a “conservative policy,” which would have the effect of stabilizing the capitalist system.36 Landauer’s main counterargument was that either one begins socialist life here and now, or there will never be a beginning at all. But he himself never joined any rural experiment. He was a man not “of the spade or shovel” but of the spoken word and the pen.37

2 ‘Poetic Anarchism’ Gustav Landauer was first and foremost a ‘poet,’ which to him was the same as being a “prophet of tomorrow”38 or “messenger of a new era” (Künder einer neuen Zeit).39 His anarchism was, above all, literature. As he showed in his essay on the “German spirit,”40 written during World War I, political reality itself – in this case he was referring to the French Revolution – is “like the dream of a poet.” Landauer believed that “the nations [Völker] are called to realize materially, in the form of living men and conditions, the presentiments, visions, loves, longings and aspirations, which the poet has awakened in their spirits.”41 Poetic visions would have to be turned into political activity, “men of deeds must come, who build in reality the new order of mankind which has been founded by the spirits of the poets. The consequence of poetry is revolution, the revolution, which consists in building and regeneration. Those who do not know this have never really 34 Despoix, Ethiken, 94, denies – against Lunn, Prophet – that Landauer supported agrarian romanticism. 35 Hans Diefenbacher, “Adolf Damaschkes ‘Geschichte der Nationalökonomie’,” in Adolf Damaschke und Henry George. Ansätze zu einer Theorie und Politik der Bodenreform, ed. Klaus Hugler and Hans Diefenbacher (Marburg: Metropolis, 2005), 70 f. 36 Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus, 285. 37 Lebensgang, I, 424: Landauer sees himself as “agitator” and “poet.” 38 Eisner, Psychopathia spiritualis, subtitle. 39 G. Landauer, “Aus meinem Gefängnis-Tagebuch,” in Der sozialistische Akademiker. Organ der sozialistischen Studirenden und Studirten deutscher Zunge, 1 (1885), 320. 40 G. Landauer, Ein Weg deutschen Geistes, Kleine Schriften des Forum-Verlages, no. 2, ed. W. Herzog (München: Forum, 1916), 4-5. 41 Ibid., 4-5.

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understood the poets.”42 Politics then, is built on the visions of poets. As a young man he had believed that out of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra” “a new Volk” would arise.43 Landauer, a Jewish member of the German educated classes, truly believed that books could change the world. And that future philosopher-poets such as Nietzsche44 and Landauer himself would not be “book worms” but the active leaders of the “young Volk.”45 But why did Landauer’s “socialism of self-realization” turn out to be nothing more than poetry – and on occasion bad poetry at that?46 The answer can only be that Landauer believed in the magic quality of the word – that is, that the right word could create a reality of its own, even “a new Volk.” Assuming that the poetic word has this utopian dimension, speaking the right word could transform reality. This at least was the gift of the charismatic leader, of the poet-prophet-savior as envisioned by Landauer (and other writers and thinkers of the fin de siècle).47 The “Spirit” to which Landauer referred “was a rhetorical strategy to 42 Ibid., 15. 43 G. Landauer, Friedrich Nietzsche und das neue Volk, GLAJ, 82 c. 44 On Landauer’s adoption of Nietzsche, see: Christine Holste, “Gustav Landauers NietzscheBild zwischen Nihilismus, Politik und Jugendstil,” in De Sils-Maria à Jérusalem. Nietzsche et le judäisme: Les intellectuels juifs et Nietzsche, ed. Dominique Bourel and Jacques Le Rider (Paris: Cerf, 1991); Hanna Delf, “‘Nietzsche ist für uns Europäer’: Zwei unveröffentlichte Aufsätze Gustav Landauers zur frühen Nietzsche-Rezeption,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 44 (1992): 263-273 and 303-321; Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 170-171, 217; Hanna Delf, “‘Nietzsche ist für uns Europäer’: Zu Gustav Landauers Nietzsche-Lektüre,” in Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus, ed. Werner Stegmaier and Daniel Krochmalnik, Monographien zur Nietzsche-Forschung, 36 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 209-227; Ulrich Linse, “Libertäre und theosophische Strömungen,” in Handbuch Fin de Siècle, ed. Sabine Haupt and Stefan Bodo Würffel (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008), 218-237. 45 Landauer, Nietzsche und das neue Volk. 46 With regard to his novels and short stories, it has been noted that Landauer’s poetic anarchism was not lacking in kitsch. (See Luc Lambrechts, “Die schöpferische Prosa Gustav Landauers: Nietzsche-Rezeption und künstlerische Gestaltung,” Studia Germania Gandensia (1970): 219-241. See also Corinna Kaiser’s article in this volume.) At the end of his novel, The Preacher of Death, for instance, he poetically evokes the future anarchist life of an exclusive suburban residential area (Villenkolonie), a garden city, as well as the role of bards in the new community. Even the concluding sentence, “I am certain it will not come about as I have described it because it would then be useless to strive for it!” shows a kitschy style that conjures up the ambience of a painting by Fidus. This is also true of his later descriptions of the future socialist settlements. See Der Todesprediger (1893; 3rd ed., Köln: Marcan, 1923), 122-123. 47 Landauer’s close friend Martin Buber had a parallel poetic concept and it seems reasonable to assume the influence of the Jewish version of the creation of the world out of the word of Yaweh, which was also voiced by the Israelite prophets, in whom the spirit (ruach) of Yaweh lived. In addition there is a strong influence of Nietzsche. See Grete Schaeder’s preface to Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, vol. I, 1897-1918 (Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider,



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legitimize himself (Strategie der Selbstautorisierung) that was not supported by any institution.”48 In Landauer’s lexicon, “word” refers primarily to the spoken word. The reading of books in solitude, as he wrote in his essay Die Revolution, is evidence of the atomization of society and the breaking up of the spiritual community into isolated individuals.49 But how was it possible to integrate these atoms again into a new spiritual community? Landauer’s initial solution involved placing emphasis on family life and friendship, both of which he saw as the vital nuclei of the regenerated future community. This was the reason Landauer so vehemently protested the bohemian ‘free-love’ ethos, which undermined the traditional institutions of marriage and the family.50 Motivated by what Else Eisner referred to as his “Old Testament Jewish sense of family,”51 as well as by his reverence for bourgeois patriarchal values, Landauer even attacked his closest friends Erich Mühsam52 and Margarete Faas-Hardegger53 for, as he put it, mixing anarchy with 1972), 40-44; I owe the reference to Itta Shedletzky, Jerusalem, and her paper “The Creation of Charismatic Stereotypes in Martin Buber’s Early Writings” (International Workshop on Neo-Paganism, ‘Völkische Religion’ and Antisemitism II: The Religious Roots of Stereotypes, Tübingen, Germany, 27-29 October 1997). Landauer’s “Spirit” was, of course, not the Spirit of God but the “Public Spirit” (Gemeingeist). 48 Elke Dubbels, Figuren des Messianischen in Schriften deutsch-jüdischer Intellektueller 19001933 (Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2011), 260, 160, 260-261. 49 Revolution, 46. 50 Ulrich Linse, “Sexual Revolution and Anarchism,” in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), 129-143; Ulrich Linse, “‘Die Freivermählten’: Zur literarischen Diskussion über nichteheliche Lebensgemeinschaften um 1900,” in Liebe, Lust und Leid: Zur Gefühlskultur um 1900, ed. Helmut Scheuer and Michael Grisko (Kassel: Kassel Univ. Press, 1999), 57-95; Richard D. Sonn, Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde. Anarchism in Interwar France (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press: 2010); Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, eds., Anarchism and Sexuality. Ethics, Relationships and Power (New York: Routledge, 2011). 51 BAB, SAPMO, NY 4060/104. 52 This is a reference to the bohemian occasional prostitution (in secondary literature played down as “free love” or “erotic rebellion”) practised by Mühsam’s friend Franziska zu Reventlow; see Frauen um Erich Mühsam: Zensl Mühsam und Franziska zu Reventlow, Schriften der ErichMühsam-Gesellschaft, 11 (Lübeck, 1996); Richard Faber, Franziska zu Reventlow und die Schwabinger Gegenkultur (Köln: Böhlau, 1993); idem., Männerrunde mit Gräfin (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1994). It refers also and especially to Mühsam’s homosexual friendship with Johannes Nohl: Peter Dudek, Ein Leben im Schatten. Johannes und Herman Nohl – zwei deutsche Karrieren im Kontrast (Bad Heilbrunn/Obb.: Klinkhardt, 2004); Christoph Knüppel, ed., „Sei tapfer und wachse dich aus.” Gustav Landauer im Dialog mit Erich Mühsam. Briefe und Aufsätze, Schriften der Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft, 24 (Lübeck, 2004). 53 Theodor Pinkus, ed., Briefe nach der Schweiz. Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Max Hoelz, Peter Kropotkin (Zürich: Limmat, 1972); Ina Boesch, Gegenleben. Die Sozialistin Margarethe Har-

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“pornocracy.”54 Reading and playing music together with others were important features of Landauer’s own bourgeois family life with his second wife Hedwig Lachmann and their children,55 and friendships (not always characterized by uninterrupted harmony) – with Martin Buber or Fritz Mauthner, for instance – created for him a wider spiritual circle. In practice, however, this principle proved viable only on a pre-political or better yet, non-political level. Landauer sought to set up “Bünde” and international friendship leagues to act as the mediating link between an inspired private sphere and the greater public sphere, to serve as vehicles for a spiritual truth with a political message. But almost from the outset it became obvious that these associations were bound to fail, as the fate of the “Sozialistischer Bund” or of the Forte-Kreis56 amply demonstrated. Poetry, Landauer nevertheless insisted, should be part of the communal life and wield its influence wherever people meet. While still under the influence of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he wrote in his novel Der Todesprediger (“The Preacher of Death”), “I cannot rid myself of a vision I had before falling to sleep when I degger und ihre politischen Bühnen (Zürich: Chronos, 2003); Regula Bochsler, Ich folgte meinem Stern. Das kämpferische Leben der Margarethe Hardegger (Zürich: Pendo, 2004). 54 Lebensgang I, 250. In this letter, signed “the father,” Landauer vehemently protested against the “gypsy” approach to morality, i.e., the view that considers “father” and “parents” to be “bourgeois institutions,” which are of no relevance for a socialist future. This was, of course, the position of Otto Gross and his psychoanalytic concept of liberation: Anarchismus und Psychoanalyse zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Der Kreis um Erich Mühsam und Otto Gross, Schriften der Erich-Mühsam-Gesellschaft, 19 (Lübeck, 2000). For Landauer’s criticism of Otto Gross and his concept of revolutionary liberation, see Lebensgang I, 265-266, 372, 381-383. See also HansJoachim Rothe, “‘Mein Nicht-Vetter Gustav Landauer.’ Der Psychoanalytiker Karl Landauer und seine Beziehung zu Gustav Landauer,” in Gespräch, 165-180. 55 See Annegret Walz, “Ich will ja gar nicht auf der logischen Höhe meiner Zeit stehen”: Hedwig Lachmann. Eine Biographie (Flacht: Die Schnecke, 1993); Birgit Seemann, “Gustav Landauers ‘Bund’ mit der jüdischen Dichterin Hedwig Lachmann,” in Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeption seiner Werke, ed. Leonhard M. Fiedler, Renate Heuer, Annemarie Taeger-Altenhofer (Frankfurt/Main-New York: Campus, 1995), 187-203; Gustav Landauer (18701919). Von der Kaiserstraße nach Stadelheim, exhibition catalogue, Oberrheinischen Dichtermuseum Karlsruhe 1994 (Eggingen: Isele, 1994), 28 (on Landauer’s first wife Margarete Leuschner), 38-48 (on Hedwig Lachmann). Landauer’s privately printed “Wie Hedwig Lachmann starb” is published in Siegbert Wolf, ed., Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 4 (Lich/Hessen: Edition AV, 2011), 351-361. 56 Christine Holste, Der Forte-Kreis (1910-1915): Rekonstruktion eines utopischen Versuchs (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992); Richard Faber and Christine Holste, eds., Der Potsdamer Forte-Kreis. Eine utopische Intellektuellenassoziation zur europäischen Friedenssicherung (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2001); Anna Wołkowicz, “Mystiker der Revolution. Der utopische Diskurs der Jahrhundertwende. Gustav Landauer – Frederik van Eeden – Erich Gutkind – Florens Christian Rang – Georg Lukács – Ernst Bloch” (Ph.D. Dissertation. Warsaw, 2007).



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was a boy: The powerful and united body of the people, which storms forward, and I [was] one of them and yet above them as an orator and bard, prophet and leader.”57 He then elaborated on this Zarathustrian theme: “There he is, there he stands in the midst of an assembly of thousands, he towers high above the people … Do you behold him, do you see? Now be silent! But this exhortation is unnecessary; everybody hearkens, holding his breath; everybody is sweetly enticed by the charm of his speech. O how he holds sway over the hearts of men!”58 Landauer admired the “oriental tone” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the way it called to mind the Bible, not by imitating it, “but in a free way.”59 In his “Call to Socialism ” lecture – which in a way was his own “Zarathustra” – Landauer himself drew both on the prophetic motif and on the lofty language of the prophets.60 He himself was the bard of the new community, comparable to the poet Walt Whitman – “the priest, prophet, creator”61 – who had sung the “New Testament of America” and thus had become “a prophet of the new mankind.”62 This conception of the charismatic poet and prophetic orator as the legitimate spiritual leader of a cultural revolution – this obvious “exaggeration (Überhöhung) of the poetic power”63 – had several consequences for Landauer’s anarchism. Obviously, he enjoyed delivering speeches and lectures to different audiences, and, being a gifted ex tempore speaker,64 he succeeded in casting his spell over manual workers and middle-class ladies alike. But, as Else Eisner criticized, by refraining from party politics Landauer could not inspire successful revolutionary mass action as Kurt Eisner had done at the end of World War One.65 It was perhaps because of his own prowess as orator in the small circles of his devoted supporters, that Landauer tended to overestimate the power of his spoken word: When, for instance, after the fall of the second Bavarian Council Republic, his 57 Landauer, Der Todesprediger, 109. 58 Ibid., 72. 59 G. Landauer, Notizen zu Nietzsche, GLAJ, Gustav Landauer, 28. 60 Dubbels, Figuren, 260 61 G. Landauer, “Walt Whitman,” Der Sozialist 5 (1913), in WA III, 81. 62 Title of a lecture delivered by Landauer in 1915: Hanna Delf, ed., Gustav Landauer- Fritz Mauthner. Briefwechsel 1890-1919 (Munich: Beck, 1994), 459. 63 Dubbels, Figuren, 264. 64 Hanna Delf, “‘Manuskript kann ich dir keines schicken’: Gustav Landauer oder: Die freie Rede, ein Stilmittel,” in Sensation, 205-217. 65 See Else Eisner’s comparison between Landauer and Eisner, part of an outline of a never completed biography of Landauer: BAB, SAPMO, NY 4060/104. It should not be forgotten, however, that even after the end of the Bavarian Revolution the syndicalist unions erected a monument in memory of Landauer in a Munich cemetery: Helge Döhring, Damit in Bayern Frühling werde! Die syndikalistische Arbeiterbewegung in Südbayern von 1914 bis 1933 (Lich/Hessen: Edition AV, 2007), 107-119.

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friends urged him to save his life by fleeing Munich, his reply was that when the counterrevolutionary soldiers came to arrest him, he would be able to change their minds. What actually happened when he was arrested was that the crowd of onlookers cheered, applauded, waved their handkerchiefs and cried: “Bump him off, that dog, that Jew, that rogue!”66 In the poisoned atmosphere of those days, the poetic voice went unheard. Another result of Landauer’s overestimating the charismatic word was that he was inclined to confuse words and reality or, to put it more precisely, he tended to live in the world of words as if they were reality. In 1907 he wrote in his Die Revolution that he lived in an “in-between time,” or Zwischenzeit, straddling the revolutions of the past and the utopian revolution of the future, but added: “nevertheless, I have, I must admit, completely merged with the revolution.”67 Moreover, in the introduction to his collection of letters from the French Revolution, dated June 1918, he expressed his hope “that the intimate knowledge of the Spirit and the tragedy of the [French] Revolution may be of help in the serious times ahead.”68 Even during the Bavarian Revolution itself Landauer continued to live in a fantasy world of revolutionary words from the past. He repeatedly drew the attention of his fellow deputies in the councils to the French Revolution, noting that it had set an example of how revolutionaries were expected to act, he exhorted them to live up to that heroic model.69 To him, the Bavarian Revolution was the reenactment of the historia sacra of the Revolution, indeed, a “holy tradition” of “the new Spirit in the Völker.”70 66 Else Eisner to Ina Britschgi-Schimmer of 28 March 1927, BAB, SAPMO, NY 4060/111. Britschgi-Schimmer collected material for Martin Buber’s edition of Landauer’s letters. See also Wolf von Wolzogen’s article in this volume. 67 Revolution, 107. Richard Saage, “Zur Differenz und Konvergenz von Utopie und Apokalypse. Von Gustav Landauer zu Franz Werfer und Oskar Maria Graf,” in Utopie und Apokalypse in der Moderne, ed. Reto Sorg and Stefan Bodo Würffel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 17-31. See also Richard Saage, Utopische Horizonte. Zwischen historischer Entwicklung und aktuellem Geltungsanspruch, Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2010, 128), suggests that in Die Revolution Landauer’s utopian thinking on the modernizing energy of revolutions in the historical process had also incorporated the older religious chiliastic elements which – by being secularized in this way – lost their original apocalyptic contents. 68 G. Landauer, Briefe aus der Französischen Revolution, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1919), vol. 1, XXXII. 69 Ulrich Linse, ed., Gustav Landauer und die Revolutionszeit 1918-1919. Die politischen Reden, Schriften, Erlasse und Briefe Landauers aus der November-Revolution 1918- 1919 (Berlin: K. Kramer, 1974), 67, 85, 108. 70 “Der neue Geist in den Völkern: Die Revolutionen,” was the title of the eighth lecture in Landauer’s series, which he entitled “Der Geist der Geschichte entworfen in einer Geschichte des Geistes,” (Lyceum-Club, Berlin, 6 October 1913 - 8 December 1913). GLAJ, 20.



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Of course, reality did not conform to these poetic dreams. In the introduction to the 1919 edition of his most influential work, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (A Call to Socialism), he presents his vision of the spiritually transforming power of the revolution: “Marionettes turn into human beings; rusty philistines become capable of emotion; every fixed thing, even convictions and denials, begin to totter; the intellect, usually concentrated on one’s own well-being, turns into reasonable thinking … for the common weal; everything opens to the good; the unbelievable, the miracle becomes feasible; the reality otherwise hidden in our souls, in our religious beliefs, in dreams and in love, in the dance of the limbs and in sparkling glances, is pressing to become reality.”71 The suggestive power of words like these was so appealing that the new Bavarian prime minister, Kurt Eisner, asked Landauer to join the new revolutionary regime in order “to assist in transforming souls by the activity of [public] speaking.”72 Landauer himself believed that the “Gemeingeist” – destroyed by the mutual war of one person against the other in the capitalist world – would be strengthened during the socialist revolution by joint action in which people experienced themselves as being “brothers.”73 And the “Federal Republic of Councils (Räterepublik)”74 would prefigure an ideal community of people inspired by the Spirit.75 In actual fact, the souls which had been brutalized during the war sought only relaxation, not refinement. Eisner’s widow, who also became Landauer’s mistress after her husband’s assassination in February 1919,76 recorded a moving scene in her diary which illustrates the intellectual distance and non-communication between Landauer and the Bavarian workers in 1919: Landauer had been invited by the local branch of the Independent Social Democrats, Eisner’s former 71 Aufruf, 49-50. 72 Lebensgang II, 296, n. 1. 73 Sven-Uwe Schmitz, Homo democraticus. Demokratische Tugenden in der Ideengeschichte (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2000), 254. 74 On the contemporary theory of councils in general, see Horst Dähn, Rätedemokratische Modelle: Studien zur Rätediskussion in Deutschland 1918-1919 (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1975); Volker Arnold, Rätebewegung und Rätetheorien in der Novemberrevolution: Entstehung und Verlauf der Rätebewegung in Deutschland, 1918-1923, 2nd ed. (Berlin: SOAK, Junius,1985). On Landauer’s theory of councils: Ulrich Linse, “Vom ‘Gemeingeist’: Gustav Landauers Räteutopie,” in Der Potsdamer Forte-Kreis (1910-1915): Eine utopische Intellektuellenassoziation zur europäischen Friedenssicherung, ed. Richard Faber and Christine Holste (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2001), 123-144. 75 Schmitz, Homo democraticus, 230-254. 76 Handwritten announcement of marriage signed by Gustav Landauer and Else Eisner-Belli “To Our Friends” (An unsere Freunde): “( … ) wir zwei haben uns in dieser wilden Zeit, die in so stürmischem Tempo verläuft, still und fest in Liebe gefunden und wollen ein Paar sein, solange das Leben währt”: BAB, SAPMO, NY 4060/111.

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party, to deliver a speech in Augsburg at the end of March 1919 to celebrate the revolution. The event took place on a Sunday and because the heavily falling snow was already knee-deep, driving to the workers’ rally was difficult. Else Eisner describes what occurred: We arrived at Ludwigsbad. There we found a merry party waiting for a beer concert. The program [for the celebration] showed a brash superficiality and barbarism. After three [entertainment] numbers Landauer spoke. The people did not understand when he apologized for having to interrupt this harmless gathering with some serious words. Landauer spoke very well and touched on the policies of those days [one week before the proclamation of the First Bavarian Council Republic]. After he finished, a singer appeared and sang a silly piece about a princess. Landauer did not return to the hall again … . ‘Don’t you know,’ I asked the people, ‘that this must offend our sensibilities? Such a celebration of the revolution is a disgrace. Where is the revolutionary spirit? If you wish to listen to satirical songs and drink beer, go to a variety show, not to a celebration in honor of the revolution. You behave like the clubby members of a veterans organization! As for the [entertainment] program … that we should have to experience this. I am ashamed for you. And for this you [had to] bother [someone like] Landauer.’ At that very moment the singer had finished and received more applause than had the speaker for the revolution [Revolutionsredner].77

The cultural revolution envisaged by Landauer had not taken place, neither during the five years of war nor in the revolutionary turmoils following it. Education therefore was necessary in order to humanize the brutalized masses.78 For the moment the gulf dividing the poetic anarchist vision and the real life of the working class should be bridged by community rituals. Landauer, the “preacher,” chose to perform those spiritual rituals in the theater.79 The stage was where poetic dreams come to life. In Landauer’s view the main function of the theater was indeed “religious.” The Volksbühne, or people’s theater, was meant to transform the audience into a new Volk; to him then, the theater was the revolutionary political institution par excellence. Already in 1892 Landauer formulated the following program as an alternative to the materialistic revolution of the Social Democrats: “Above all a transformation of Spirit [eine Umwälzung der Geister] is 77 Diary of Else Eisner, entry dated 9 April 1919, 12-13 (the celebration itself had taken place on 30 March 1919): BAB, SAPMO, NY 4060/101. 78 Ulrich Klemm, ed., Anarchismus und Pädagogik: Studien zur Rekonstruktion einer vergessenen Tradition (Frankfurt/ Main: Dipa, 1991); Siegbert Wolf, “‘Revolution heißt ein neuer Geist’. Gustav Landauers libertäre Pädagogik und ihre Weiterentwicklung durch Martin Buber,” in Bestandsaufnahme, 76-97; Ulrich Klemm, Libertäre Pädagogik (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren, 2011). 79 Landauer was in conflict with himself over whether to work for the “Neue Freie Volksbühne” in Berlin or the “Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf.” See: Frank Pfeiffer, “Mir leben auch die Toten … ” Gustav Landauers Programm des libertären Sozialismus (Hamburg: Dr. Kovač, 2005), 157-167.



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necessary in order to systematically educate adults and children to moral and spiritual liberty.”80 This was the aim behind Landauer’s public speeches, and even more so, behind his concept of the theater. The theater was for him the central therapeutic place of psychic healing. It is not surprising then that during the German Revolution of 1918-1919 Landauer delivered speeches in the Bavarian councils and at the same time developed the concept of the revolutionary people’s theater, with him in the role of producer and director. “For me,” he wrote, “this is all one thing: Revolution – liberty – socialism – the dignity of man in politics and society – regeneration and rebirth – art and the stage.”81 He hoped that on and through the stage, the new revolutionary spirit of politics could be infused in a “people religiously caught up and united by the Spirit.”50 By touching and moving the souls of the audience and thus effecting a transformation in the most intimate realm of the individual, Landauer also hoped to transform and transfigure politics: “Public life can only find redemption and regeneration in that which is most intimate.”82 In particular, Landauer’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays as a theory of liberty83 is a good illustration of the political as well as religious dimension of the theater. He revised his Berlin Shakespeare lectures from the spring of 1917 until the outbreak of the revolution and intended to publish his book on Shakespeare in 1919, the year of the revolution (Shakespeare, 1920). Shakespeare, he writes, deals with “what is most personal and intimate in the individual soul and [with] the great public problems of the peoples.”84 Recent scholarship has stressed that Landauer’s theory of liberty – contrary to earlier interpretations – was lacking apocalyptic, chiliastic or messianic elements.85 Indeed he never suggested an end of history; history was – like in Shakespeare’s plays – a drama, and contemporary history was experienced by him to be as dramatically structured as plays on the stage: “In the letters written by Landauer in the turbulent days of the revolution

80 Sensation, 90. 81 Lebensgang II, 195. 82 Ibid., 184. 83 See Leonhard M. Fiedler, “‘Shakespeare ist der Genius der Freiheit.’ Gustav Landauers Shakespeare-Studien,” in Bestandsaufnahme, 246-264; Hanna Delf, “‘In die größte Nähe zu Spinozas Ethik.’ Zur Gustav Landauers Spinoza-Lektüre,” in Gespräch, 69-90; Stefana Sabine, “Seinsgrund. Landauers Shakespeare: Zur Politisierung philologischer Interpretation im Kontext der deutsch-jüdischen Moderne,” in Seelengrund auf Seinsgrund. Gustav Landauers ShakespeareStudien und seine Übersetzungen des Meister Eckhart, ed. Stefana Sabin and Yossef Schwartz (Berlin-Vienna: Philo, 2003), 5-23; Pfeiffer, “Mir leben auch die Toten,” 133-149. 84 Lebensgang II, 194. 85 Dubbels, Figuren, 273-274.

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it can be seen that for him the events on the stage and the historical moment merged.”86 The underlying tenet of Landauer’s ‘poetic anarchism’ then, was that both the new libertarian world and the new spiritual word had to be found in the “mine shafts”87 of the individual soul. And, as Landauer added in Skepticism and Mysticism, the prerequisite for that regeneration of the soul and of society was the “killing of the [old] word.”88 For Landauer an inevitable consequence of killing the old word was, of course, the basic rejection of political party anarchism, along with its notion of class consciousness as a source of political strength, and its political programs, statutes, resolutions and proposals. These all belonged to that world of the old word, which had to pass away or even be killed in order for the “new humanity” to become a reality. Linguistic criticism (Sprachkritik)89 thus opened the way to language poetics (Sprachpoetik), to the creative new language of an energizing myth.90 This redemptive “new word” could not be spoken by anarchist party politicians but only by Landauer, who himself was “a poetic man.”91 Whereas the Marxian socialist tradition sought to demystify the world, Landauer’s socialist anarchism under the influence of Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie reintroduced the myth into the realms of culture and politics.92 One can see why the members of the proletarian anarchist movement, fighting for the economic and political emancipation of their class, attacked Landauer’s position as intellectual arrogance93 and denounced his version of socialism 86 Despoix, Ethiken, 99-107, quotation 101. 87 Skepsis, 7. 88 Ibid., 3. 89 Thomas Regehly, “‘Die Welt ist ohne Sprache.’ Bemerkungen zur Sprachkritik Gustav Landauers, ihre Voraussetzungen und ihre Konsequenzen,” in Bestandsaufnahme, 219-245; Thomas Hinz, Mystik und Anarchie. Meister Eckhart und seine Bedeutung im Denken Gustav Landauers (Berlin: Karin Kramer, 2000); Joachim Willems, Religiöser Gehalt des Anarchismus und anarchistischer Gehalt der Religion? Die jüdisch-christlich-atheistische Mystik Gustav Landauers zwischen Meister Eckhart und Martin Buber (Albeck bei Ulm: Ulmer Manuskripte, 2001); Yossef Schwartz, “Seelengrund. Landauers Eckhart. Zur Säkularisation des Mystischen in der deutsch-jüdischen Kultur,” in Seelengrund auf Seinsgrund, 25-45; Elke Dubbels, “Sprachkritik und Ethik. Landauer im Vergleich mit Spinoza,” in An den Rändern der Moral. Studien zur literarischen Ethik, Ulrich Kinzel ed. (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2008), 103-115. For Martin Buber’s mysticism see Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue. Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 90 Dubbels, Figuren, 79-86; see also Rolf Kauffeldt, “Die Idee eines ‘Neuen Bundes’ (Gustav Landauer),” in Gott im Exil. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, vol. II, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 131-179. 91 Lebensgang II, 182. 92 Aschheim, Nietzsche, 217; Dubbels, Figuren, 82, calls this “Remythologisierung.” 93 Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus, 20.



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as “a revisionist anarchism with watered-down bourgeois tendencies.”94 Party anarchism and poetic anarchism, despite both having their roots in the “new anarchism” of the 1890s, were thus indeed fundamentally different. The proletarians and the prophetic poet could find no common ground.

94 Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus, 285.

Michael Löwy

Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber 1 Introduction Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber shared a romantic utopian vision that inspired their literary, religious and political writings, and made them the twentieth century’s principal prophets of community. It may be useful to explain from the outset what I understand by ‘prophet’, ‘romantic’ and ‘utopia.’ The term ‘prophet’ is used here not in the sense of a magician who pretends to foresee the future, but rather in the truly biblical sense of one who warns the people of impending catastrophe and calls for action before it is too late.1 The term ‘utopian’ should not be understood as “an ardent but unpractical reformer” as the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it, but rather as the advocate of a just and humane social order that does not yet exist anywhere – according to the original meaning of the Greek ou-topos. And ‘romanticism’ refers not only to the German literary movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but also to the more general current of protest waged against modern, industrial bourgeois society, in the name of past social, cultural or religious values. The romantic protest, running through modern culture from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s day to our own is directed at the cold, calculating, utilitarian, spirit of the modern and capitalistic age – what Max Weber called Rechenhaftigkeit – against the mechanization and reification of the soul, and above all, against what Weber referred to as die Entzauberung der Welt, or “disenchantment of the world.” To a large extent then, romanticism constitutes a nostalgic and often desperate attempt to re-enchant the world through poetry, myth, religion, mysticism and utopia. A powerful force in Central European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, this romantic trend usually took on a conservative and restorative character – the main exception being Jewish intellectuals, who often demonstrated marked socialist, utopian or revolutionary tendencies.2 Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber met for the first time in 1899 at the Neue Gemeinschaft, or “new community,” a sort of neo-romantic circle founded that year by the well-known literary critics, Heinrich and Julius Hart. The group also 1 “Thus saith the Lord : … if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the sabbath day … then will I kindle a fire in the gates … and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched.” (Jer. 17:27) 2 For the social and cultural background to these tendencies, see my Redemption and Utopia: Libertarian Judaism in Central Europe (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992).



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attracted writers and artists such as Erich Mühsam, Else Lasker-Schüler and Fritz Mauthner.3 Curiously enough – but perhaps quite typically, given the assimilation of German-speaking Jewish intellectuals and the romantic quest for religious spirituality – Buber’s and Landauer’s first area of common interest was Christian mysticism. Landauer was preparing an edition of Meister Eckhart’s writings at the time, while Buber had given a lecture on Jakob Böhme. For both, mysticism seemed a fascinating alternative to the empty rationalism, materialism and positivism of bourgeois culture.4 But they shared another, even more important, passion, namely the ideal of Gemeinschaft, or “community.” According to Martin Buber’s biographer, Hans Kohn, the encounter with Landauer, who was six years his senior, was “a landmark in his [Buber’s] life. From that point on, and up until Landauer’s death, the two were bound by a close friendship. Buber’s views on communitarian life were decisively influenced by Landauer.”5 Indeed, on social and political issues Buber was to become, to a significant degree, a follower or disciple of his older friend – a debt, which he always acknowledged.6 This does not mean that Buber was not a profoundly original social philosopher. If one compares the key lectures that they gave at the Neue Gemeinshaft in 1900, one can see both their common aspirations and some differences. In June 1900, Gustav Landauer gave his lecture “Through Isolation to Community,” an important statement of his new communitarian theory: “The community we long for and need we will find only if we isolate ourselves as individuals; then we will at last find, in the innermost core of our hidden being, the most ancient and the most universal community: the human race [Menschengeschlecht] and the cosmos. Whoever has discovered this joyous community in himself is enriched and blessed for all time and is finally removed from the common accidental communities of our age.”7 Among the old communities which were to be rejected in order to create the 3 Buber mentions the year 1899 as the moment when he first met Landauer. See his introduction to Lebensgang I, vii. 4 Buber intended to produce, with the German publisher Eugen Diederichs, a collection of essays on European mysticism, divided into three sections : German, Slav and Jewish. He was going to ask Landauer to write a piece on Eckhart, if the project went ahead. See his letter to Landauer of 10 February 1903, in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzenten, ed. Grete Schaeder, vol. I, 1897-1918 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1972), 186. 5 H. Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit (Hellerau: J. Hegner, 1930), 29. 6 As Paul Mendes-Flohr aptly sums it up, “without Landauer it is difficult to appreciate the ideational nuance and passion of Buber’s conception of politics … . Landauer was his alter ego on social and political matters.” See his paper “Prophetic Politics and Meta-Sociology: Martin Buber and German Social Thought,” Archives de Sociologie des Religions 60/1 (1985): 71. 7 G. Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in Die Neue Gemeinschaft: Ein Orden vom Wahren Leben, part 2: Das Reich der Erfüllung: Flugschriften zur Begründung einer neuen

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Menschengemeinschaft, or human community, there was of course the state, that authoritarian Gemeinheitsgemeinschaft, or communal community. Similar views were expressed a few months later in Martin Buber’s pathbreaking lecture, “Old and New Community,” also given at the Neue Gemeinschaft. In his lecture Buber referred to the above passage by Landauer as the most adequate description of the common “experience,” or Erlebnis – a key term in the Buberian lexicon – shared by those searching for a new Gemeinschaft. But Buber also developed some critical reflections concerning the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, which led him to a new and unprecedented definition of the new community as “post-social” rather than “pre-social” (the latter term was used by Tönnies in his well-known opus, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887). Buber meant that the new community does not hark back to ancient forms, but rather seeks to overcome modern society, while taking into account its achievements, such as the principle of individual freedom. It is not bound, as was the old community – whether the tribe, the clan or the religious sect – by one single word or opinion, such that quickly becomes frozen into dogma or a rigid law; instead it is held together by a common life in freedom and creativity, one that requires a diversity of opinions. In a remarkable sociological synopsis, illuminated by his visionary utopia, Buber argued: “Thus will humanity, which came out of a beautiful but rough primitive community, after having gone through the growing slavery of society [Gesellschaft], arrive at a new community, which will no longer be grounded, as was the first one, on blood affinities [Blutsverwandtschaft], but on elective affinities [Wahlverwandtschaft]. Only in this new community can the old eternal dream be accomplished and the instinctive life-unity of the primeval man [Urmenschen], which has been for so long fragmented and divided, return on a higher level and in a new form.”8 The utopian community is thus construed as a renewal of the primitive one – this is an essential theorem of romantic social philosophy – but it ceases to be a world of constraint inasmuch as it is bound by the mutual affinity of free individuals. Both Buber’s and Landauer’s communitarian views were clearly romantic, not only in their critical slant against the individualism and egotism of modern bourgeois society, but also in their nostalgic celebration of the lost Urgemeinschaft, or primeval community. However, unlike reactionary and conservative Weltanschauung, ed. Heinrich und Julius Hart (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1901), 46-48; quoted in Eugen Lunn’s fine biography, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 125. 8 M. Buber, “Alte und neue Gemeinschaft,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr and B. Susser, “Alte und neue Gemeinschaft : An Unpublished Buber Manuscript,” AJS Review, I (1976): 52-56. Flohr and Susser perceptively define Buber’s vision as a sort of non-political anarchism (ibid., 49).



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German romantics, they did not dream of restoration, but rather of a new form of communitarian life; nostalgia for the past is thus invested with hope for the utopian future. Prompted by his admiration for Landauer, Martin Buber asked him a few years later, in 1906, to contribute a volume to his sociological and socio-philosophical series, Die Gesellschaft. Landauer’s contribution, Die Revolution, published in 1907, is a largely unacknowledged landmark in modern political thought. This was the first attempt to challenge Friedrich Engels’ sympathetic but firm dismissal of utopia as a pre-scientific stage in the history of socialism in his Anti-Dühring (1878), and to re-instate the concept at the center of social philosophy. Well in advance of Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1918) and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929) Gustav Landauer had raised utopia to a universal human principle, which was to find its active expression in revolution.9 Landauer’s apologia for utopia was to influence not only Buber, Bloch and Mannheim, but also Gershom Scholem, Maneś Sperber, Walter Benjamin and the Jewish youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. It is difficult to estimate the impact this book had on its publisher, but we do know that Buber shared Landauer’s idea of revolution as regeneration, as well as his belief that the utopian change would come from “the unknown, the deeply buried and the sudden.”10 Buber was also very interested in Landauer’s essay “Volk and Land: Thirty Socialist Theses” (1907), which attempted to reformulate socialist theory. Landauer felt that if socialism were ever to emerge, it must be built up outside the state through decentralized communities, which would constitute the “new organism of the people.” Buber eagerly joined Gemeinschaft, the Berlin branch of the Sozialistischer Bund, which was the libertarian, socialist association created by Landauer in 1908 on the basis of his “Theses.” In its first pamphlet, “Was will der Sozialistische Bund?” the new organization, which attracted a significant following of a few thousand members, called for an “active general strike” to further their goal: a situation in which working people would no longer work for the capitalists but for themselves.11 9 Revolution, 17-18: “Utopia survives underground, also during times of relative stable topias, and undertakes to make out of this complex of memories, desires and feelings a unity, which it tends to designate with the name: the revolution.” 10 “Unbekanntes, Tiefbegrabenes und Plötzliches” are the last words of Landauer’s Die Revolution, 119. This, and several other passages from this work are quoted in Buber’s later work, Der utopische Sozialismus (Köln: J. Hegner, 1967), 81-100. 11 G. Landauer, “Volk und Land. Dreissig sozialistischen Thesen” and “Was will der Sozialistische Bund,” in Beginnen, 3-20, 91-95. In the preface to this posthumous collection of Landauer’s socialist essays, which he edited, Martin Buber commends the “presuppositions of a true socialism” and pays homage to the visionary character of the Socialist Bund. See his preface to Beginnen, iii. See also Lunn, Prophet of Community, 124-125.

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Buber and Landauer also shared a radical criticism – inspired by both German romantic and Jewish messianic ideas – of the evolutionist philosophy of progress common to both liberals and Second International Marxists. Both of them – more or less at the same time in 1911 – published books in which this new conception of history is couched in almost identical terms. It is impossible to know who influenced whom. Rejecting the conformist ideology of progressive “improvement” (Verbesserung), Buber wrote, in his Three Addresses on Judaism: “By ‘renewal,’ I do not in any way mean something gradual, a sum total of minor changes. I mean something sudden and immense [Ungeheures], by no means a continuation or an improvement, but a reversal and a metamorphosis.” Rather than hope for ordinary progress (Fortschritt), one should “desire the impossible [das Unmögliche].” Buber found the paradigm for such a complete renewal in the Jewish messianic tradition. Referring to the end of the Book of Isaiah where God says ‘I create new heavens and a new earth,’ (Isaiah 65:17), Buber states that “this was not a metaphor but a direct experience.”12 In the course of the same year Landauer’s A Call to Socialism appeared. One of the century’s great works of romantic socialism, it offers a negative credo, which can be summed up in the phrase “no progress, no technology, no virtuosity can bring us salvation or happiness.” Rejecting the German Social Democrats’ “belief in progressive development” (Fortschrittsentwicklung), Landauer presented his own vision of historical change: “To my mind, human history is not made up of anonymous processes, nor is it merely an accumulation of countless small events … . When something noble and grandiose, deeply moving and innovative, has happened to humankind, it has turned out that it was the impossible and the unbelievable … that have brought about the turning point.”13 Against the positivist-evolutionist perception of progress as quantitative and gradual accumulation, Buber and Landauer proposed a qualitative conception of historical time, according to which, the radical change or great metamorphosis results from a sudden eruption of what had hitherto been considered impossible. Whereas in Buber’s thought this vision has a strong religious, even messianic character, for Landauer the privileged moment of such an irruption is revolution – and here too, the religious undertone is unmistakable, as Landauer asserts that in revolu-

12 M. Buber, Drei Reden über das Judentum (1911; Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1920), 6061. Landauer wrote Buber a warm letter on May 1911, referring to his “inner joy” when reading the book, and emphasizing that he felt they were “friends walking the same path together.” See Buber, Briefwechsel I, 294. 13 Aufruf 1919, 11, 44, 108.



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tionary events “the unbelievable, the miraculous move toward the realm of the possible.”14 As Karl Mannheim has noted with some insight, Landauer can be seen as the heir of anabaptist millenarianism and even as the representative of “the Chiliastic mentality … preserved in its purest and most genuine form.” This style of thinking precludes any concept of evolution or any representation of progress. Within a “qualitative differentiation of time,” revolution is perceived as a breakthrough (Durchbruch), an abrupt moment, an experience lived in the here-and-now (Jetzt-Erleben).15 Mannheim’s analysis is all the more striking in that it applies not only to Landauer, but also, with a few subtle differences, to Martin Buber, to Walter Benjamin (in particular, to the latter’s messianic concept of Jetztzeit) and to several other Jewish-German thinkers

2 Romantic Judaism On the issue of communitarianism, Buber followed – albeit in his own unique way – the ideas of his friend, and the two also shared a contempt for the modernist and social-liberal ideology of progress; there was one area, however, regarding which Landauer was clearly indebted to Buber, namely, Judaism. Before 1908, there are very few references to Judaism in Landauer’s writings – or even in his letters. In the “Thirty Socialist Theses” essay mentioned earlier, Landauer refers to spiritual figures from every nation – for example Goethe in Germany – and then adds: “The Jews too, have their unity and their Isaiah, Jesus and Spinoza” – a selection that is very characteristic for Landauer, insofar as two of these purportedly greatest representatives of Judaism had an ambiguous relationship to the Judaism of their day.16 What caused Landauer to turn toward Judaism was not anti-Semitism or the Dreyfus affair – as was the case with Theodor Herzl or Bernard Lazare. It was rather his discovery – through the writings of Martin Buber – of a new conception of Jewish spirituality, a romantic Jewish religiosity. Landauer showed enthusiastic interest in Buber’s first Hassidic book, Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906). He was particularly impressed by the story called “The Master of Prayer,” which has a strong anti-bourgeois, critical slant. The story recounts how, once upon a time, there was a land of wealth, where gold, money and affluence were the only recognized values; where the rich were revered as

14 Landauer’s preface to Aufruf, x. 15 K. Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, 1929; 5th ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Schulte-Bulmke, 1969), 196. 16 Beginnen, 7.

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gods and received human sacrifices; and where compassion and solidarity were considered shameful nonsense. In the end, the inhabitants of the land are saved from their folly by the “master of prayer.”17 Landauer had read this story to his friend, the Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner (pen name of Leopold Wertheimer) and his wife, and he reported their reaction in a letter to Buber: “Deep joy, strong emotion and astonishment was the effect. It is indeed a marvelous text.”18 But the real watershed for Landauer was Buber’s The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908), which for Landauer had the effect of a sort of profane illumination, to use Walter Benjamin’s term. He was not the only one impressed by the book. It had a tremendous impact on many Jewish – and non-Jewish – intellectuals in Central Europe, because it presented for the first time a new image of Judaism, one radically different from both assimilated liberalism and Rabbinic Orthodoxy.19 For Landauer, as for several other German-Jewish intellectuals, only a romantic, mystical and poetic Judaism, such as that created by Buber from the old Hassidic legends, could have an appeal. It appeared as a direct challenge to the view of Judaism as a rationalist, legalistic, non-mystical, and anti-magical religion, which prevailed in various guises in German sociology, Weber and Sombart being but two of the names which immediately spring to mind. Writing to a friend in October 1908, shortly after the publication of the book, Landauer hailed these “marvellous stories and legends, from the tradition of eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystics, of the Baal-Shem and Rabbi Nachman.”20 He also wrote a review of the book – which appeared only in 1910 – that brought to the fore its romantic and messianic aspects: “The extraordinary thing about these Jewish legends is … that not only must the God who is sought after, free people from the limitations and illusions of the life of the senses, but he must first and foremost be the messiah who will raise the poor, tormented Jews out of their suffering and oppression.” In his view the Hassidic tales were the collective work of a people (Volk), and this did not mean something “popular” or trivial, 17 M.Buber, “Die Geschichte vom Meister des Gebetes,” in Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1906) from Die Chassidischen Bücher (Berlin: Schocken, 1927), 77-103. 18 The letter from Landauer is lost, but the comment is proudly quoted by Buber in a letter to his wife from December 1906, see Buber, Briefwechsel I, 252. 19 Among those whom it fascinated were such different figures as Rainer Maria Rilke, Walther Rathenau, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, and Franz Kafka. See Paul-Mendes Flohr’s remarkable essay, “Fin-de-siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1991), 100. 20 G. Landauer to Margarete Faas-Hardegger, 20 October 1908, in Lebensgang I, 218.



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but rather betokened “living growth: the future within the present, the spirit within history, the whole within the individual … . The liberating and unifiying God within the imprisoned and lacerated human being; the heavenly within the earthly.”21 The review also holds a confession of sorts, as Landauer tells us how his own attitude toward Judaism changed as a result of reading Buber’s opus: “Nowhere can a Jew learn, as he can in Buber’s thoughts and writings, what many today do not know spontaneously, and discover only when there is an outside impulse: namely, that Judaism is not an external accident [äussere Zufälligkeit] but a lasting internal quality [unverlierbare innere Eigenschaft], and identification with it unites a number of individuals within a Gemeinschaft. In this way, a common ground and a common situation of the soul [Seelensituation] is established between the person writing this article and the author of the book.”22 In the first, unpublished version of the review, which was recently discovered by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Landauer is even more explicit: “It is precisely through the mediation of Martin Buber that I have found Judaism.”23 In fact, Landauer himself was one of those Jews for whom Judaism had been an “external accident”; in response to an anti-Semitic article by Helmut Von Gerlach, Landauer wrote a letter to the editor of Die Zeit, in which he characterized his Jewishness as “fortuituous.”24 A few years later, Landauer wrote another sympathetic article on Buber, in which he presented his friend as “the apostle of Judaism before humanity,” and praised his Hasidic books as “filled with melancholy, tender beauty, and … the desire to be delivered from earthly oppression.” Landauer notes that as a result of Buber’s writings, which had saved a buried and underground tradition from oblivion, “the image of the Jewish essence [des jüdischen Wesens] became different for Jews and non-Jews.”25 In other words, Buber’s Jewish writings were the “outside impulse” that allowed Landauer to discover his own Jewish identity. It would, however, be rather one-sided to suggest that Buber’s influence alone accounted for Landauer’s “Jewish turn,” especially given the fact that Buber’s own religious ideas were themselves deeply influenced by Landauer’s social philosophy and by his writings on Christian mysticism. According to Hans Kohn, there are quite a few similarities between the way Landauer prepared his translation of Eckhart and the way Buber undertook his first translations of Has21 G. Landauer, “Die Legende des Baalschem,” Das literarische Echo 13, no. 2 (1910): 149. 22 Ibid. 148. 23 Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 107. 24 GLAJ, MS Varia 432, File 162. Although the document is not dated, it can certainly be established as having been written before 1908. 25 G. Landauer, “Martin Buber,” (1913), in WM 1921, 244-246.

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sidic documents.26 The two men in fact drew on a common source of German neo-romantic culture, and it was from this shared background that a process of mutual influence developed during those years. Indeed, after 1908 Landauer not only interpreted Judaism in the light of romantic hermeneutics, but also considered German romanticism in terms of the Jewish prophetic tradition. The most astonishing example of this latter concern is found in his lecture on Hölderlin from March 1916, in which he compares the German poet’s words – “harsh as the merciless verdict of a God” – to those of the Jewish prophets, and likens Hölderlin’s ultimate spiritual power as a modern prophet to that of his “brothers in the ancient times of the Hebrews.”27 The friendship and deep spiritual affinity between the two utopian prophets did not mean that there were no important differences between them. There were two main issues that set Landauer’s thinking apart from Buber’s: religion and Zionism. Whereas Buber’s spirituality falls within the realm of religious faith in the strict sense, Landauer’s philosophy belongs to the ambiguous domain of religious atheism. The prophetic, mystical or Jewish messianic topoi were secularized in Landauer’s socialist utopia. This of course was not secularization in the usual sense of the word, for there was still a religious element at the very heart of Landauer’s political imagination. The religious dimension was not simply nullified but rather preserved and suppressed – in the dialectical sense of Aufhebung – in utopian revolutionary prophecy. In Landauer’s mystical secularization – some authors speak of his “mystical atheism” – a religious symbolic universe became part of his revolutionary discourse and imbued it with a sui generis spirituality, which seemed to elude the usual distinctions between faith and atheism.28 Lan26 To illustrate his argument, Kohn quotes from the pamphlet issued by Landauer announcing the publication of his Eckhart-book: “Concepts such as modernization or selection are entirely false for this book … . It is the reappearance of a hidden something, which should be not historically honoured, but fulfilled in life.” Kohn, Martin Buber, 30. See also Norbert Altenhofer’s insightful article “Tradition als Revolution: Gustav Landauer’s ‘geworden-werdendes’ Judentum,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Carl-Winter-Universitätsverlag, 1979). 27 G. Landauer, “Friedrich Hölderlin in seinen Gedichten,” WM 1921, 165n., 168. See Bernd Witte, “Zwischen Haskala und Chassidut,” in Gespräch, 39-41. It is interesting to note that a few years later, in 1918, the young Gerhard Scholem, in his personal diary, also compared Hölderlin’s ‘canonical’ texts to the Bible. See G. Scholem, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen: 1. August 1918 – 1. August 1919, Adelboden – Bern. 89 pages, 37. Document to be found in the Gershom Scholem Archive of The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. See also: G. Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershon Scholem 1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard/ Belknap, 2007). 28 Heinz Joachim Heydorn, preface to Gustav Landauer: Zwang und Befreiung (Köln: J. Hegner, 1968), 15.



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dauer refused to believe in a “celestial and other-worldly God”; following Feuerbach, he affirmed that it was man who created God, and not the other way round, but this still did not prevent him from defining socialism as a “religion.”29 Landauer shared with Buber an attitude toward Jewish religion that was inspired by the romantic dialectic of utopia, linking the millennial past with a liberated future; tradition perseveres in the collective memory and in emancipation. In an important article on the Jewish question, entitled “Sind das Ketzergedanken?”(“Are these heretical thoughts?”), Landauer asserts that “the age-old path, which we keep in our soul, is that taken by mankind toward the future, and the tradition of our martyred and nostalgic heart is nothing other than the revolution and regeneration of mankind.”30 Landauer, however, emphasized the revolutionary social and political dimension of Judaism much more than did Buber. For instance, in his A Call to Socialism (1911) he interpreted the institution of a jubilee set down in Mosaic law in the following terms: “The uprising [Aufruhr] as a constitution, transformation and upheaval as a rule expected to last for ever … were the grandiosity and the sacredness of the Mosaic social order. We need that once again: new regulations and a spiritual upheaval, which will not make things and commandments permanently rigid, but which will proclaim its own permanence. The revolution must become an element of our social order, it must become the basic rule of our Constitution.”31 A note which I came across in the Landauer Archive takes up this theme from another angle; Landauer suggests that, whereas in other religions the gods help the nation and protect its heroes, in Judaism, “God is eternally opposed to servility; he is therefore the subversive one [Aufrührer], the one who rouses [Aufrüttler], the one who warns [Mahner].” The Jewish religion is evidence of “the people’s holy dissatisfaction with itself.”32 With regard to the issue of Zionism, Landauer had ambivalent feelings, even if he was not hostile to the movement itself. On the one hand, he rejected what he considered to be the “cold” and “doctrinaire” concept of a “Hebraic Judaism” aimed at suppressing German-Jewish, Russian-Jewish and Yiddish culture.33 On the other hand, he praised “the movement, generally known as Zionism, which 29 WM, 1921, 30, 35. 30 G. Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” in WM 1921,135. 31 Aufruf 1919, 136-137. This does not mean that Buber disagreed with this sort of argument – he quotes this same passage at the end of his chapter on Landauer in Paths in Utopia, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). But Landauer did not share Buber’s faith in the “God of Abraham and Isaac.” 32 GLAJ, Ms. Varia 432, File 23. Paul Mendes-Flohr is right in emphasizing the role of aesthetics in Landauer’s conception of Judaism (Divided Passions, 108), but the social and political dimension are no less important. 33 Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” in WM 1921, 127.

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runs through Judaism,” for seeking to give “a pure and creative form” to the specific essence of the Jewish nation.34 What he particularly resented was what he, in an angry letter to the Zionist educator Siegfried Lehmann, called “the falsifying ‘either/or’ choice, which the Zionist calls upon me to make between being a German and a Jew, a European and an Oriental.”35 In any case, his true commitment was not to Zionism – as it was for Buber – but to a sort of messianic diaspora socialism. He believed that the Jewish people have a specific messianic-revolutionary role in modern history: their mission (Amt), vocation (Beruf) or task (Dienst) being to help transform society and create a new humanity. Why the Jews? Landauer’s answer can be found in an astonishing passage from his “Heretical Thoughts” article: “A voice, like a wild cry resonating throughout the world and like a sigh in our heart of hearts, tells us irrefutably that the redemption of the Jew can take place only at the same time as that of humanity; and that it is one and the same [thing] to await the messiah while dispersed and in exile, and to be the “messiah of the nations.”36 This was, of course, a typical form of pariah messianism, which, in the spiritual domain, reversed the “negative privileges” (to quote Max Weber) of the pariah people. In Landauer’s view, the Jewish vocation could be traced back to the Bible itself. In a commentary on Strindberg written in 1917, he claims that there have been only two great prophecies in human history: “Rome, world domination; Israel, world redemption.” The Jewish tradition, which never forgot God’s promise to Abraham – the redemption of the Jew along with all nations – was evidence of “a messianic conception, a messianic faith, a messianic will.”37 The Jewish redemptive mission in modern times has taken the secular form of socialism. Landauer regarded the situation of the Jews in his generation to be the objective foundation for their internationalist, socialist role. Unlike other nations, the Jews were in the unique position of being a people, a community, a nation, but not a state; and this gave them the historical opportunity to avoid the delirium associated with statehood.38 This explains why he states in the conclusion to his “Heretical Thoughts” essay that while other nations have closed themselves off within state borders (“sich zu Staaten abgegrenzt haben”) “the Jewish 34 G. Landauer, “Zum Beilis-Prozess,” in WM 1921, 133. 35 The letter to Lehmann, from 30 November 1915, was published in November 1929 in the journal Der junge Jude. See Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 131. 36 WM 1921, 125. 37 Ibid., 273, 284. 38 According to Norbert Altenhofer, Landauer the anarchist rejected the two dominant currents within the German-Jewish community: assimilation, which implied acceptance of the German imperial state, and Zionism, which sought to establish a Jewish state. See “Tradition als Revolution … ,” 194-195.



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nation carries its neighbours in its bosom.” He regarded this singular situation as the surest sign of the Jews’ “mission to humanity.”39 When, in 1912, Landauer was invited by the West Berlin branch of the German Zionist movement to give a speech on “Judaism and Socialism,” he put forward the provocative idea that it was in fact the Galut (literally the exile), that linked Judaism to socialism – a notion that followed logically from his entire analysis of the Jewish condition. The Jewish people, he believed, was particularly qualified for the task of helping to build socialist communities, precisely because it was less addicted to the cult of the state.40

3 War and Revolution These differences never led to a clash between the two thinkers: their friendship and spiritual Wahlverwandtschaft, or elective affinity, was strong enough to overcome this and other differences of opinion. But things changed with the outbreak of World War I; now, for the first time, a real conflict emerged. While Buber, like many other Jewish-German intellectuals, seemed to follow – albeit with ambivalent feelings – the general trend of German patriotism, Landauer had been a staunch opponent of the war from the outset. In June 1914, just before the war, Landauer and Buber had taken part in an international cultural meeting in Potsdam of the Forte-Circle. When the war began, several of its members – such as the writers Erich Gutkind and Florens Christian Rang – sided with the German Reich, and hailed the war as a fight for German spiritual values and against French and English commercialism. To what extent Buber shared this viewpoint is not clear. Landauer, however, in a letter to Erich Gutkind expressed his utter rejection of such views, which he considered a sort of perverse aestheticism. Apparently this critique was also directed at Buber, who in a letter to Landauer of 18 October 1914, protested what he considered to be the latter’s unfair verdict: “Gutkind reports that you reproach me – as well as him – for having an aestheticist attitude; is it possible that you really misunderstand and misjudge me so? I 39 WM 1921, 128. 40 G. Landauer, “Judentum und Sozialismus,” Die Arbeit: Organ der Zionistischen Volkssozialistischen Partei, 2 (1920): 51. As Paul Breines emphasizes, in Landauer’s opinion “the Diaspora became the social base so to speak of the idea of the Jews as redeemers of humanity. The dispersion, in fact, freed the Jews; it allowed them to remain a nation, and at the same time, to transcend that nation and all nations, and to perceive the future unity of mankind as being made up of a variety of true nations.” See P. Breines, “The Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Landauer,” Leo Baeck Yearbook, 12 (1967): 82.

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cannot believe it.”41 Apparently there was a personal exchange of explanations, and though the quarrel was neutralised, the tension remained. Landauer’s attitude is succinctly expressed in a letter from November 1914 to his friend Fritz Mauthner, who had also adopted a German nationalist stance: “I do not have the slightest feeling of association with the policies and actions of the German Reich.”42 In Der Sozialist, a journal that was closely monitored by the authorities, he tried to fight German chauvinism by publishing cosmopolitan and anti-war texts by Herder, Fichte and Romain Rolland. He also supported the initiatives of the democratic, pacifist organization Bund Neues Vaterland, created in 1915 by certain intellectuals who favored an immediate compromise for peace, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and Albert Einstein. At the same time, he was deeply offended by the pro-war position taken by trusted friends such as Fritz Mauthner and Richard Dehmel.43 Martin Buber’s views were much less clear-sighted. In the editorial he wrote for the first issue of his journal Der Jude in 1916, he took a highly ambiguous stand. While emphasizing that Judaism as such had no connection to the war, he praised individual Jewish commitment to the war effort as an instance of “the discovery of community” and “the first step to inner liberation!”44 In another essay from the same year, “The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,” Buber celebrated Germany as the only nation in Europe with a spiritual affinity to the Eastern cultures, and therefore best suited to the historical mission of bringing together East and West in a fruitful reciprocity. He also emphasized that of all European nations, Germany had the strongest cultural interaction with Judaism.45 This was too much for Landauer. In a highly emotional letter to Buber on 12 May 1916 he reacted to his friend’s arguments with bitter anger and disappointment. He notes that in these two texts he once again discerns the “Kriegsbuber” or warmonger (literally war-Buber) he had almost forgotten – probably a reference to their first exchange in 1914. For Landauer, these texts of Buber’s were “very painful, offensive, and almost inconceivable,” representing the worst sort of “aestheticism and formalism,” which was the very reproach he had leveled at Buber in 1914. Landauer’s criticism was particularly aimed at Buber’s editorial “Die Losung”; indeed, what could be the meaning of discovering “community”

41 Buber, Briefewechsel I, 381. 42 Lebensgang II, 10. 43 Lunn, Prophet of Community, 243-246. 44 M. Buber, “Die Losung,” 1916, in Die jüdische Bewegung: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen, 2nd series, 1916-20 (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920), 7-15. 45 “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum,” in Vom Geist des Judentums (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916), 46. These passages do not appear in the 1919 edition of the essay.



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in the midst of war and murder? Referring to the “Spirit of the Orient” lecture, Landauer also told Buber that he had met several young people who had once admired him, but having heard the lecture now viewed him as a traitor rather than as a leader. Landauer’s own verdict was somewhat milder. He felt Buber was guilty not of treason, but rather of confusion (Trübung). Landauer considered Buber’s presentation of Germany as the redemptive nation for the Orient to be war politics and officialistic rhetoric (Offiziosentum) – especially in light of the fact that Buber had neglected to mention Germany’s policy of colonial conquest in the preceding decades. Finally, at the end of his letter, Landauer predicted – quite accurately – that Buber would soon regret these writings, and would abandon his positive view of Germany’s war against the other European nations; indeed to Landauer, this view reflected Buber’s state of “deep confusion” (Verwirrung) and “entanglement” (Verstrickung).46 How did Buber react to this harsh indictment – which at the same time, bore witness to a wounded friendship? In 1972, Grete Schaeder, the editor of Buber’s correspondence, added a note to Landauer’s letter: “Buber’s answer is missing; there was probably a spoken exchange between the two.”47 Thanks to a letter discovered in the Landauer Archive by Eugene Lunn, we in fact have a more concrete answer. Lunn explains Buber’s rebuttal: “Denying that he had defended the German war policies, he claimed that Landauer had read his article ‘with the eyes of a fanatic’ and had imposed [on it] a political meaning that was foreign to it. Landauer, in turn, concluded the exchange by saying that Buber, whether he wanted to or not, had played into the hands of the imperialists, although he saw Buber’s position as an unfortunate effect of the agony of the war.”48 Under pressure from Landauer, but also following a more widespread trend among leftist intellectuals, Buber became increasingly hostile to the war during 1916-1918. This is already apparent in his dispute with Hermann Cohen, champion of German “state consciousness,” in Der Jude, in September of 1916: “Humanity is greater than the state – and to say so, Professor Cohen, is now more than ever the duty of every man living in God.” His articles from 1917 are even more explicitly anti-war. Lamenting the fact that so many intellectuals had let themselves be regimented by the war-machine, he denounced “this degenerate war.”49 Buber’s

46 Buber, Briefwechsel I, 433-438. For obvious reasons this letter was not included in the edition of Landauer’s correspondence (Lebensgang) that Buber published in 1929. 47 Buber, Briefwechsel I, 438. 48 Buber’s answer is quoted in a letter Landauer wrote on 2 June 1916. See Lunn, Prophet of Community, 246-247. 49 M. Buber, “Der Staat und die Menschheit,” in September 1916, and “Ein politischer Faktor,” in August 1917, in Die Jüdische Bewegung, 57-58, 113.

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change of mind allowed the friendship with Landauer to grow once more, as the correspondence from those years readily shows. This does not mean that there were no disagreements; differences of opinion persisted, particularly with regard to political issues such as the question of Zionism vs. revolution. This issue did not produce the same kind of conflict between them as did the war issue, but it did determine in a decisive way the different paths they followed during the crucial years of 1918-1919. Landauer welcomed the Russian Revolution with enthusiasm, despite his strong hostility to Marxism. A letter to Buber from 5 February 1918 documents in a sharp and concrete way Landuaer’s disagreement with his friend, whose main interest at that precise moment was the future of the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Explaining his refusal to contribute to a volume of collected essays, which Buber was planning as a protest “against the penetration of imperialism and mercantilism into Palestine” Landauer writes: “My heart has never lured me to Palestine, nor do I believe that it necessarily answers the geographical requirement for a Jewish community [Gemeinschaft]. The real event of importance, one that may even be decisive for us Jews, is the liberation of Russia … . To me it seems preferable – in spite of everything – that Bronstein is not teaching at the University of Jaffa, but is Trotsky in Russia.”50 Landauer’s attitude toward the Bolsheviks was ambivalent but in the preface to the new edition of his A Call to Socialism he expressed joy at the news that they – like Friedrich Adler or Kurt Eisner – seemed to have overcome their doctrinarism and allowed federation and freedom to take precedence over centralism and military-proletarian discipline.51 However, Landauer’s main interest, during the last year of his life was the future of the revolution in Germany. His friendship with Kurt Eisner led him to make a decisive commitment to the movement in Bavaria. As soon as he arrived in Munich in November 1918, Landauer, together with Erich Mühsam, became leaders of the most radical current, the Revolutionary Workers’ Council, which included both partisans of Eisner’s USPD (Independent Social Democrats) and anarchists. During January and February 1919, he was even willing to cooperate with the Munich Spartacists – a group he had once 50 Despite this harsh rebuttal, Landauer still showed interest for the Jewish kibbutzim in Palestine and agreed to participate in a meeting with Zionist socialists (organized by Buber) in order to discuss the topic; the meeting was to have taken place in April 1919, but by that time Landauer was involved with the revolutionary councils in Munich. There is a letter between Landauer and Nahum Goldmann on the subject, dated March 1919 (Landauer Archive, MS Varia 432, Files 167168). It has been published in Hebrew with an interesting introduction by Avraham Yassour, “Al hityashvut shitufit va tiyus” (On communal settlements and industrialization), Kibbutz 2 (1975): 165-175. 51 G. Landauer, “Vorwort zur neuen Aufgabe,” Aufruf 1919, vii-viii.



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despised – in the common struggle against the counterrevolutionary forces; his involvement became more intense following the assassination of his close friend Kurt Eisner, at the hands of the fanatical aristocrat, Count Arco-Valley. Martin Buber followed his friend’s political endeavors with sympathy but increasing anxiety. He went to Munich in February 1919, and met with both Eisner and Landauer. In an impressive letter from February 22 – shortly after the Jewish revolutionary leader had been murdered – Buber describes to his friend Ludwig Strauss the “apocalyptic” mood among the Munich revolutionaries and the “demonic character [Dämonie] of Eisner’s divided Jewish soul.” Landauer, he notes, “kept faith in Eisner with an extreme effort of the soul, like a sentinel inspired by a moving self-denial.” The whole situation, he concluded, was an “unspeakable Jewish tragedy.”52 When the Räterepublik, or Council Republic was proclaimed in Munich on 7 April 1919, Landauer agreed to become commissioner for enlightenment and public instruction. He had few illusions about the chances of the revolution lasting for long. In a letter to Fritz Mauthner, written the same day, he comments “if we are allowed a few weeks time, then I hope to be able to accomplish something; it is very possible, however, that it will last only a few days and it will then seem as if it had been a dream.”53 The dream soon ended in a nightmare. After the defeat of the revolution three weeks later, Landauer was brutally murdered by counterrevolutionary troops on 2 May 1919. In an article written soon after Landauer’s death, Martin Buber payed a moving tribute to the memory of his friend: “Landauer lived as a prophet of the human community to come, and fell as its martyr.”54 In his will Landauer had named Buber the executor of his estate. His friend carried out this duty with exemplary dedication, publishing Landauer’s correspondence (1929) and two volumes of collected articles and essays, Der werdende Mensch (1919) and Beginnen (1924). Above all, Buber remained faithful to the romantic, libertarian, anti-authoritarian, federalist and communitarian socialism of Gustav Landauer. This debt is reflected in all of Buber’s social-philosophi52 Buber, Briefwechsel, I, 67. 53 Lebensgang II, 414. In fact, Landauer had ceased to serve as people’s commissioner after April 14, when a Communist leadership (Eugen Leviné) replaced the socialist/anarchist coalition at the head of the ephemeral Council Republic. His project for educational reform, based on a “Revolutionary University Council” was to transform the universities into a libertarian cooperative society of lecturers and students. Of course, he did not have time to implement it. See Lunn, Prophet of Community, 330. For a dramatic eye-witness account of his murder, see ibid., 338. 54 M. Buber, “Landauer und die Revolution,” Masken, 19 (1919): 290-291. Buber compared him to his ancestors, the Jewish prophets and martyrs of the past, and to Christ crucified by the Romans.

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cal writings, from The Holy Way (Der heilige Weg) of 1919, which was dedicated to Landuaer, through to his last essays. In a lecture held in 1939 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Landauer’s death, he referred to the state-centered, bureaucratic degeneration of Stalinist Soviet Russia (“a Leviathan that presents itself as messiah”) and insisted that history had confirmed Landauer’s ideas: “Landauer had argued again and again, with perfect clarity and consistency, that such an accumulation of power and violence could not become socialism.”55 But, it is primarily in Paths in Utopia (first published in Hebrew in 1947) – his most important discussion of socialist theory – that Buber pays homage to Landauer as a thinker. He shared Landauer’s romantic conception of the socialist utopia as a revival, a regeneration, or renewal – outside of the state and its institutions – of ancient communitarian traditions still present in the collective memory. He of course agreed with his friend’s conception of socialism as “religion,” in the etymological sense of the word, as a free common life of human beings linked by a common spirit.56 The definition he proposes for Landauer’s social philosophy also applies perfectly to his own. “Revolutionary conservatism,” he writes, “was exactly what Landauer had in mind; a revolutionary choice of those elements of social being which deserve to be preserved and are viable in the building of a new structure.” Finally, he did share Landauer’s belief in the need to begin building socialism here and now, by creating an “organic” social life, through a decentralized network of local socialist villages or communities.57 There are, however, significant differences between Buber’s utopian socialism and Landauer’s anarchism. First of all, the author of Paths to Utopia was critical, but not in a totally negative way, in his assessment of Marx’s socialism; he also positively acknowledged the federalist and democratic content of Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune of 1871. Secondly, Buber did not call for the complete abolition of the state, but only of the “surplus-state” (Mehrstaat), or that amount of state power that has been made unnecessary by the people’s increased capacity for voluntary common life in justice and order.58 55 M. Buber, “Landauer heute,” 1939, unpublished paper, Martin Buber Archive, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 56 The root religare means to link, to bind. 57 Buber, Der utopische Sozialismus, 83, 88. See also his comments on the “most ancient traditions” (uralte Überlieferung) of communitarian life, ibid., 85. As is well known, Buber considered the kibbutz to be an “exemplary non-failure” in the history of practical socialist experiments. On the differences between Landauer’s anarchism and Bubers’s “communitarian religious socialism tinged with anarchism,” see Avraham Yassour’s essay “Utopia and Anarchism in Buber’s and Landauer’s Social Thought,” (Hebrew), in Buber, Hakibbutz ve hara’ayon hashitufi (Buber, the Kibbutz and the Communitarian Idea), University of Haifa, 1979. 58 Buber, Der utopische Sozialismus, 83.



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Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber were unarmed prophets, to use Machiavelli’s well-known phrase. They were also romantic socialists and communitarian utopians. Was their utopian socialist dream a reasonable one? The answer is perhaps best expressed in the words of George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress therefore depends on the unreasonable man.”

Martin Treml

Between Utopia and Redemption: Gustav Landauer’s Influence on Gershom Scholem Gershom Scholem’s memoirs of his youth, From Berlin to Jerusalem, not only describe the formative years of this great historian, but also offer a broad view of fin-de-siècle Judaism in Germany.1 One might call it a panoramic view, even though it is biased and presented in a deliberately unbalanced fashion. Throughout his life Scholem was critical of what has been called “the German-Jewish symbiosis” or “myth of the German-Jewish dialogue,” as he derisively referred to it.2 Of course “myth” is not meant here in any formal, technical sense, but rather points to the illusion, or kind of wishful thinking that failed, because “it takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him.”3 This precondition for ein wahrhaftiges Gespräch, a true dialogue of the kind aspired to in all forms of Lebensphilosophie, was completely lacking in the Germany of the time. Scholem’s utter contempt for the complex phenomenon of Jewish assimilation to German culture led him to undertake a description of the milieu from which he had emerged ira et studio. Scholem, it must be noted, was definitely streitbar, a militant and polemical thinker. He often developed his own opinions by attacking those of others, especially views that were fashionable or widely accepted. This was the scholarly approach behind Scholem’s writing, for which David Biale would later coin the term “counter-history.”4 As Biale explains it, counter-history emerges as a new kind of Volksgedächtnis, a collective but repressed memory running under the surface of the great epic of official historical commemoration. Scholem himself viewed this interpretation with a certain skepticism and, in a private letter, made an ironic comment about the title of Biale’s book, musing “who Gershom Scholem is I hope I know more or less; what Kabbala is, I have tried to find out in my lifetime, and what counter-history is, I frankly do not know.”5 1 See G. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken, 1980). 2 G. Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue” (1964), in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. W. J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 61-64. 3 Ibid., 61f. 4 See D. Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979). 5 G. Scholem to Edward Ullendorf, 8 October 1980, G. Scholem, Briefe, vol. III, 1971-1982, ed. I. Shedletzky (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 215.

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Yet in his approach to the historiography of Jewish mysticism and in his effort to contribute to the renaissance of Jewish spiritual life, Scholem certainly ran counter to the common opinion of his time, and he persevered in his singular approach for decades. At the same time, however he felt deeply indebted to ideas that had been expounded by thinkers a decade or so before his time. One of the most interesting figures on the intellectual landscape of Scholem’s youth, and one of several eccentrics – even outsiders – who dominated the intellectual and reform-oriented circles of late Wilhelmian Germany, was Gustav Landauer. In tracing Landauer’s influence on Scholem’s thinking, one can begin with Scholem’s own comments on the impact that Landauer’s lectures and writings had on him. In From Berlin to Jerusalem he mentions Landauer twice, but only the first remark is of interest here.6 The passage cited below reflects Scholem’s personal attitude toward the man and his work, and can also be seen as his public account of his relationship to Landauer: Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf zum Sozialismus [A Call to Socialism] made a profound impression not only on me but on a considerable number of young Zionists as well. The same may be said of the personality of Landauer, who frequently lectured in those days before Zionist groups, and with whom I had several conversations toward the end of 1915 and in the following year. By that time I had already attempted to understand the three substantial volumes of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Toward a Critique of Language] to which an older student had directed my attention. Landauer, who was a great admirer and also a collaborator of Mauthner (though he made very negative remarks about the latter’s attitude during the war), encouraged me to read his own observations and conclusions from Mauthner’s theories which he had written down in his book Skepsis und Mystik [Skepticism and Mysticism].7

The information provided in this passage must be analyzed step by step, and each step supplemented with details provided by Scholem in his other writings. First of all, Scholem recounts that he was profoundly impressed by Landauer’s socialism, and particularly by his essay A Call to Socialism. Yet Landauer’s call was to a very different type of socialism, and it was expressed in a very different tone than that associated with the “political” socialism of the time. Indeed the term “political” is aptly used here by way of contrast, given that Landauer considered his position to be “unpolitical.” In fact, Scholem attended more or less clandestine meetings, held by a minority within the Social Democratic Party, which was strictly opposed to the 6 The second reference to Landauer was made in a discussion about the Forte-Kreis, to which Landauer belonged. See Scholem, Berlin to Jerusalem, 81. Regarding the group itself, see Christine Holste, Der Forte-Kreis (1910-1915), (Stuttgart: M&P - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992). 7 Scholem, Berlin to Jerusalem, 52f.

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war. He attended the meetings in the company of his brother Werner and in April 1915 he even “took an active part in … the distribution of the Marxist journal Die Internationale, of which only one issue had appeared and which was immediately banned.”8 He notes, however, that “the Marxist doctrines that my brother now urged on me amicably rather than forcibly still impressed me far less than the writings of the anarchists, quite a few of which I read in the Berlin municipal library … I went on to read Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, as well as Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Elisée Reclus. Their socialism was more meaningful to me than the supposedly scientific kind, which I never found convincing.”9 Though he had considered joining the Social Democrats from time to time, Scholem ultimately rejected this option for several reasons. As he confessed in his diary, joining would have been a step taken only out of protest or curiosity, not out of conviction. On 18 December 1915 he wrote how he almost became a member of the Social Democratic Party: “suddenly something came over me, I went to the house where Werner had registered at the time, and had I found the clerk of the fourth constituency that I was looking for, I would be a party member now. Only afterwards did a skeptical reflection arise: in times of peace I would never ever become a member of the party, and was doing so now out of curiosity for opposition news. Is that right? What have I got to look for in the party? Very little.”10 It was certainly the party’s support for the war, which deeply shocked Scholem. Given his Zionist convictions, he did not think it his business to fight for the interests of imperial Germany, especially since the latter could by no means be regarded as a power that protected Jewish interests, either in Palestine or in Eastern Europe. One must not forget that Scholem was one of a growing number of young German Jews who were fascinated by the religious aura, which seemed to issue from Russian immigrants and refugees from Poland and Galicia. It was felt that these Eastern European Jews did not need to be Western, on the contrary, they could exert a great influence on the German Jews who had apparently lost all ties to their Jewish identity. On the other hand, not all the political views voiced by these Eastern European Jews were equally well received by their admirers in the West. Of the four Scholem brothers, it was Werner and Gerhard (later Gershom), who protested against the authority and values incarnated in their father; he was branded a petty-bourgeois by the one and a self-deceptive assimilationist by the

8 Ibid., 52. 9 Ibid. 10 See G. Scholem, Tagebücher, 1913-1917, ed. K. Gründer and F. Niewöhner (Frankfurt/Main: Jüdischer Verlag), 207.

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other. At the family table, Scholem the elder called them “incorrigible rogues.”11 To the rebellious sons, who left home in 1913 and 1917 respectively, after disastrous quarrels with their father, the latter came across as a dangerous dog, always on guard and growling “rogues, rogues.” They considered him part of a society in decay, which would soon pass, and saw themselves as part of what Gershom called “the proletariat of longing (Sehnsucht).”12 In their ideological struggle the two brothers stuck together for quite some time. Decades later, in the famous interview with Muki Tsur, Scholem spoke of Werner: “This brother of mine, who at first had thought that Zionism might be the way, one day wrote a letter to that Zionist youth organization saying that he had found something broader than the narrow little thing called Jewish nationalism; he had found: Humanity. He became a left-wing radical socialist and took part in all splits of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, finally landing with the Communists in 1921. Six years later they expelled him as a Trotskyist, along with most of the Jews in the Communist movement.”13 Werner’s decision to pursue “something broader than the narrow little thing called Jewish nationalism” led him bit by bit into complete isolation. By contrast, Gerhard’s Zionism proved to be an option that enabled him to spend his life among others. Yet it seems that the younger brother would also have to find “something broader” – a profile of his own in the larger context. An anarchist stance in opposition to Marxism would have been one such possible choice. In a letter of 7 September 1914, which is the second letter in Itta Shedletzky’s remarkable edition of Scholem’s correspondence, the young Gerhard gives Werner another reason for his disapproval of the Social Democrats, explaining it is “because you are ‘organized.’ I don’t like any organization. Organization is like a muddy lake into which the beautiful torrential stream of the idea flows and [is] not let … out again. Organization is a synonym for death. This holds not only for the Social Democrats – but also for the other ‘ists and ‘isms, only with the socialists it is appallingly so.”14 Presumably, Scholem is here indicating a different ideal, indeed a genuinely anarchistic notion aiming at a bundisch kind of association or league. He could have borrowed this ideal from Landauer, and it appears that this was in fact the case. In his argument against organization of any kind at all, he refers to a muddy lake into which the beautiful stream of ideas flows, never to be let out again. These 11 Werner Scholem to Gerhard Scholem, 22 September 1914, Scholem, Briefe, vol. I, 1914-1947, ed. I. Shedletzky (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 14. 12 Scholem, Tagebücher, 85. 13 G. Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” in On Jews and Judaism, ed. Dannhauser, 1-48, 3. See Mirjam Zadoff, Der rote Hiob: Das Leben des Werner Scholem (Berlin: Hanser, 2014). 14 Scholem, Briefe I, 5.

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words contain a veiled reference to Landauer’s critical comment on Zionist party politics. In an article entitled “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” (“Are these Heretical Thoughts?”), that appeared in the collective volume Vom Judentum of the “Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag,” he had written: “Characteristic of what is called the party here is the kind of masturbating self-gratification of the so-called movement in itself; the party is like a continental lake, into which the idea has flowed, but from which it will not emerge again.”15 In Scholem’s diary the first allusion to the Bar Kochba volume can be found in the entry for 23 January 1915. Since he appears to have picked up on Landauer’s comment likening an organized party to a muddy lake, already half a year earlier, one can assume that he already possessed, or at least knew of the volume at this time. In the note to this diary entry, he mentions but a single essay, namely, Adolf Böhm’s “Wandlungen des Zionismus.”16 Writing about this essay with a certain sympathy, he declares “our Zionism is the teaching of the breaking down of walls, the teaching of revolutionizing the East, it is the most sublime anarchist teaching there is. With special emphasis we demand the Zionist deed rather than this organisational talk, that is, we demand a move toward the East, possibly to Palestine … . Even Landauer will not defeat us by words. And to think that he considers himself to be a critic of language!”17 Sooner or later Scholem changed his mind about Landauer’s “Ketzergedanken.” In a diary entry for 28 June 1916, Scholem writes that Landauer’s work is, “through the clarity of conviction, extraordinary and important.”18 One should add that the young Scholem was more radical than consistent, at least in some of his ideas. In the letter to Werner from September 1914 he listed the pitfalls of organization and continues: “I, Gerhard Scholem, do not stand on the ground of anarchism even though I have the highest admiration for Gustav Landauer. Because it does not know unity. Perhaps you have heard of a mystical Jewish sect, the Hasids in Galicia, who teach (taught!) socialism sans phrase. They stood on the ground of unity and of myth that is life … I believe in socialism and in the path that it takes. I believe in the will to happiness, but I do not believe that you or we will bring happiness. But with regard to happiness, Martin Buber, in his Three

15 G. Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken”, in WA III, 170-174, 265f., 171. 16 Scholem, Tagebücher, 82. The volume Vom Judentum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1913), can be found in the Scholem Library, The National Library of Israel, under sign. 16 364. There are annotations in quite a few essays, and there is a single undated page with comments in Scholem’s handwriting, relating not to Landauer, but to Moritz Goldstein’s “Wir und Europa,” 195-209. Scholem calls this latter essay “Höhe des Buberism,” literally “The Height of Buberism.” 17 Scholem, Tagebücher, 83. 18 Ibid., 327.

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Addrresses on Judaism, told the parable: In front of the gates of Rome a leprous beggar sits and waits, It is the Messiah … Who is he waiting for? ‘For you’...!”19 Here Scholem expresses a degree of admiration and esteem for Landauer, which does not accord with his own feelings about anarchism. Scholem felt that anarchism lacked unity or Einheit, to use another magic fin-de-siècle term. Ex negativo Landauer is credited with possessing this quality. As far as Scholem is concerned, there may be greater masters of unity – and of this capacity for myth – than Landauer, namely, the Hasids of Galicia. Yet they taught their “socialism sans phrase,” they no longer teach it. The hope is that Landauer will fill the void in order to become their genuine successor. Were he to do so, happiness might reign; and this, of course, would also be thanks to Buber’s interpretation of “socialist” Hasidism, which, as it were, brought socialism into closer alignment with messianic redemption. One of the best sources for tracing Scholem’s reception of Landauer is Scholem’s diary. One can assume, for example, that Scholem must have read Landauer’s Die Revolution before he started recording regular entries on 15 November 1914.20 In any case, Scholem followed the course and fate of Landauer’s public pronouncements quite meticulously. On 8 May 1915 he refers to Landauer’s recently published article on anarchism in Zeitecho, which had been “censored, and how censored?!! It is dreadful.”21 The article, “Aus unstillbarem Verlangen,” constituted yet another “call.” It was a call to not sacrifice oneself on the battle-fields, “because human beings long for the connecting spirit, which has become lost, for a substitute for the old religions, which have perished in [terms of] their forms.”22 In place of the cult of the moloch, Landauer gave the following advice: “practice the innate and eternally equal religion of love in small matters and that of justice in great matters – then the special form of religion of humanity will surely grow out of your life.”23

19 G. Scholem to Werner Scholem, September 1914, Briefe I, 6. He is alluding to one of Buber’s famous Bar Kochba speeches in Prague. 20 Scholem mentions a visit from Brauer, who brought him Landauer’s Die Revolution: “Vormittag Brauer. Hat mir die Revolution von Gustav Landauer sehr schön gebunden gebracht.” See Tagebücher, 44, 50. Elsewhere Scholem notes “In 1915, I began to read the works of Gustav Landauer, especially his Aufruf zum Sozialismus.” See G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 6. 21 Scholem, Tagebücher, 104; see also G. Landauer, “Aus unstillbarem Verlangen,” in WA III, 12-15, 232. 22 WA III, 15. 23 Ibid.

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Scholem not only read Landauer’s works, he also attended some of his lectures.24 Most of these were held at an institution called the Siedlungsheim, which was located in Berlin’s Zoological Gardens and attended by members of the “social reform-minded wing” of the youth movement.25 In fact, Landauer had come in close contact with its protagonists, Ernst Joël and Hans Blüher. His relationship with them was most certainly born of his isolation after 1914, when at least two of the three men “who were humanly and spiritually” close to him, namely Martin Buber and Fritz Mauthner, became patriots and war enthusiasts.26 His cooperation with the “few young people … who might come to some good” ended half a year later, in the spring of 1916, because of differing views on the role of women in the group.27 When the crisis between Landauer and the leaders of the Siedlungsheim was still in its early stages, Scholem began attending the meetings. In December 1915 he attended a lecture on romanticism, and noted down his impressions: “Gustav Landauer is a very tall, handsome man with elevated language and an artist’s tie. He spoke about Jean Paul, Hölderlin, and Kleist and he said very nice things about the latter two. About love and the longing for unity that transcends oppositions.”28 At the end of January 1916, Scholem referred to Landauer’s lecture on democracy: Greeted Herr Landauer who came very punctually at half past eight. [He did not come at all, when the lecture was announced the first time.] So he spoke rather nicely for about one and a half hours about the “problem of democracy.” In his speech, he was frightfully dismissive with regard to the right to vote [for candidates] to the Reichstag. In the debate that followed the speech all kinds of things were asked and talked about, also by myself. Afterwards spoke with Landauer personally at length; he said that ‘he sympathizes with Zionism very much’, then I drove home with some of the people.29

24 The following books by Landauer are stored in the Gershom Scholem Library in Jerusalem: Rechenschaft, under sign. 7991; Revolution, (sign. 7997); Aufruf zum Sozialismus (sign. 7999), Skepsis und Mystik, both the 1903 edition (sign. 8001), as well as the second edition of 1923, corrected by Buber against Landauer´s own copy (sign. 8000); and Erkenntnis und Befreiung, ed. R. Link-Salinger (Hyman), (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), with dedication (sign. 16096). There are no annotations or glosses in any of these volumes. 25 Scholem, Berlin to Jerusalem, 76. 26 G. Landauer to Margarete Faas-Hardegger, 20 October 1908, Lebensgang I, 218. 27 G. Landuaer to Hedwig Lachmann, 5 August 1915, Lebensgang II, 65. For the beginning of the break with the Siedlungsheim, see Landauer’s letter to Ernst Joël, at Christmas 1915, and for the final stage, see the letter to Hans Blüher, 26 February 1916, in Lebensgang II, 112-114 and 129-132, respectively. 28 Scholem, Tagebücher, 198. 29 Ibid., 250f.

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Neither Scholem nor Landauer could be said to be brimming with enthusiasm about the relations between them, even after they had become better acquainted. But Scholem still attended the lectures, which were the first in a whole series on socialism, and remarked that Landauer “speaks very well.”30 It was at the Siedlungsheim, however, that by chance, Scholem’s “acquaintance with Walter Benjamin took place,” and it was Landauer who unintentionally played an important role at the beginning of the friendship.31 Having read Landauer’s A Call to Socialism Scholem talked to Benjamin about Landauer’s attempt “to unite the two paths of socialism and Zionism.” It is worth noting that Benjamin “was interested especially in [Landauer’s] monograph Die Revolution,” of all of the many books in Scholem’s library.32 However, the folie à trois soon cooled. Benjamin had become skeptical of a journal, “which, so we thought, suffered from general feebleness and despite its antiwar stance lacked a definite aim.”33 The monthly, called Der Aufbruch, an obvious choice of title in those years, was edited by Ernst Joël, his enemy of old from their days in the Free Student Movement (Freie Studentenschaft). Landauer contributed an article entitled “Stelle dich, Sozialist!,” a shorter and less sophisticated version of his Call to Socialism.34 Scholem states “Benjamin made a very good analysis of [the] essay, which I defended to some extent.”35 Scholem recounts that when the three friends met in the summer of 1916 near Munich – at Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg – this time in the company of Benjamin’s wife Dora, Landauer joined the conversation when “Benjamin said that Buber represented feminine thinking. In contrast to Gustav Landauer, who had once said the same thing about Buber in an essay by way of praise, Benjamin meant it here as a rebuke.”36 Even without delving deeply into what Landauer really had meant by calling his friend “a resurrector (Erwecker) and advocate of specifically feminine thinking … without which there will be no renewal and refreshment for our playedout and abased culture,” one notes how close the two of them had been brought together by Benjamin.37 In those years, Buber was in fact the main target of both 30 Ibid., 284. 31 Scholem, Berlin to Jerusalem, 77. 32 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 6f., 11. 33 Ibid., 13. 34 See G. Landauer, “Stelle dich, Sozialist!,” in Auch die Vergangenheit ist Zukunft, ed. S. Wolf (Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 1989), 224-230. 35 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 13. 36 Ibid., 29. 37 G. Landauer, “Martin Buber,” in WA III, 162-170, 263-265, esp. 165. For Landauer´s answers to Buber in the discussion concerning his statement, see his letters from 17 and 19 March 1913, in Lebensgang I, 434-436.

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Scholem and Benjamin, whereas Landauer could be thought of as another Buber, only better. Benjamin, as Scholem gladly reported, rejected “the cult of ‘experience’ (Erlebnis), which was glorified in Buber’s writings of the time (particularly from 1910 to 1917). He said sarcastically that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew “Have you experienced Jewishness yet?’” or “‘Have you had the Jewish experience yet?’” – a blasé, even silly question.38 Compared with Buber’s position, Landauer’s stance was more neutral – at least with regard to Zionist issues. One could disagree with some of his statements, but still be enthusiastic about others. Scholem was thus a passionate advocate of Landauer’s epistemology in Skepticism and Mysticism, of his philosophy of history in Die Revolution and A Call to Socialism, and he was also interested in Landauer’s occasional reflections on Judaism.39 Certainly, Landauer’s work in these areas was unsystematic, but there was a connecting – albeit sometimes torn and re-knotted – thread running through them all. The very same holds for Scholem’s own reception of Landauer. Despite his long-standing interest in Landauer, all reference to the latter could vanish from Scholem’s writing for a time, only to reappear later in some other context. This special relationship can be likened to the tie that exists between close friends, who may lose contact now and then, but feel great pleasure when they meet again. For Scholem this relationship was never as ambivalent as that which he had with Buber, nor was it marked by a change of heart as was the case with regard to Hermann Cohen. Scholem’s lifelong affinity to Landauer is evident in Scholem’s writing even in places one would least expect. When he discovered the notion of an integral Judaism, comprising the sum total of all its forms throughout history, Scholem fiercely attacked Siegfried Lehmann, a disciple of Buber and the head of the Volksheim in Berlin Mitte: “Judaism is not Buber, Judaism is not the Rambam, not mysticism and not Rashi, but [rather] Rabbi Akiba + Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, Isaac Luria + Joseph Karo and perhaps Hillel Zeitlin + David Hoffman: they together constitute Judaism. This is the meaning of the totality of Judaism: the sum of the currents of the Torah.”40 Six years earlier Landauer had expressed similar sentiments in a letter to the young writer, Rafael Seligmann: “If you take Moses, Jesus, and Spinoza away from Judaism then there is no Jewish people. The Kabbalah is as genuine as Spinoza.”41 Yet Landauer’s concept of revolution is marked not by 38 Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 29. 39 See the fourth part of WA III in toto; besides the “Ketzergedanken” article, see esp. “Die Legende des Baalschem,” 158-160, 261f. and “Kiew,” 177-184, 269-271 (formerly titled “Zum BeilisProzeβ”). 40 G. Scholem to Siegfried Lehmann, 9 October 1916, Briefe I, 48f. 41 G. Landauer to Rafael Seligmann, 17 September 1910, Lebensgang I, 324.

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progress, but by a kind of simultaneity. In his view, the past will come into its own in the future, and this means “that the past is not something finished, but rather in the process of becoming. For us there is only the path, only future; also the past is future, which as we proceed, becomes, changes, has become something different.”42 Revolution is thus the master of time, and through it “the world of the possible, like a beacon that flares throughout and beyond the times, is brought to fulfillment.”43 Here we see an idea that comes near to the meaning of the messiah in Judaism, namely, a figure of future fulfillment and redemption; it was Scholem, who analyzed the forces that steered the course of the messianic idea in Judaism. In so doing, he made a distinction between the conservative, the restorative and the utopian tendencies, none of which could exist as a “pure instance “or “crystallization.”44 He explained that “even the restorative force has a utopian factor, and in utopianism restorative factors are at work … . The completely new order has elements of the completely old, but even this old order does not consist of the actual past; rather, it is a past transformed and transfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism.”45 This bright dream betrays an “anarchic element” or, as Scholem explains, “the dissolution of old ties which lose their meaning in the new context of messianic freedom.”46 Redemption is thus a “blazing landscape,” as Scholem notes in the famous last paragraph of his essay on the messianic idea: “Little wonder that overtones of messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete real, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. It is a readiness, which no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history.”47 This attempt to grasp something concrete by the unredeemed may herald the end of messianism rather than its secularization. One could argue that messianism has lost its apocalyptic force, once it has been successfully deployed in history. Or, as Landauer wrote in the “Ketzergedanken” article, “no one who feels within himself a task, which spares him the question of what he is living for, is able to live in suspenso.”48

42 Revolution, 26. 43 Ibid., 80f. 44 G. Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (1959), in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 1-36, 3. 45 Ibid., 4. 46 Ibid., 19. 47 Ibid., 35f. 48 WA III, 172.

Anthony David

Gustav Landauer’s Tragic Theater The Drama of Revolution In the late summer of 1918, throughout Central and Eastern Europe seismic shock waves set off by the defeat of armies sent cracks deep into the foundations of ancient kingdoms. Generals ran for cover, revolutionaries began plotting their course, and utopians dreamt of a New Order. During these months, the Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer sat quietly in the village of Krumbach in southwest Germany, putting the finishing touches on the second volume of a book he called Letters from the French Revolution. Compiled by this bearded bohemian who had spent a considerable time behind bars for his radical political convictions, the volumes were expected by friends and opponents alike, to sing the praises of the great executioners and dreamers of the past – Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and others. There is, however, nothing radical about Landauer’s montage of letters, which draws equally from revolutionaries and their sympathizers along with counter-revolutionaries and theirs.1 Royalists are not portrayed as tyrannical fools, just as the revolutionaries are not presented as noble, angry prophets of a new age. The impression given by the book is rather one of universal helplessness. None of the revolutionaries saw what lay ahead. Armed with ideals incapable of taming the terrible forces released by their own actions, all stumbled in the dark and were swept forward by events far beyond their control. The actors in this vast drama, said Landauer, “misunderstood the larger relationships within which they moved, the whole, true, and essential picture (das Ganze, das Wahre, das Wesentliche).”2 The letters betray a story more like a Greek tragedy than the teleological terminus of Progressive Mankind. Landauer’s tragedy did have a hero, though. The collection begins with a large number of letters – over 130 pages of them – from the pen of Gabriel Riqueti, Duke of Mirabeau. The book opens with a letter written from prison in 1777. “Oh Sophie!” exclaimed Mirabeau to his mistress. “What kind of magical love is this that binds us to life. I am no longer in those years in which I delight in plans to storm the heavens or in vacuous hopes to create for myself an illusory good and evil. [...] I have but one address for all of my likes, ambitions, and desires. I only know of one form of happiness; and you alone can give it to me.”3 1 Gustav Landauer, Briefe aus der französichen Revolution 2 vols. (Frankfurt, Rütten & Loening, 1919), vol. 1, xxi. 2 Ibid., xi, xii. 3 Ibid., 5.



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The second letter in the collection was sent by Mirabeau to the police official who had secretly passed on his love letters to his beloved Sophie. “Freedom,” he writes, “prayed to like an idol by so many strong spirits; freedom, which in the state of nature is wild and within civilization makes one proud; freedom, this irrevocable gift from heaven, this seed of every happiness and virtue – this freedom rules in my spirit and heart, and always will.”4 Landauer’s hero the duke never seemed to be on the right side of authority. Mirabeau was a skilled seducer and libertine who made off with the fiancée of a colonel in the French army and also wrote a pornographic novel entitled Erotica Biblion. His father had him imprisoned for debauchery. Mirabeau escaped from a dungeon, was sentenced to death in absentia, and finally made his way to Holland and England, where he matured into a political thinker of extraordinary brilliance. And it was on this role that Landauer focused in the subsequent letters. Mirabeau’s correspondence after 1789 shows him in opposition both to the tyrannical outrages and absurdities of the ancien régime and to the revolutionary theorizers who opposed them. The duke’s political model was England rather than dreamers with fine-sounding speeches and grand, hollow decrees. Landauer described him as “enthusiastic and skeptical, revolutionary and political,” equally equipped with “a soft aridity and a turgid caution.”5 Mirabeau tried to save the monarchy through permanent constitutional changes and popular, mass support within a new, decentralized France. “If the government had even a trace of deftness,” he declares in one letter, “the king would proclaim himself a man of the people instead of letting on that he is the precise opposite.”6 Mirabeau failed. He died in the midst of the revolution, his realism and wisdom largely ignored. Nothing the strange duke wrote or did could prevent the rise of the two political figures who, through violence, negated everything he had lived for: Robespierre and Napoleon. The question arises, then, why did Landauer give so much space in his collection to a failed politician, and this in the summer of 1918? It seems that Landauer deemed dramatic quality and insight into human nature to be more important than success. In his dramatic view of history, Landauer imposed his own theatrical requirements on people, events, and ideas of the past. “I am not going to hide my intention in presenting this book to the public,” he states in the preface. “The intimate knowledge of the spirit and the tragedy of the revolution should be a help to us in the trying days that lie before us.”7 His book therefore set out 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid., xiii. 6 Ibid., 95. 7 Ibid., xxxii.

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to create the “effect of a drama” and to turn the wretched duke into a lead character in a pedagogical play composed for contemporary Germans.8 Against the blindness, false idealism, misplaced hopes, and folly of the Revolution, his hero joins a nobility of mind and love of freedom with a steeled political realism void of illusions. And it was just this combination that Landauer felt Germans needed to master.

The Revolution Like his French hero, Landauer combined the offices of lover (he too dabbled in erotic literature) with that of dreamer, hard-nosed realist, and political thinker of the keenest insights. The two agreed that only a federation of smaller states within a larger one could guarantee, quoting the duke, the “conquest of freedom and of human rationality.”9 Finally, Landauer also found himself swept up into a doomed revolution. While Landauer sat over his manuscript in Krumbach, most Germans continued to assume that the world war would, at the very least, end in an honorable stalemate. High-minded intellectuals, both left and right, began to make preparations for the New Order that would follow peace. The conservative publisher Eugen Diederichs invited many of the leaders of state and society up to the mythshrouded Castle of Lauenstein where they were to seek out “new fixed abodes for the new German spirit,” to make new “moral conquests,” and to “hammer out a new lifestyle.”10 Landauer likewise placed high hopes in a cultural transformation. During the summer of 1918 he accepted a job as dramatic adviser for the Düsseldorf Volkstheater, the People’s Theater, where he aimed to introduce the masses to the riches of the stage. One of the first suggestions he made to the director of the theater, Louise Dumont-Lindemann, was to combine a stage performance with his lecture on the Hindu poet and mystic, Rabindranath Tagore. The events in late 1918 took Landauer, like everyone else, by surprise. The German army’s precipitous collapse set off a swirl and tumble of events, rocking the German Reich to the core. The first major blow occurred in Bavaria, where a former editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the soft-spoken Jewish socialist Kurt Eisner, declared himself the revolutionary head of the former Kingdom of Bavaria. After Eisner got the militia on his side, King Ludwig III fled in a borrowed car. He 8 Ibid., xv. 9 Ibid., 116. 10 Gary Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neo-Conservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 136.



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did not know how to drive and crashed into a potato field outside the city. Eisner, with his black floppy hat, shabby suit, and wild locks of hair, became the head of state. The new ruler of the kingdom gathered around him a host of like-minded literati, for the most part fellow Jews. The poet and playwright Eric Mühsam, a self-declared bohemian, whose philosophy of life was “to experiment with chance, to play catch-ball with the accidents of the moment,” rushed to join.11 The Jewish poet Ernst Toller also headed south. Toller had spent much of the war in an insane asylum due to his demand for “peace without annexation.”12 He was also famous enough for his expressionist poetry and cabarets to merit Diederich’s invitation up to Castle Lauenstein, though Toller’s ideas about the “fixed abodes for the new German spirit” differed markedly from his conservative host’s. He teamed up with Eisner in order to create a “new art form in drama, painting and architecture in order to set mankind free.” The oddest member of the new government was Dr. Franz Lipp, Eisner’s foreign minister. As soon as he took office he sent garbled telegrams to Lenin and to his “Comrade Pope” in Rome, alternatively citing from Immanuel Kant’s Eternal Peace while bitterly complaining that someone from the old guard had pilfered the keys to the men’s lavatory in the foreign ministry.13 Landauer was an obvious candidate for the new government. His books Die Revolution (1907) and Aufruf zum Sozialismus (1911) gave him an important standing among pacifists and anarchists. The events in Bavaria also captured Landauer’s imagination. In a letter to Louise Dumont-Lindemann he expressed his hope that the new government would open up a “people’s theater” of its own. He was certain that the Bavarian masses would “embrace” it with a “religious spirit.”14 On 14 November, ten days after posting this letter, Eisner invited Landauer to join him in Munich, where he could use his “speaking talents” on behalf of the “reconfiguration, the Umbildung, of the soul.”15 Landauer accepted the offer on the spot. “Munich, where I am heading for today, is the absolute best place for me,” he wrote to the philosopher Margarete Susman.16 He explained to another friend, Fritz Mauthner, that “the German Volk has been defeated. Its kingdom has collapsed and suddenly, for peoples everywhere wrestling with justice and rationality in public institutions, a man stands out who has until now lived a 11 Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 411. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Lebensgang II, 289. 15 Ibid., 296. 16 Ibid.

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wretchedly pure, honest life as a hungry writer: Kurt Eisner ... a man of the spirit, a brave Jew.”17 Landauer had another reason for exchanging theatrical work in Dusseldorf for Eisner’s revolution. “Happily, Germany is not France and 1918 is not 1789,” he exclaimed. In other words, there was no monolithic power left to “determine the fate of the people” because of the collapse of the central government in Berlin and the traditional hostility between Bavaria and Prussia.18 He went to Munich, as he asserted, to “hammer away at the last remnants of Bismarck’s creation”19 and hence to labor for his vision of a decentralized Germany. On 15 November, Landauer took a train to Munich, but a bad flu forced him to return to Krumbach where he sat out the first dramatic days of the revolution. It was from afar that he conceived of grand schemes to reform society. He never spoke of guillotining kings, executing capitalists, or even nationalizing industry. When his son suggested allowing students to vote for professors, he replied that this was as impossible as “a calf electing its own butcher.”20 He focused almost exclusively on establishing a new culture through theater and a truly free press. Among other things, he revealed to Martin Buber his determination to give the communes and worker’s council a “monopoly over advertising.” This would do away with the capitalistic press that allowed “the private interests of a few to dominate the press, to suppress the freedom of public opinion and, at the same time, to poison the public.”21 He also thought of ways of introducing theater to the masses. There must now be “power and movement” in the revolutionary theater. Like the “blast of trumpets,” the theater and symphony were to be the avant-garde in a “censorship-free era.” His revolutionary program included George Kaiser directing the Burgher from Calais along with his own play called Gas. Shakespeare’s Hamlet belonged to the revolutionary repertoire, as did Aeschylus’ Persians and Beethoven’s Ninth.22 Meanwhile, Eisner’s unlikely cast of bohemians and anarchists went to work laying the foundation of a new order. How they were to do so remained less clear, since they all loathed centralization, bureaucracy, and the instruments of state domination, whether controlled by Prussian aristocrats, Leninists, the Church, or the working class. Eisner began by improving and expanding social legislation: he installed an eight-hour day and free Saturday afternoons. To “fill in the leisure 17 Ibid., 322. 18 Ibid., 318. 19 Ibid., 323. 20 Ibid., 317. 21 Ibid., 298. 22 Ibid., 319.



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hours” freed up by the shorter workweek, the government founded an adult education program. It also did away with required religious education, removed all militaristic books from school libraries, and made hiring at schools and universities independent of worldview and gender. Eisner’s most controversial move was to publish the war papers found in the state archive exposing German war guilt. “Only through the full truth can a relationship of trust be established between the peoples,” he explained.23 Germans had to know the truth and have the courage to tell it to others. This did little to build support for the new government among the middle class, so by the time Landauer finally settled in Munich the atmosphere had already heated up. On one occasion a breathless man approached with an urgent plea to follow him: “A gathering of the bourgeoisie, the mayor, and others are giving old-style military, patriotic speeches in the National Theater.” Landauer went directly to the theater where he found himself in the company of hide-bound conservatives. In a letter to a friend he later recounted how he “spoke in the name of the worker’s council” amidst the “harmless cheer of a ... military club.” He gave a rousing speech and the applause was tremendous.24 With one success behind him he reported to his daughter of a second. The new government orchestrated a mass rally to celebrate the revolution, where the revolutionaries showed their true colors. Landauer told his daughter that the program began with Eisner’s “extraordinary speech.” He stood there like an earthly, firmly rooted figure from Barlach. [...] Excitement and surging ferment rang through the hall. Lovely blasts of the trumpet from the Leonore Overtures followed, heralding freedom out of the darkness of despair. Then came the aria from Handel’s Messiah of a people wandering in darkness, now seeing a great light. [...] The crowd responded with unending calls of bravo and “carry on.” The most wonderful thing of all happened at the end, when the entire house sang the song of the peoples (Gesang der Völker),” sung to the melody of Das altniederländische Dankgebet. Gradually everyone rose and the house shook, as if it wanted to open itself up to the heavens.25

The festive atmosphere did not last for long. Problems with deliveries of food, coal, and other raw materials made the economic situation in the city desperate. Unemployment rose, capital flight set in, and the call for elections became ever stronger. Their middle-class enemies tried to characterize the leaders of the revolution as bloodthirsty – and Jewish – usurpers.

23 Ibid., 325. 24 Ibid., 331. 25 Ibid., 312.

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Eisner agreed to hold elections; when the results came in he and his government had failed to get the support of the majority. His small faction of breakaway Social Democrats lost to the larger, better organized and financed Social Democratic national party. Defeat left Eisner no choice but to tender his resignation. En route, however, a chauvinistic aristocrat named Anton Arco-Valley assassinated him. Leftists used the opportunity to declare martial law and proclaim their socialist republic. A little over a month later, on 7 April 1919, Bavaria got its own Council Republic, with Landauer as the “people’s commissar for popular enlightenment.” Since 7 April also happened to be his birthday, the new “people’s commissar” chose to celebrate the event in the (later infamous) Hofbräuhaus. It was there that Landauer gave his first official speech. “The Bavarian Council Republic has given me the pleasure to make my own birthday a national holiday,” he quipped in a letter to Mauthner. “If they give me a couple weeks I can do something.” He added grimly, however, that most likely “I will only have a couple days and then everything will become just a dream.”26 The Council Republic lasted just under a week. Its end came when the government suggested allowing communists to test out their theories in an area of rural Bavaria. This led to a middle-class revolt. The putsch came from right-wing socialists, supported by the Munich militia which then occupied the palace. The members of the government were arrested. Landauer escaped and went into hiding for two days. The communists in the city, led by two Jewish intellectuals, Eugen Leviné and Max Levien, staged a counter-attack and defeated the militia. Because they controlled what they now called the Red Army, the extreme left took control of the city government. The defeated rebels withdrew to the Munich suburb of Dachau, pursued by the Red Army under the command of the poet and pacifist, Ernst Toller. He waged the battle of Dachau with volunteers, many of them women and children, who defeated the counter-revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the forces against the Council Republic established a provisional government in Nuremberg. They pleaded with the central government in Berlin to send in troops to help, and once they arrived the march on Munich began. They first encircled the city, then – in a classic example of the “Ruse of History” – invaded on the first of May. The city fell and a massacre ensued. The young lieutenant Adolf Hitler, who served in the city at the time, worked for the army as a stool-pigeon and sent in reports denouncing those who had given support to the hated “gang of vagrant Jews.” The French attaché in the city noted that “it would require a volume to narrate all the atrocities committed by the Whites ... Organized barbarism was given free rein ... a savage debauchery, an indescribable orgy.”27 26 Ibid., 413, 414. 27 John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York, 1976), 83.



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Landauer had a chance to escape the city but refused to. The White Guard easily found him and lined him up for execution. But before soldiers could shoot, someone pleaded with them to spare him. “He did not belong to the communists,” they told the soldiers. This only delayed the execution by a day. The next morning an officer announced his decision that “Landauer will be immediately shot.” Another officer, an aristocrat, hit Landauer with the wooden end of his riding crop. The soldiers then leapt on him, kicking, hitting, and finally riddling his body with bullets. Landauer’s last words were, “kill me, then. To think that you are human!” The only soldier ever punished for the murder was the private who stole Landauer’s watch.28

History as Tragedy It would be easy to conclude from the debacle that the author of Letters of the French Revolution proved less astute in the real world than at his writing desk. The story of the Council Republic can illustrate how badly leftists such as Eisner, Toller, Mühsam, and Landauer overreached themselves by misjudging the utopian potential of a crippled and humiliated industrialized powerhouse ominously filled with unemployed ex-officers and idle front-line soldiers. They were Jewish literati with no experience in mass politics or street fighting. They never had a chance. In many ways, the revolution seemed more befitting a slapstick Chaplin film than a serious episode of history. It was the precise reverse of Marx’s astute observation: in this case the farce became tragic because it led to hundred of deaths, including Landauer’s. One could also agree with Karl Mannheim who dubbed Landauer a “chiliastic” dreamer longing for a pure community of fellow believers.29 Like all messianic figures, his mystical dream world and noble sentiments inevitably came into conflict with the hard-knuckled political reality and the mighty tidal wave of blind violent passion. One could go even further by agreeing with Franz Kafka, who believed that Landauer spread the very poison that killed him. Kafka blamed him and his co-revolutionaries for turning Germans against Jews by “pushing Germany into things which it might have accepted slowly and in its own fashion, but which it was bound to reject because they came from outsiders.” Franz Kafka, who overheard German tourists speaking about the revolution in a restaurant,

28 Gordon Craig, Germany, 421. 29 Philippe Despoix, “Von der Buehne zur Geschichte: Gustav Landauer,” in: Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 15/2 (1990), 167.

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wrote that Germans now “drown” the Jews “during the soup and quarter them while carving the roast.”30 But Landauer’s own personal correspondence, which Martin Buber published in two volumes in 1928, tells a different story. The letters he wrote throughout 1918 and 1919 do not portray a Martyr to the Revolution or a helpless, bearded giant crushed by the inscrutable forces of fate. Indeed, this man who looked to Buddha and Jesus for “true politics” was in reality a cold pragmatist without a hint of a messianic faith in catastrophe and redemption.31 Landauer had no residual hopes in what he called “radical cures with a magical appeal.”32 For example, there was scarcely anyone he attacked more bitterly than Ernst Bloch, whom he depicted as a “charlatan” whose “system of theoretical messianism” was little more than a “slap to the face.”33 He called Karl Liebknecht a terrorist and dismissed the Bolsheviks as “tragic fools” longing for a “Caesar-like proletarian dictatorship.”34 He likewise likened the Spartacist revolutionaries to “pure centralizers” who, “like Robespierre and his ilk,” were only out for power.35 He predicted to Margarete Susman that the military regime they were busy preparing would be “more horrible than anything the world’s ever seen.” “Dictatorship of the armed proletariat! I’d rather have Napoleon!”36 Nor did he ever give the Republic much of a chance. In one letter he admitted that it would be “short lived,” and in another he said it would be a “miracle” if it survived. Throughout late 1918 until his death, he forecast doom and “chaos.”37 And the masses, seen by some as agents of history, were in his mind not much better than the old ruling class. He spoke of their “ignorance,” “base egotism,” and “folly.” “Idiocy is becoming more idiotic, and the resulting baseness only worsens, just as the rulers become ever more helpless. The simple question is whether one can survive and yet still push ahead in one’s own work.” No wonder that he confessed to Mauthner that his first task was to “save ourselves from utter annihilation.”38 Why then did he go to Munich in the first place if he knew the hopelessness of the situation? And why did he stubbornly remain in the city after Eisner’s assassination? His calm walk into a death trap suggests something of a suicide mission. 30 Quoted in Frederic Grunfeld, Prophets without Honor (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980), 123. 31 Lebensgang II, 277. 32 Ibid., 336. 33 Ibid., 371. 34 Ibid., 314. 35 Ibid., 314, 315. 36 Ibid., 336. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 305.



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His letters, however, betray none of the melancholy or desperation associated with suicide. He predicted “long, difficult, confusing and wild” events, but called himself the “only man alive who remains at peace and content.” In one letter he said that he was “in the best of moods” despite the “ghastly confusion and the rawest need.”39 He went on to say this, that “the ability to remain in the midst of it all, as if led by a different star, only comes to someone who has seen it all happen long before.”40 He told Louise Dumont-Lindemann in the same vein that he accepted “all of the stupidity and depravity” with a smile because “we are at work for coming generations.”41 The fact of the matter is that Landauer “choreographed” his death according to a very precise theory of history, art, and society. He knew full well that he and the revolution would most likely not survive and did all in his power to ensure that the tragedy would at least contain a universal moral. One of the keenest publicists and humanists of his day, he sought to pack a political farce with the cathartic effect of a literary tragedy that could, at some point in the future, contribute to a new social order. In both the letters he collected on the French Revolution and those he wrote himself, Landauer stressed that reason and truth do not triumph by virtue of the cogitation of thinkers; that a new society or a New Man cannot ensue from the grand schemes of a revolutionary elite; and that real social transformations can only occur once the deeper sensibilities of the masses change – that is, once they adopt a new “style” and “piety,” “the right and gripping tone.”42 As if quoting from a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, he asserted that the masses must turn their lives “into a task” they “set” for themselves.”43 He had a theory to back this up. In a nutshell, he held that categorical imperatives, police regulations, and bourgeois taboos thundering down upon the masses’ conscious life could not transform their inner life. How, he asked, was it possible to combat prejudice and “spiritual servitude” which, unlike “ideas” that can easily be changed like a pair of trousers, were so deeply rooted in mental and spiritual habits?44 Like aesthetics, morality for Landauer had its source in the intuitions and instincts; it was associative and intuitive and as such could be changed only through example. Society needed, as it were, a modern myth free of dogma, blind belief, and superstition. To phrase it somewhat differently, he 39 Ibid., 318. 40 Ibid., 357. 41 Ibid., 352. 42 Ibid., 336. 43 Ibid., 264. 44 Despoix, “Von der Bühne zur Geschichte,” 148.

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sought a “deep therapy” that could work upon the basic desires, feelings, and language of a society. Landauer expected such a mass therapy from the hands of the artists who, he said, could see the past and present from the perspective of a larger universal hope and task. In his mind, the powers and energies that come to us from the past must pass through the artist’s own will and fantasy to create a new image of an event. By presenting his work to the public the artist helps determine the way it sees the past and how it imagines the present and the future. Landauer, in his decision to journey to Munich, was inspired by a very specific understanding of theater, which he called “the bridge between a picture of humanity, as envisioned through art, and the swarming masses of men.”45 To his mind, tragic theater was particularly well suited to luring twisted, debilitating mental habits and prejudices out into the open, and then producing among Germans a moral catharsis. Poets, playwrights, and stage directors respond to a particular catastrophe by turning it into a work of literature. This in turn transforms meaningless acts of violence into universal lessons, which then filter down into the masses through the stage. The artist may need to give a broken nation hope by creating for it a humane past full of power and beauty; conversely, a haughty, bellicose nation may require a graphic display of its crimes and misdeeds. In both cases, the writer aims to turn a collection of individuals, broken up into warring classes, regions, religions into a unity based upon decency, tolerance, even love. In the German case, Landauer hoped that the artist could make “a war that began so senselessly” “burst out with meaning.” “Debasement” must become the point of departure for “deep ethical introspection (Einkehr), renewal and creativity.”46

To Be or Not to Be Guided by such theoretical reflections, Landauer used the little time he had in Munich to stage mass therapy. The cultural commissar looked to a number of theatrical works he considered best able to produce their cathartic effect upon a “land of collapse and renewal, enemy occupation and liberation.” The play that topped his list was Aeschylus’ The Persians. “It would be a great piece for your house,” he told Louise Dumont-Lindemann after the latter had agreed to become the stage director,

45 Lebensgang II, 352. 46 Ibid., 168.



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and a marvelous “drama for our time.” The Persians, a play about “victors and the defeat of enemies,” was a perfect piece for postwar Germany.47 The play begins after the death of Darius, the Persian king, who leaves his vast empire in the hands of his son, Xerxes. Darius was a scrupulous leader faithful to the divine laws. The young king, less prudent and more cocksure, tries to expand the kingdom through aggressive invasions of Greece. Aeschylus sets his play in Susa, the center of the Persian Empire. It opens with a chorus of nobles. The nation’s best has already gone off to war and those left behind await word. “Come,” says the leader of the choir, “let us deliberate. How is Xerxes faring?” Intimations of disaster begin with a vision of defeat that visits the queen in her sleep. This is confirmed after a messenger arrives with the terrible news of battle: the nobility of the nation has been destroyed; the navy is in ruins; the army annihilated. After the messenger finishes, the ghost of Darius appears to predict even greater misfortune. The ghost, moreover, understands the inner meaning of the catastrophe. His son’s pride has brought ruin upon the Persian people. The choir of elders follows by singing praise to the dead king who raised Persia to greatness but wisely refrained from hubris. At the end of the hymn Xerxes himself appears in rags, robes torn, disheveled, defeated. The play ends with an oriental dirge. “Alas for our fallen nation,” cry out the elders. For Landauer the play’s cathartic power centered upon the vanquished Persians. Aeschylus did not write his play from the perspective of the Athenians, gloating over their glorious victory. His theme had less to do with Greek victory than with the reasons for the Persian defeat. He did so by showing how boundless aggression had exacted the terrible price of total calamity. Equally important was his portrayal of the Persians’ nobility. Both Darius, the queen, and even the elders were depicted as wise. This gave the nation a large reserve of honor and dignity with which it could rebuild itself. Landauer found additional cathartic power in Shakespeare, whose historical plays formed the theme of the most important book he wrote during the war. Like the Letters on the French Revolution, his Shakespeare explores what he called the “philosophical, political, and social problems of our time,” rather than mere technical, literary or historical questions.48 Landauer’s essay on Hamlet, completed shortly before the revolution broke out, bore the marks of these stormy events. “There’s a divinity that shapes our end,” was for him the motto of the play. The prince, a man of good intentions, has a tragic fate far beyond his control. Landauer looked for the workings of this fate deep inside his hero’s inner life. The “divinity” shaping the prince’s fate, he 47 Ibid., 287. 48 Shakespeare I, 182.

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wrote, “is more in coalition with our spontaneous unconscious than with our conscious deeds.”49 With this move Landauer set his interpretation squarely against that of Schlegel, who considered the prince a hapless playboy who “shifted between various options.”50 But Hamlet does more than dabble and doubt, Landauer insisted; like most coffee house literati, Hamlet is full of noble intentions. After his studies at a German university, he returns to Denmark with a fierce faith in reason and good will. He is a “decent and smart fellow with a natural knack for friendship and love.” He in fact combines the roles of “hero, intellectual, and artist” and as such already lives in a “new world, the world of the spirit and not of politics and violence.”51 Philosophy, not the state, commands his interest. Lack of knowledge is not his problem; it is his lack of a unified will to do what he knows he must. The tragedy therefore revolves around Hamlet’s will. This “hero, intellectual, and artist” falls into a crisis of will once his ideals face the reality of “the rotten state of Denmark,” wholly absorbed in “military preparations” against the Norwegians. The prince’s revulsion for militarism is soon joined by the dark message from his father’s ghost. The news of the true source of his father’s death robs him of his “happiness and peace of mind.” More than ever, Hamlet finds himself in a world of “debasement” and “hideous disappointments” and “events fill him with revulsion.” The man of reason and humanity simply “does not fit into this world of murder, violence, greed, and venality. The human genuineness, the thinking full of love and feeling yet guided by reason, ends up tormented, repelled, and lonely in a murderous, hypocritical, political world.”52 Hamlet learns to master fate once he breaks free from his “still world of pure contemplation” and begins to act within a world of “horrific depravity,” “rank wantonness,” “filth and shame.”53 A crime has to be ascertained, the criminal found, his secret exposed. Landauer proceeded to describe how Hamlet’s rationality and humanity rise to the occasion. The play reaches its height in the famous monologue. To be, or not to be – that is the question./Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing, end them … For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,/The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,/The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,/The insolence of office, and the spurns. (Act III, Scene I)

49 Ibid., 211. 50 Lebensgang II, 41. 51 Shakespeare I, 219. 52 Ibid., 252. 53 Ibid., 233.



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Landauer’s exegesis created out of the scene a picture of a hesitant man finally learning to bring the eternal categories of pure and practical reason in line with real-life action. His Hamlet strips his own personal fate from “associations derived from his own particular situation” and joins it with universal concerns – with “das Ganze.” Accordingly, the tragic hero “does not speak about King Claudius but about tyrants, injustice, arrogance, and oppression.” His true act is less revenge for a crime committed against himself than a defense of the “oppressed and the robbed.”54 He is driven by a “deed of freedom that liberates the world from usurpers, frivolous men, tyrants, and a suicide that frees those who suffer because of the world as it is.”55 This was what made Hamlet so relevant for German intellectuals, humanists, and utopians, Landauer believed. In Germany, he wrote, “the outsider, the rebel, the scoffer and the poet” must become the true “men of the republic” performing “new deeds” in a corrupt and decaying society. And in this, he added, “there is no other figure that is so close to us as Hamlet. … During the days before the 1848 revolution the rebels rightly said, ‘Hamlet is Germany.’ Today we must say that Hamlet is humanity.”56

Quiet and Unnoticed Sacrifices A similar strategy runs through Landauer’s anthology of revolutionary letters and his interpretation of tragic theater. To quote from what he said about Goethe and the role of the poet in politics, Goethe “made his intense participation in politics through secret oracles.” As such, “he who wants to speak the truth” about a poet’s politics “must embark upon a journey of discovery.”57 This is a good guide to understanding the way Landauer camouflaged his own voice in historical or literary figures. In his analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquy, for instance, he used the dense expression Vergegenwärtigung or “simultaneity” to describe the manner in which Hamlet called up his own death before his mind’s eye in order to “free it from everything that is not universal.” The dithering, uncertain prince learned to transform his personal fate into something universal. By the same token, one can see in Landauer’s “Hamlet” his own “simultaneity,” one that announces a formula to turn individual catastrophe into an act of universal significance. He said in a letter 54 Ibid., 236. 55 Ibid., 235. 56 Ibid., 254. 57 WM 1921, 138.

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that he could keep a smile on his face despite the horror because he had “seen it all happen before.” Indeed, he had often seen it on the stage and had penned its best commentary. Landauer’s reading of Hamlet accurately described his own role in the tragedy of Munich, all the way to the brutal end. Munich was for him a tragic stage and he himself was a tragic figure who did everything in his power to ensure that his personal fate would become a symbol of human freedom, as profound and moving and ultimately instructive as the great works of tragic theater. Seen from this angle, Landauer’s death is more than an absurd accident that robbed the world of a moral voice. What he did and how he died became symbols of his political philosophy and deep expressions of his faith in universal liberation and human decency. It is only fitting that his closest friends chose an epitaph for his gravestone that summed up his life and death with poignant accuracy: “We must be prepared to make sacrifices, not heroic ones, but quiet and unnoticed sacrifices in order to give an example for the good life.”58

58 Lebensgang II, 424.

Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann

Gustav Landauer and the Literary Trends of his Time Any attempt to pinpoint Gustav Landauer’s place in fin-de-siècle literary culture must begin with a close look at the naturalist and post-naturalist movements and controversies in Berlin at the time. Landauer arrived in Berlin in 1889, leaving only for a short time, from 1890 to 1891, to study in Strasbourg. Interestingly enough, Landauer’s name is not particularly prominent in the most recent handbook of literary and cultural associations of the time; this meticulously compiled catalogue lists him only as a member of the Friedrichshagener and Neue Gemeinschaft circles.1 He arrived on the scene too late to play a role in what is known as the “battle for a literary movement” waged by the advocates of naturalism. Also, Landauer did not want to commit himself to symbolism or neo-romanticism, which were making great strides in the years 1890-1891. In fact it is futile to try to pin him to any of the many literary movements of the early 1890s. Since he happened to be living in Friedrichshagen, a writers colony and cultural enclave in south-east Berlin that was generally considered to be a dominant force on the literary scene, Landauer is usually identified with this group. Yet this group developed in a different direction than did either the circle associated with Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche, or the Nordkolonie group led by Strindberg and the Hansson couple; the Friedrichshagener also differed in many ways from the Hart brothers’ circle.2 If one considers the joint activities and social events of this multifaceted literary milieu, one notes a marked difference between the way that Landauer, on the one hand, and the Wille and Bölsche circle, on the other, saw the role of the intellectual in society. This is especially true of their respective assessments of the intellectual’s capacity to influence the masses. Wille characterized his own group as “Sozialaristokraten,” a term which reflects not only the exceptional role they had claimed for themselves once the honeymoon – or “Liebesbund” – with Social Democracy was over, but also the pedagogical obligation they were taking on.3 Their manifold endeavors to educate the people – evidenced for example 1 Handbuch literarisch-kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bände, 1825-1933, ed. Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns and Rolf Parr (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997). 2 See also Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Rolf Kauffeldt, Berlin-Friedrichshagen, Literaturhauptstadt um die Jahrhundertwende: Der Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (Munich: Boer, 1994). 3 Bruno Wille, “Sozialaristokratie,” Freie Bühne für den Entwicklungskampf der Zeit, 4, no. 8 (1893): 914-920.

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by their efforts to publish editions of literary classics, to teach in working-class educational frameworks, to establish adult-education colleges, and to make people aware of contemporary discoveries in the natural sciences – certainly bore witness to their high ideals, but were less a reflection of political concerns at the time. On the other hand, Landauer’s thinking was decidedly political in the 1890s. He was convinced that a higher intellectual leadership guiding the working classes was possible and envisaged a common struggle waged side by side with them. However, his conception of a working-class anarchy failed because the anarchist working population was unwilling to acknowledge an intellectual as their leader. This was one of the factors that led Landauer, in the years between 1895 and 1898, to develop a social-aristocratic position not unlike that, which had been espoused by Wille’s and Bölsche’s Friedrichshagener circle as early as 1892. Before formulating his new position, however, Landauer first had to undergo a kind of conversion to a new kind of anarchism.4 Just as Wille and the leaders of the Volksbühne-movement – Franz Mehring in particular – had to weather disputes over the content and organization of the Volksbühne, Landauer had to have his clash with the working-class anarchists. This conflict centered on the leadership and structuring of Der Sozialist, a journal serving as the dominant voice of anarchism in Germany. Things came to a head over the question of the role the representatives of the “bourgeois intelligentsia” could claim in determining the program and choosing texts for the journal. For their part, the workers – under the leadership of the locksmith and ex-Independent Socialist Paul Pawlowitsch – organized their rebellion against the heavily Landauer-influenced Der Sozialist, and against the egotism of its literati and its bias in favor of theoretical texts.5 It was as a result of this long-lasting conflict that Landauer broke allegiance with working-class anarchism. Landauer rejected the workers’ notion or expectation that anarchist leaders should give up their middle-class, culturally defined self-image as a given prerequisite for their turn to anarchism. On this point he could draw on a clear line of anarchist tradition: none of the great anarchist mentors had been proletarians; indeed, without their middle-class refinement and education, they would never have attained their role as intellectual leaders. Neither Landauer nor his middle-class comrades-in-arms saw their social position as a dilemma. However, no matter how enmeshed in practical social struggles 4 See also Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, “Gustav Landauer im Friedrichshagener Jahrzehnt und die Rezeption seines Gemeinschaftsideals nach dem I. Weltkrieg,” in Gespräch, 235-278. 5 Ulrich Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 73ff.



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Friedrichshagener anarchists like Landauer, Spohr and Albert Weidner became – for example, in their support of the Berlin clothing workers’ strike in 1896 and of the working-class consumer society, Befreiung – wide gaps remained. There was also a further development, which, as we shall see, made it impossible to bridge the gap. Indeed, the end of “Landauerian” working-class anarchism can be dated to 1897 at the latest; with it, Landauer’s paradigmatic turn to cultural anarchism was made possible. One of the texts that gives clear evidence of Landauer’s turn from working-class to cultural anarchism is his commentary on the history of German literature, which appeared in the issue of Der Sozialist, from 26 February 1898.6 In this article, Landauer refers to his earlier essay “Die Zukunft und die Kunst” (“The Future and Art”), and takes issue with his earlier view that art has no role to play in times of battle. Thinking of his own literary work, he realized not only that this attitude was inconsistent but that he had also completely underestimated the proletariat’s potential to develop in new cultural directions. With genuine displeasure, he states: “We who have voluntarily linked our destiny to that of the proletariat [have] other things to do than always to be prepared and wait.”7 Landauer here is looking ahead to an open and promising future. His joyful, almost playful enumeration of what the future holds in store peaks in the programmatic statement: “We [will] have time for art again.”8 Landauer was obviously looking for a change of disposition and found it in the settlement project headed by the Hart brothers. On 2 April 1900, Landauer had already mentioned to Paul Eltzbacher that he thought a Siedlung, or settlement, could form the nucleus of an alternative anarchist movement. He stated that he had “not cast overboard the anarchistic future society, but only the belief that it will be achieved in the foreseeable future by the masses of people alive today.” He then adds, “in contrast, I believe that it is reasonable and possible to realize it among human beings who are characterized only by moderate insight and good will. In any case I believe in smaller anarchistic settlements.”9 What is of foremost interest here is the complete and fundamental change in Landauer’s views on the function and possibilities of art. This resulted from Landauer’s shift in allegiance from a working-class to an intellectual point of view. By readmitting art into his intellectual master plan he was indicating more than an abandonment of his former 6 G. Landauer, “Vortragszyklus zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur,” Der Sozialist (1892), quoted from Signatur: g. l. Gustav Landauer im “Sozialist” (1892-1899), ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 368-371. 7 Ibid., 369. 8 Ibid., 370. 9 Lebensgang I, 52.

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spartan denial of art. His new stance was evident already in the notice announcing his series of lectures on literary history. Referring to his former understanding of art as something that seduces one “to self-reflection or to the contemplation of the deeds and souls of other human beings,” Landauer now abandoned his truly naïve assumption that “this was the ultimate end of all art.”10 At the time of writing his earlier article, he had given up on that late bourgeois educational ideal. Landauer now reconsidered that idea or model of artistic identification and adapted it to a new literary program, the coordinates of which, however, he had not yet specified. Also, Landauer still upheld his outright rejection of naturalism – which was directed mainly against Johannes Vockerat, the Bildungsbürgertum hero of Hauptmann’s drama Einsame Menschen. He also added a denunciation of “art that is still only art and that in its alluring play with forms, sought freedom, and … was in danger of falling prey to the befuddlement of art.”11 Landauer thus, also rejected all anti-naturalistic trends of “art for art’s sake” whether they be identified with “symbolism,” or with “decadent art,” or with the stylized art of the fin de siècle. With regard to the brief period of time between 1898 and 1901 then, we must consider two key questions with regard to the development of Landauer’s thought. First of all, how did he explain his changed socio-political aims, and secondly, what kind of ideas does he develop concerning aesthetics? The Hart brothers, whose Neue Gemeinschaft (New Community) settlement project Landauer at first warmly endorsed, strongly disagreed with Landauer’s assessment of the importance and function of community, monism and Weltanschauung. This battle of paradigms revealed the different aesthetic program of each side in the debate. Whereas the Harts pursued an uncritical consecration of art and succumbed to the contemporary dictates of style, Landauer developed an opposing model. Building on Mauthner’s empiro-criticism, he referred to the aesthetic potential that is grounded in the immanence of being. When released in the process of creating and receiving art, this potential opens up a qualitatively different approach to the world. Landauer can thus be seen as a representative of the literary avant-garde; there are elements of his writing, which can be traced back to Viennese modernist trends, to the “words as art” theory of the Sturm and to the artistic theory of the Blaue Reiter. The poetic models for this artistic program – one, which Landauer certainly did not have sufficient talent to implement himself – were Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Dehmel and Alfred Mombert. A few words are in order here on the controversy with the Hart brothers and the Neue Gemeinschaft, which resulted in Landauer breaking with the group. 10 Landauer, “Vortragszyklus,” in Link-Salinger, Signatur g. l., 368. 11 Ibid., 370.



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Following in the footsteps of Emile Zola who had committed himself to the Dreyfus cause, Landauer was sentenced to prison in the spring of 1899 for his role in trying to free a man by the name of Ziethen who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. By the time Landauer completed his time in prison in February 1900, the founding meeting of the Neue Gemeinschaft had already taken place. Landauer had not participated in the official founding event of the Neue Gemeinschaft in December 1899 either. Immediately following his release from prison, he became active in the settlement project that was trying to attract like-minded souls to the cause in a variety of ways, producing its own journal and a series of pamphlets. Those involved in the project were striving for a community based on cooperative planning. Landauer worked on the journal and the celebration committees and was responsible for arranging lecture series and topics. It was most likely at Landauer’s suggestion that Martin Buber, whom he had known since the two worked together at Berlin’s Neue Freie Volksbühne, gave a talk on “Alte und neue Gemeinschaft” during a series of lectures in March 1900. Landauer himself worked together with Albert Weidner on the “new community’s” periodical, Die Neue Gemeinschaft - Mitteilungen für Mitglieder und Gleichgesinnte, and also gave talks, such as his programmatic lecture “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft” on 18 June 1900 and another entitled “Nietzsche und die neue Generation.” As early as 1902 Landauer began publishing critical attacks against Julius Hart and the community in Der Arme Teufel, edited by Weidner.12 In the same year he withdrew from the community, and the reasons for his decision must be closely scrutinized. The Neue Gemeinschaft had aspired to be a “community of deeds.” They promised themselves a “life in the light” in an empire of art, raised to a higher plane than that of day-to-day life. The project was not to be limited to just this one settlement; the original community was seen as the precursor of a widespread network of settlements, to be organized in accordance with the ideals of a future humanity. Julius Hart described this ideal: “By living a new Weltanschauung, a harmonious existence, an exemplary life in light, we constitute centers of crystallisation everywhere in humanity in order to attract everything kindred in ever wider circles, with ever-stronger power.”13 The cult-like religious tendency of the community made it stronger vis-à-vis the position of the social revolutionaries. In a development similar to that taking place in the Giordano-Bruno Bund around the same time, the community’s monistic, reli12 Landauer’s emphasis. G. Landauer, “Über Weltanschauungen: Offener Brief an Albert Weidner,” Der Arme Teufel 2, nos. 2 & 5 (1902). 13 Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart, “Vom höchsten Wissen: Vom Leben in Licht. Ein vorläufiges Wort an die Wenigen und Alle,” in NG, 88.

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gious festivals – with their strong mystical overtones – eclipsed any serious reflection on the actual goal of effecting reform in the people’s way of life. There was a tendency toward an esoteric, pantheistic pathos, as love feasts and consecration ceremonies, or Liebesmahle and Weihefeste, became the actual forms of expression. The community became renowned for these elaborate feasts and festivals and, as a result, attracted in particular Berlin’s upper-middle-class ladies. This prompted Erich Mühsam to comment in retrospect in 1904 “that the New Community, which had been welcomed so enthusiastically, does not cause any more of a stir than the dust, which is swirled up by women’s garments in the Tiergarten.”14 Indeed, part of Landauer’s dispute with the Hart brothers, had to do with the cult-like self-consecration of the “God-artist,” or Gott-Künstler, propagated by the pair.15 Superman, God-man, new humanity, (Übermensch, Gottmensch, Neumenschheit) – in this climactic sequence, the Harts combined the aristocratic individualism of Nietzsche with the Neue Gemeinschaft’s goal of a new humanity: “The Neue Gemeinschaft is a select community, a super-Volk, [a Volk] above other Völker, a new humanity, not in terms of its rights, but rather in terms of its strivings and achievements.”16 In the Harts’ imagined world, with its religious prophetic traits, the elitist social ethics and claim to exclusivity developed into the basis for their own transfiguration. Such a cultural ideal, in accordance with which the “new humanity” pursues a life of consecration feasts and rituals, moves, according to Landauer, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Although evolutionary thinking has something in common with the social aristocratic thinking of the earlier Friedrichshagener, Landauer concluded, the elitist Social Darwinism of the Neue Gemeinschaft does not. Gustav Landauer had envisaged the Neue Gemeinschaft developing in a completely different way. Already in the summer of 1900, while still in Karlsruhe, he sent promotional letters to the Hart brothers and poured all his energy into preparing his programmatic lecture.17 His actions in the first year clearly showed that he planned to implement his ideas primarily in a practical way. He thus institutionalized the Monday meetings, in which small groups met and were looked after by one of the community’s Anregender, or facilitators. In his article “Unsere Zusammenkünfte” (“Our Meetings”), which appeared in the Neue Gemeinschaft’s periodical, Landauer explained that such groups were important “for it is necessary that the elements 14 Erich Mühsam, “Das Ende vom Liede,” Der Anarchist 2, no. 4 (1904). Quoted from Erich Mühsam, Briefe an Zeitgenossen, ed. Gerd W. Jungblut, 2 vols. (Berlin: Guhl, 1978), vol. 2, Materialsammlung, 14. 15 Heinrich Hart, Julius Hart, G. Landauer, Felix Hollaender, “Der neue Mensch,” in NG, 36. 16 Ibid., 13. 17 Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Dortmund, Best. Landauer, G., nos. 11461-11464.



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of the New Community draw nearer, that they become acquainted with us and finally, that we become acquainted with them. It is necessary that we create the possibility and the necessity for intimately coming out of our shells in order to bring out that, which is quietest and best in us.”18 Landauer was searching for “friendly approaches” and for “personal links of togetherness,” as necessary conditions for a Neue Gemeinschaft, which was at the same time, intended to be an expression of a “new, higher culture” as Albert Weidner termed it. Weidner also elaborated the goals and efforts of this phase, which were completely in accordance with the ideals of the anarchist faction of the Neue Gemeinschaft; this faction included – in addition to Landauer and Weidner – Wilhelm Spohr, Bernhard Kampffmeyer and Erich Mühsam. The effort was not supposed to take the form of political struggles; rather the desired goal was to be achieved through renewal, which each person – both as an individual and as a community member – had to undergo in order to participate in a new “inner culture.” This “inner culture,” a veritable state of “freedom in beauty,” could only result from what Landauer called an “Innenbefreiung,” or “inner liberation.”19 Only by means of this inner process could the individual as such meet the requirement of social self-realization within the community. And this was the purpose of the settlement project. Landauer detailed his idea of community in the programmatic lecture “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft” (“Through Isolation to Community”). He believed that an ontogenetically anchored “Erbmacht,” or hereditary power, ensures that there will be a feel for the “original” community. This original community had, as it were, been eclipsed by the community imposed on individuals by the state, and this forced community had to be destroyed. The future utopian society was supposed to reconnect with the “paleontological treasures”20 of the “primeval community.” The need and ability to do so, Landauer maintained, are developed through isolation and mystical immersion in the origins of the universe: “only if we totally separate ourselves, if we sink down deep into ourselves as individuals, then we will at last find, in the innermost core of our hidden being, the most ancient and universal community: the human race and the cosmos. Whoever has discovered this joyous community in himself is enriched and blessed for all time and is finally removed from the common accidental communities of our age.”21 Landauer was aspiring to the ideal of a “community of bodies” or Körpergemeinschaft. The phenomenon of cultural memory is biologically reinterpreted: the individual, as part of humanity, 18 G. Landauer, “Unsere Zusammenkünfte,” Die Neue Gemeinschaft–Mitteilungen für Mitglieder und Gleichgesinnte 1, no. 5 (1900): 2. 19 G. Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in NG, 45-68. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Ibid.

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can reach his goal only if he remembers. Hence the notion of “utopia as memory.”22 This was an ideal that the Hart brothers could not, and did not want to, grasp. Landauer’s break with the Neue Gemeinschaft was, in a sense, predetermined. It was the result first of all, of his displeasure over the extravagant living arrangements that were taking over the community. Julius Hart had brought his style of embracing the world to virtual perfection, causing Landauer to accuse him of being superficial, arrogant and despicable.23 However, a more important reason for the break was related to differences over basic issues. In their espousal of monism, the Harts claimed that everything that exists is automatically a basic material substance, which can have its own manifestation and is subject to the law of permanent change. This, in Landauer’s opinion, was a claim devoid of any social, and thus of any moral, merit. Indeed, Landauer not only posed the rhetorical question, “what does monism have to do with our social movement?,” but also provided a clear answer: “nothing whatsoever!” And here Landauer’s attack took on a sarcastic note. If Julius Hart believed everything in the world was good, and if one believed in his monistic dogma and were fulfilled by it, then one could replace the word “transformation” or Verwandlung – which obviously embraced everything – with anything: Let us say a different word in its stead, let us for instance be filled with the teaching: Everything is (not transformation, but rather) for the birds: Life is for the birds. Death is for the birds. Poverty is for the birds. Wealth is for the birds Thus, if our entire being is filled with this inspiration, the result is precisely that, which Hart associates with his religion: we will be very happy about it, we will not let anything be contested, we will not find it worth the trouble to put impediments in the way of others.24

While the Harts were striving for some kind of mystical merging with the universe as an existential-transcendental, aesthetic act, Landauer was spurred by two basic concerns. He was concerned, on the one hand, with social restructuring and future-oriented actions, and, on the other, with finding access to an alternative aesthetic discourse in dealing with the conflict between skepticism and mysticism.

22 See also the article by Bernd Witte, “Zwischen Haskala und Chassidut: Gustav Landauer im Kontext der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte,” in Gespräch, 25-41. 23 Lebensgang I, 73. 24 G. Landauer, “Die Neue Welterkenntnis,” Die Kultur 1, no. 10 (1902): 615.



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We can see how Landauer’s position gradually began to take shape, ultimately leading to his break with the Neue Gemeinschaft. Landauer’s idea of isolation as the first step toward mystical immersion and the transformation of an enlightened and self-assertive ego into a communal ego clashed, by definition, with the idea of an aesthetic-cultural life externally manifested in love feasts and festivals, as well as in the members’ vegetarianism and in social reforms. The opening up of the community to visitors – indeed to a paying audience of onlookers hungry for an experience – made the group, at best, into a “sober cabaret” – as one well-intending visitor critically remarked.25 Permitting this kind of voyeurism made it impossible to retain the purity of communal life.26 The Hart brothers and Landauer had different notions of Gemeinschaft, and these differences were not only on the level of everyday life. The Harts’ concept of community had roots in the lifestyle of the early Friedrichshagener, and was based on a sociological notion of “community” that followed the views of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Landauer, on the other hand, Gemeinschaft was synonymous with a mystical concept of unity. This did not betoken a belief in something already existing, as was the case with the Harts’s monism, but rather in an envisaged social goal. The paradise, which the Hart brothers – with a kind of pentecostal euphoria – already felt themselves be a part of, was something which Landauer still had to attain, indeed, to discover. In the course of the controversy over the Neue Gemeinschaft, which was waged and documented in Der Arme Teufel in 1902, Landauer emphasized, that it was “not because of the positive faith, the Hart brothers were striving for, but rather in spite of it” that he had labored in the Neue Gemeinschaft “with all his strength, for positive creative work.”27 The final reason for Landauer’s break was that he was wary of the term Weltanschauung itself. Although the Harts derived from it their universal sense of unity, it was, in Landauer’s view, really nothing more than the realization of what he termed a hypertrophic ego. In the Hart brothers’ worldview, “psycho-physical monism” was the third step, coming after “mechanistic-materialistic monism” and “hylozoism”; this view led to a belief in a process of development from the “atomic soul” to the “world soul” and the “universal soul.” All of this was based on the evolutionary principle that allowed them hic et nunc passage into the “world soul,” and

25 Quoted from Janos Frecot, “Literatur zwischen Betrieb und Einsamkeit,” in Berlin um 1900, exhibition at the Berlin Gallery, 1984, 319-347, 330. 26 See also Walter Fähnders, Anarchismus und Literatur: Ein vergessenes Kapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichte zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 175 f. 27 See Landauer, “Über Weltanschauungen.”

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conferred on the whole the status of a Weltanschauung. Given his adherence to a principle of immanence, Landauer had to reject this Weltanschauung.28 The ecstasy entailed in such a bacchanalian universe, bolstered by the claims associated with the term Weltanschauung, ultimately proved to be an escape mechanism for times in which all sense of unity was lost. The term itself became an “uncritical noun of the educated classes” as Claudia Bibo demonstrated in her study on naturalism as Weltanschauung.29 Viktor Klemperer traced the long-term effects of this mythical, irrational noun and marked the path by which “this cliquey word of the turn of the century became the pillar word of the LTI” (Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich).30 Landauer naturally also found fault with the ways in which the word and the concept of Weltanschauung were being used. In two letters that he wrote to Julius Bab, his satirical condemnation of the dubious use of the term shows his contempt even more clearly than did the political articles he published in Der Arme Teufel. In a letter to Bab dated 23 April 1903, Landauer, relates to an epigram in which Bab, had defined Erkenntnis, or knowledge, with unusual modesty. Bab’s epigram is as follows: ‘“Knowledge” – to you a God, / to whom you dedicate life, / to us, at the hearth of life / only a good log.” Landauer sets against this the ongoing demand of world pervasion and reveals at the same time the quietistic comforting effect and interchangeable nature of every Weltanschauung: ‘Knowledge’ – to us a god, to whom life is dedicated, although all our knowledge is only in the human image: To you moral philosophers at the hearth, an inflammable log of life or a couch cushion (for comfort and eternity) Bang! The newest models and patterns of Weltanschauung [are] always in stock. Specially recommended, a larger lot of “sleep softly” at ludicrously low prices; a larger shipment of the popular “only a quarter-of-an-hour” brand will arrive soon. With the adoption of two or more Weltanschauungen, a free membership card for the Giordano-Bruno-Association. 28 In his review of Julius Hart’s then newly-published book Die neue Welterkenntnis he spares no criticism; also in a letter to Auguste Hauschner (21 May 1902) he refers to it as a “bad book.” See Lebensgang I, 109. 29 Claudia Bibo, Naturalismus als Weltanschauung: Biologistische, theosophische und deutschvölkische Bildlichkeit in der von Fidus illustrierten Lyrik, (1893-1902) (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1995), 34. 30 Viktor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1975), 153.



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Haute Nouveté! Air cushions for the trip: to be filled with sceptical winds by the travelers themselves. Comfortable – convenient – superb. Bliss-maier & Co. Ltd.31

Landauer not only opposed the Hart brothers’ ineffectual speculations, which he countered with his practically-oriented notion of “Beginnen” (beginning), but also rejected, more than anything else, their moral claim on the world, which they offered as “erknenntniHarmoni” (sic) or knowledge-harmony. Landauer saw it as a dismal mistake when “the same words are used in moral and epistemological matters.”32 The alternative presented by Landauer in his confrontation with the Hart circle becomes even more pronounced in his controversy with Bab. The controversy erupted in connection with Richard Dehmel’s work. Landauer complained that Bab, in his review of Dehmel’s essay in “Moderne Kunst und Literatur,” provided only frayed attempts at interpretation that did not do justice to Dehmel.”33 Landauer insisted that instead of these ineffectual analyses and “laborious leaps” of interpretation there should be a differentiation of the literary field according to different standards. He inquires as to which of the existing genres Richard Dehmel belongs.34 For him, Dehmel is the “modern artist.” Landauer formed his own opinion in opposition to Bab’s Dehmel-study, and in so doing, aligned himself with the modernist trend in art and literature. Landauer saw Dehmel as a poet representing the particular view of music as the art form least burdened with meaning. Landauer thus continues the endeavor – which had been pursued and most notably formulated by Schopenhauer – of redefining artistic meaning from a musical perspective. Music’s equivalent in the linguistic arts is poetry, and Landauer believed in the power of words in a utopian sense, and not only in political, but also in aesthetic, terms. Such views place Landauer squarely in the ranks of those associated with theoretical developments in modernism, which went as far as the “words-as-art-theory” (Wortkunsttheorie) expounded in Herwarth Walden’s Sturm: “in poetry, words and concepts are the instrument that leads us to music – to rhythm, to the unutterable that wells up in us and carries us along. And the great artist will use his instrument, words, in such a way that between the words there is not only music – the unutterable – but rather its perception by the senses (sinnliche Anschauung) – once again the unutterable from the other end. 31 Lebensgang I, 114f. 32 Landauer’s emphasis. See Mauthner Briefe, 390, n. 50. 33 Julius Bab and Richard Dehmel, Moderne Essays zur Kunst und Literatur, 23 and 24 (1902); see further the letter from G. Landauer to Julius Bab, 26 December 1902, in Lebensgang I, 110. 34 Ibid., 111.

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It is precisely this duality in poetry – music and perception – that constitutes the unity that distinguishes it from all other art. It stems from the special nature of its instrument, language.”35 However, the ‘unutterable’ here is nothing other than a category closely corresponding to Kandinsky’s notion of “innere Notwendigkeit” or “inner necessity” as described in his theory of aesthetics, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Arnold Schönberg emphasizes the extent to which the older and now largely forgotten generation of Dehmel and Landauer had laid the foundation that was later built on by those acknowledged as the classic modernists: “from them [Dehmel and Landauer] we acquired the ability to listen in to ourselves, and yet still be a man of our times.”36 In Landauer’s insights regarding the material nature of language one can already see the conditions being set for an alternative aesthetics, one that is concerned with neither mimesis nor idealism, nor least of all with the apotheosis of the artist himself – notwithstanding the numerous references to Nietzsche. Landauer himself contributed to the desired differentiation of the literary field by naming two additional witnesses to the pursued ideals, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Alfred Mombert. Both figure prominently in Landauer’s essays from this period. Landauer opens his essay “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft” with a text from Mombert and also uses the latter’s self-proclaiming phrase, “I am the music of the world,” as the motto for his essay “Musik der Welt.” In his important essay on Mauthner’s Critique of Language, Landauer refers to Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter.” The identity crisis of Landauer’s generation could not be resolved by fleeing to some distant Olympus where all would be united; all that was possible was a reminiscence of “paleontological treasures” in combining the new and old identities. Mysticism had to follow skepticism. The union of the two, according to Mauthner’s critique of language, forms the basis for anarchy and socialism. Landauer thus writes to Mauthner in 1911, “certainly, critique of language is inseparably tied to what I call my anarchism and socialism.”37 In his essay, “Mauthners Werk,” Landauer assumes that Hofmannsthal was familiar with Mauthner’s critique of language. Quoting the central part of the “Lord Chandos Letter,” Landauer suggests that it is both a “manifesto” and an “artistic exercise”; indeed he accepts the internal contradiction of the text – which lends almost perfect artistic expression to the problem of ineffability – as a challenge or provocation. This, Landauer explains, is the successful outcome of the attempt to overcome rhetoric for the sake of a “new poetry.”38 His 35 Ibid., 112. 36 Berlin um 1900, 329. 37 Lebensgang I, 361. 38 Gustav Landauer, “Mauthners Werk,” in idem., Zeit und Geist: Kulturkritische Schriften, 18901919, ed. Rolf Kauffeldt and Michael Matzigkeit (Munich: Boer, 1997), 103-15, 114.



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concern was with the unutterable, which can now be preserved in “images of the material world.”39 This is where Landauer sees the “practical benefit” of the loss of a conceptual language, as the ego is won back by means of art. The unutterable becomes a precondition for a type of art that becomes its own subject, and thus is far removed from any mimetics. In this context, the ordering categories of time and space, thought to have been lost, gain a new dimension. Referring to Hofmannsthal and Mombert, Landauer explains this in his Mauthner essay: “this swinging into one another of unutterable entities, which flow together from opposite ends – rhythm from time, the sensory image from space – this dissolution of everything real in the element of the dream: This I am able to find in the poetry of those I mentioned, and precisely this seems to me to be the only mood in which one can return from the critique of language to the art of words. Mauthner has shown us that conceptual science cannot satisfy our longing to comprehend the world and that which is properly our own, as something other than merely human. Art, however, is able to do so in those moments in which we live in it. We gain and create worlds and lose ourselves.”40 Thus, Landauer not only interprets Mauthner in a practical sense and uses Hofmannsthal’s topos of the unutterable in a creative way, but also hints at his fascination with Mombert. Landauer adopted for himself the advice given by Mombert to his friend, literary colleague and admirer, Richard Dehmel: “Try to take the poem as reality, not as dream … . Try once to be at rest in your work. Not in life. For otherwise you could not do so in art. Try once to be perfect. To be fulfillment, not longing. Only in your works. Not in life. Try once to separate art and life.”41 Landauer’s reception of Mombert has rarely been acknowledged, even though there is much in common between the two. Among other things, both hailed from Karlsruhe and knew each other from school. This may explain why Landauer already owned Mombert’s first publications at a time when the latter was still virtually unknown. It is also possible that Hedwig Lachmann had spoken highly of Mombert to Landauer, since she had been Dehmel’s girlfriend for a while, and Dehmel and Mombert had been friends since 1893. Isi and Richard Dehmel even moved to Heidelberg for a year in the summer of 1900, because Mombert had opened a law office there a year before. From the beginning of Landauer’s relationship with Hedwig Lachmann, Mombert played an important role in their lives. Lachmann had arranged for Mombert’s works to be sent to Landauer, and the latter wrote to her on 25 May 1899, thanking her and indicating that he would

39 Ibid., 115. 40 Ibid. 41 Richard Dehmel, Ausgewählte Briefe aus den Jahren 1883-1902 (Berlin: Fischer, 1923), 254.

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acquire them himself. Indeed, when he was in prison, the first books he asked Mauthner to have delivered to him were those of Mombert. He did not manage to study Mombert’s work closely until he was released from prison and spent some time in Karlsruhe. On 4 July 1900, one month before he held his lecture “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft” he wrote to Hedwig Lachmann: “Since yesterday I have been living in Alfred Mombert, whose creation I have now finally been able to read. I have always known what he would mean to me. I do not know what is most important to me in this wonderful mystic: the naturalness with which he can sometimes reveal what is most hidden and shape it figuratively, or the colossal struggle with the most unutterable, which still defeats him sometimes … . Perhaps we will find a free hour in the near future, in which we will be able to read Mombert together. It would be so nice.”42 The notion of “Beginnen,” literally the call to ‘begin,’ which informs Landauer’s political work, is also a category of his aesthetics. This “beginning” takes place on the threshold of the “unutterable.” That is what Mombert seems to have conveyed to Landauer, and Landauer, for his part, must have perceived Mombert’s motto “I am the music of the world” as the momentary fusion of the ego with the rhythm of being. In the last verse of the motto-poem in the essay on community mentioned above, the antinomy also seems to be a part of the process of gaining knowledge – whereby ‘knowledge’ or Erkenntnis is meant in the Old Testament sense, indicating both the perception of God by the senses, as well as sexual love: “Of dark questions the world is full, / Therefore one should pluck the harp.”43 In early 1901, shortly before he withdrew from the community’s activities, Landauer tried to convey to the Neue Gemeinschaft something of his intellectual encounter with Mombert.44 By May, however, he had already withdrawn from the community. Yet Mombert continued to influence him. The “dream-filled world of the mind,” which he found in Mombert’s poetry, created a further bond to the poet. In 1906 Landauer wrote to Mombert, “you probably know yourself how indelibly your rhythms, your images and all your world live on in those who, at the right time devoted themselves to these images.”45 For Landauer, the decisive phase between conservative Weltanschauung and artistic modernism was indeed the “right time.”

42 G. Landauer to H. Lachmann, 4 July 1900, Lebensgang I, 61. 43 G. Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in Zeit und Geist, ed. Kauffeldt and Matzigkeit, 89-99, 81. 44 The titles of the planned lectures are recorded in a notebook. See Berlin um 1900, 330. 45 Lebensgang I, 143.

Philippe Despoix

Toward a German-Jewish Construct: Landauer’s Arnold Himmelheber One does not usually think of Gustav Landauer as a writer of literature. Literary influences are certainly discernible in his diverse work not only as critic, translator, orator, and dramaturge, but also as philosophical essayist, and political polemicist. However, it is in the essay form that Landauer’s writing finds its most mature expression. His affinity to the medium of the stage – evident in his involvement with the Volksbühne movement in the 1890s, in his great Shakespeare lectures, as well as in the position he held at the Düsseldorf Theater toward the end of his life – made him an advocate of modern drama. Yet, apart from a few unpublished pieces from his youth – including a comedy – Landauer’s own literary production dates, for the most part, back to the turn of the century. His literary works comprise an early novella, Knabenleben (1891), which, according to Theodor Fontane, was “not bad” in terms of artistic level and technique; a novel, Der Todesprediger (1893); a volume of novellas, Macht und Mächte (1903), and the later tale, Der gelbe Stein (1910).1 Already as a young man Landauer did feel a calling to be a writer. In 1899, in one of his first letters to his future wife, the poet Hedwig Lachmann, he asserts his literary ambition and specifically refers to “the novel and novella” as the focus of his efforts and as his areas of literary strength.2 Landauer sent her a first draft of his novella Arnold Himmelheber to read, but did not receive a positive response. Nevertheless, during their life together they remained united by their work in the field of literature, especially translation work, which they undertook in order to secure a living. Hedwig Lachmann made a name for herself with her translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome around 1900. Other translations of Wilde and later of Tagore were undertaken jointly with Landauer. Although she was also a poet, Lachmann is considered one of the most notable German translators of modern prose – including Balzac, Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad – of this period.3 Landauer, on the 1 Theodor Fontane to O. Neumann-Hofer, 5 January 1892, quoted in Gustav Landauer (18701919): Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeption seines Werkes, ed. L. M. Fiedler (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995), 166. 2 G. Landauer to H. Lachmann, 15 May 1899, Lebensgang I, 21. 3 See H. Lachmann, Gesammelte Gedichte: Eigenes und Nachdichtungen (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1919); Oscar Wilde, Salome, trans. H. Lachmann (Leipzig: Insel, 1903); Honoré de Balzac, Die Frau von Dreissig Jahren, trans. H. Lachmann (Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1912); Edgar Poes Werke, 6 vols., trans. H. Moeller-Bruck and H. Lachmann (Dresden: H. Minden, 1911-1914); J. Conrad, Lord Jim, trans. H. Lachmann and W. Freissler, 1st-6th eds. (Berlin: Fischer, 1927).

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whole, showed a preference for lyrical, mystical and historical texts, as evidenced in his translations of Walt Whitman and Meister Eckhart, as well as in his Letters from the French Revolution.4 Landauer’s first important literary work, Der Todesprediger (“The Preacher of Death”) is a parody of a Bildungsroman, with the main character’s apocalyptic visions of death transformed at the end into an affirmation of life in the community.5 This is a twenty-year-old’s credo of sorts, a work in which the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are clearly discernible. Landauer’s next effort was a novella, entitled Lebenskunst, published in 1897 in the literary supplement of Der Sozialist, for which Landauer wrote essays on culture and politics.6 This text can be seen as an early version of Arnold Himmelheber, a novella which was conceived around 1900 as the main part of the volume Macht und Mächte. Landauer’s friend Fritz Mauthner had to intervene several times to persuade the publishers not to reject the literary text for “political reasons.” Thanks to Mauthner’s mediation, as well as the support of Maximilian Harden, the book – which also contained the novella Lebendig tot (“Living Dead”) – found its way into print in 1903 at Egon Fleischel Publishers in Berlin.7 In the same year, Landauer’s translation of Eckhart, Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften, and his own philosophical essay, Skepsis und Mystik also appeared.8 The Himmelheber novella should be read in close connection with these other two texts, perhaps all the more so because it does not in itself meet the mark as a fully-formed literary work. The later tale, Der gelbe Stein (“The Yellow Rock”), with its abstract, Jugendstil-influenced form probably represents Landauer’s greatest literary endeavour.9 Yet Arnold Himmelheber is also a truly significant work, albeit for reasons which lie beyond purely aesthetic considerations. It represents a search for a genre that experiments with a blending of translation, literary prose and philosophical reflection. This singular quest links 4 With Hedwig Lachmann, he translated O. Wilde, Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray (Leipzig: Insel, 1907); R. Tagore, Der König der dunklen Kammer (Munich: K. Wolff, 1915); and R. Tagore, Das Postamt (Leipzig: Insel, 1918); His other translations include: W. Whitman, Gesänge und Inschriften (Munich: K. Wolff, 1921); and Briefe aus der französischen Revolution, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1919). 5 See G. Landauer, Der Todesprediger (Dresden: H. Minden, 1893). 6 See Lorenz Jäger, “Der Herr des Lebens und die Anarchie: Zu Landauers Novelle ‘Arnold Himmelheber’,” in Gespräch, 9 f.; and Signatur g. l.: Gustav Landauer im “Sozialist” (1892-1899), ed. R. Link-Salinger (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). 7 See Macht und Mächte, 1903/1923; see also G. Landauer, Arnold Himmelheber: Eine Novelle, ed. with commentary by P. Despoix (Berlin: Philo, 2000). 8 See Meister Eckhart and Skepsis, 1903/1923. 9 See P. Despoix, Ethiken der Entzauberung: Zum Verhältnis von ästhetischer, ethischer und politischer Sphäre am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998), 76f.



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Landauer not only with his close friends Mauthner and Buber, but also with a whole generation of German-Jewish intellectuals. But the utopia of a ‘lawless life,’ the fantasy pursued in Himmelheber, also refers to a relationship between German and Jewish culture, which is distinctive of Landauer’s work in general. In formal terms, the novella shows unmistakable traces of an early-Romantic influence. As is the case in Landauer’s other works, the blending of genres is carried out almost programmatically; the text comprises dramatic scenes in which dialogues predominate, together with a fairy-tale-like narration, correspondence, a portrayal of idyllic love, and a phantasmagoric epilogue. In terms of form, one senses a close proximity to drama. This is related not only to Landauer’s strong ties to the theater, but also specifically to a dialogical technique already found in Dostoevsky’s writing. While working on the final draft of the novella in Kent in 1902, Landauer explained in a letter to Mauthner, “for the time being, my material has found its form, and this time it wants to be something like a play: a novella, in which the author does not interject anything into the dialogue.”10 Beyond the experiment with literary form, it is the choice of subject matter which makes this work unique. There is something daring, even scandalous about the novella, as one social taboo after another is violated. Two parallel stories are narrated: one involves the secluded life of a former doctor, Himmelheber, and his “love-sick” daughter; the other involves the reunion of Ludwig Prinz with Judith, the love of his youth. There is a merging of these two narrative threads and the connecting link is the main character, Himmelheber, who has taken the orphan Ludwig under his wing and raised him. The novella unfolds step by step in a few episodic scenes. It opens with the reunion between Ludwig, who has just returned home after completing his medical studies, and Himmelheber’s daughter Lysa, who from the outset evokes a Liebesverbot, forbidding love between the siblings. However, this prelude reaches its climax with Himmelheber challenging his adoptive son Ludwig to want happiness, and not to shy away from adultery. Ludwig’s and Judith’s early history, i.e., the story of the chaste love of their youth, is narrated in the next chapter, which is set in a small Jewish village located on the outskirts of a city in southern Germany. The chapter also relates how Judith, who has since married, becomes estranged from her “coarse” husband, the Jewish merchant, Wolf Tilsiter. Judith’s despair and thoughts of regaining freedom come to a head after she daydreams about reading a strange newspaper advertisement for a marriage partner while thinking of Ludwig, her first love. The story then turns into an epistolary novel, at the beginning of which Judith explicitly alludes to the adulterous thought concerning the classified ad. The correspondence with Ludwig brings about the 10 G. Landauer to F. Mauthner, 20 February 1902, Lebensgang I, 103.

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dreamed-of response to the ad. In the penultimate chapter, the reunion between the two former lovers comes to pass at the very place where they had last parted, in the heart of nature. After making love with Ludwig, Judith decides that she will never let herself be touched by her husband again. The epilogue presents her liberation in a most curious way. In a violent attempt to assert his conjugal rights, the drunken Tilsiter is severely injured by Judith. He dies – while under general anesthetic – on Himmelheber’s operating table. With the body of her dead husband still in view, Judith asks to be formally joined with Ludwig, by whom she is now pregnant. The two are blessed in a kind of profanatory ritual by Himmelheber, who confesses to murdering Tilsiter. The scene takes on phantasmagorical proportions, as they all throw off their clothes and invoke life. Meanwhile, Lysa – who appears as if possessed by her own dead mother – reveals the secret of her incestuous relationship with her father. Freed from all feelings of guilt, she slides ecstatically into death. Certainly the notion of breaking taboos belongs to the context of the time, from Franz Wedekind, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann all the way to Freud; and yet there is hardly a contemporary work in which one finds such a systematic and massive build-up in this regard. In Landauer’s novella a tremendous escalation of transgressions – adultery, marital violence, murder and incest – is being staged. In addition, the explicitly profanatory character of the transgressions obviously corresponds to Landauer’s Kulturkampf against monotheism, which he wages elsewhere in his work. Indeed the blasphemy indicated in the last scene is twofold, for it indicates the dissolution of both Jewish law and Christian love in favor of a pagan sovereignty of life: “When you are alone,” whispers Himmelheber to Judith after the news of her husband’s death, “drop to your knees before the nameless, the ineffable, the unbelievable and stammer: ‘I thank you from the depths of my being, you magnificent, redemptive coincidence!’”11 This profanation of the God of the Jews becomes even more blasphemous in Himmelheber’s justification of the murder of the Jewish merchant Tilsiter, which is presented as a liberation from sin: “Let yourself be buried, you eternal Jew, old Jehovah … I am the eternal heathen … . There is no sin, there is only life. Life never ends.”12 One can discern here the use of Nietzschean language in countering St. Paul’s message. Pauline Christianity’s commandment of love (agapé) has imperceptibly come into view alongside the Jewish Torah. The words used by Lysa in revealing the fact of her incestuous relationship with her father take this one step

11 Landauer, Macht und Mächte, 1923, 70. 12 Ibid., 76.



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further: “The Mother and I are one” – a blasphemous reversal of the words of Jesus: “The Father and I are one.”13 Why is so much blasphemy necessary? The plot of the story revolves around Judith’s liberation from her unhappy and childless marriage to Tilsiter. She and Ludwig can affirm life in a total way only if they are also declared guiltless. This is precisely the function filled by Himmelheber’s profanatory rhetoric. In contrast to Tilsiter who is law-abiding in bourgeois as well as religious terms, yet portrayed as coarse and almost a-human, the two lovers are, as it were, reborn to humanity, obeying only the power of life. The blasphemous ritual marks the staging of their “new birth” beyond the law, as a conquest over culture’s ultimate boundary, namely shame. It is not by chance that the Dionysian ending is referred to as taking place in “natural” nakedness against the background of a midsummer night’s bonfire, with all its pagan connotations. The connection established between Himmelheber’s incestuous behavior and the abandonment of bourgeois law is precisely what shocked even Landauer’s closest friends. It was particularly the enigmatic ending of the novel which caused the loudest objections. Hedwig Lachmann was the first to strongly condemn the novella after reading an early version. Landauer’s reply, justifying his work, was sent on 15 May 1899: “Now do not consider it vanity that I refuse to defer to your judgment. That you knew from the beginning of the story what was going to happen is to my credit. You were supposed to sense it. That you think the narrative consists of two stories that have nothing to do with one another, I find highly old-fashioned. I think it all flows together into one picture. Think of Dostoevsky, how right he was to put a hundred stories into one for the sake of the symbol which unites everything.”14 This argument does not seem to have convinced the poet, for in addition to lambasting the abstract depiction of the characters, she also criticized in her next letter, Himmelheber’s ruthlessness toward Judith’s husband. It seems that the discussion was too personally charged to go on, for the controversy broke off at this point. One discerns a similar tone three years later in the comments of Landauer’s friend Fritz Mauthner, after the novella had been revised. Mauthner, who had been involved in trying to get the work published, noted in the blurb which Landauer had asked him to write for the booksellers: “The story’s main point is wonderful. Everything concerning the Judith-Ludwig couple is the finest poetry. … But there is something that troubles me. As for the nakedness, that is a big question mark. That’s asking for the police. I think the emotional sense of longing for new human beings gets abandoned. But it’s only a question mark. On the other 13 Ibid. 77. 14 Lebensgang I, 20 f.

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hand, I definitely did not like the down-to-earth portrayal of Arnold and Lysa’s relationship. I do not think it should have been spelt out.”15 Basically, the doubts expressed by Landauer’s closest friends touch on the same point. It is precisely the linkage established in the transgression of the two strictest social taboos, murder and incest, which is to them disturbingly enigmatic or unresolved. Landauer himself concedes this difficulty in his reply to Mauthner written on 22 July 1903: “I don’t think you are right about the nakedness. On the other hand, concerning the ‘down-to earth account’ (of Himmelheber and Lysa’a relationship), I know I have not managed to resolve it. That is why I let years go by before I wrote the last chapter. [The account] has to be there, and has to be at this point [in the story] where one character after another rises up, but it has to be different.”16 Landauer even writes that he would like to integrate Mauthner’s comments into the manuscript. Both Lachmann’s criticism that the incestuous father-daughter relationship should not be intimated already at the beginning of the story, and Mauthner’s view that it should not be disclosed at the end, point to one and the same problem: how to represent the uncanny. And it is this problem that lies at the heart of the novella, for it is the underlying question not just in the linking of the critique of the law with sexuality, but rather also in the linking of violence with liberation. This is the linkage which touches on Landauer’s “anarchistic” cultural blueprint; Landauer ultimately chose not to change the enigmatic ending in the published version of Himmelheber. The hubris-motif, as epitomized in the figure of Himmelheber, points to an imaginary genealogy of “life” underlying the whole narrative construction. Up to the last scene Himmelheber is portrayed as a kind of Faustian director with noticeably demonic traits. However, the ending shows that at the precise turning point where murder and incest are coupled, Himmelheber is no longer master over life. A strange power seems to issue from Tilsiter’s corpse, which in the end draws Lysa to her death. A death for a death: is this to be understood as intrinsic retribution? Everything that happens here happens outside of the boundaries of the law, for as Landauer would later say in reference to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, “no punishment is required because the order comes from within.”17 Death and life stand opposite one another as coequal forces. The powerful, dream-like nature of the last scene has to do with the fact that it is played out on the threshold of life and death, of nature and culture. Himmelheber was working against the ideals of the Jewish Torah and Christian agapé, in the service of Eros 15 Ibid., 120 f. 16 Ibid., 121. 17 Shakespeare II, 51.



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and life. The nasty, childless marriage with Tilsiter is over. Judith and Ludwig, as if regenerated, find one other, and the child can be born without disgrace. But the decisive question is what elements are pushed aside in the narrative? The strong rejection of conventional Jewish life is brought to bear exclusively on the figure of the merchant Tilsiter. Here, Landauer plays in an ambiguous way with the anti-Jewish clichés of the time. Certainly no trace of his critique is to be found in the figure of Judith, who is also Jewish. It is no coincidence that Ludwig imagines her to be aristocratic. Her desire for freedom and later on, to separate from her husband, is never given an anti-Jewish connotation. And just when she learns of her husband’s death, the midsummer’s night procession and the singing of the words “Be glad, daughter of Zion,” can be heard in the background. As if hallucinating, she then perceives the words “rejoice, Jerusalem.”18 Himmelheber’s words, which had been profanatory up to this point, have suddenly reversed their meaning. A joyful affirmation of life as well as of its Jewish origins is articulated here. Ludwig on the other hand, with whom Judith joins up, is clearly marked by his German Christian origins. The prerequisite for the construction of a new human generation, then, has a definite German-Jewish connection. In fact, there is only one feasible future constellation, namely one in which there is a pairing of the feminine-Jewish and the masculine-Christian elements, and in which, both the Jewish and Christian religions are dispensed with. The other configurations, both the “intra-Jewish” connection – or “inbreeding” as it is dismissively termed – between Judith and Tilsiter, and the “intra-German” – in fact, incestuous – relationship between Himmelheber and his daughter, are denounced as failures. In a kind of vision, Lysa is addressed by the dead Tilsiter before she, as it were, “joins” him in “naked death.” The scheme of relationships is not unlike that in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften; it is as if this literary motif has served here as a tacit genealogical model. All of the distinctive features of the main characters – origin, gender, religion, culture, even social rank – are elements of an “alchemical” play of signs. This playing with signs serves as a symbolic construction of a utopian symbiosis, with Himmelheber acting as its Faustian mediator. Interestingly enough, Landauer remarked in his letter to Hedwig Lachmann, that he had divided himself between the novella’s two male characters. Also worth noting is the fact that Landauer claimed that the novella’s ending was only one side of his mysticism, the other side of which was to be found in Dostoevsky.19 Landauer seems to have been aware of the dangerous flip-side of anomism. But he was too Nietzschean to let his depiction 18 Macht und Mächte, 1923, 71. 19 See Lebensgang I, 22.

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of the transgression of the law take on a messianic, or even apocalyptic dimension – as was the case with Dostoevsky. In Landauer, there is a positive attitude with regard to life that surpasses the pure negation of the law. The ending of Arnold Himmelheber is mystical in the sense that it presents not some collective eschatology, but rather an ecstatic, Dionysian eros as the agent of life and death.20 The transgression of laws here can thus be understood as an aesthetic affirmation of a realm beyond bourgeois culture, in which the “German” and “Jewish” elements are ordered in a new way. Freud’s claim that the constitution of culture must be defined in terms of the law of the (Jewish) father is well-known, and especially in the wake of his Interpretation of Dreams, which appeared in 1900, this view of culture has been seen in connection with the necessity of upholding sexual taboos – specifically the repression of incest.21 Landauer, however, points in the opposite direction: Himmelheber is not a classic father-figure, but rather a lawless educator – not of his own biological children, but of a future, chosen generation. With Freud, the violence of the law, as represented by the figure of the father, is directed against the sons, and the desire of the son is aimed at the mother. In Landauer’s story, on the other hand, it is the actual father who is incestuous, and the violence of the fatherly educator is directed outwards, as if he might serve as a “doctor of civilization,” and subvert the oedipal conflict. Here we see Landauer’s structural opposition to the contemporary Freudian interpretation of incest as a necessary cultural taboo; this is even clearer if one recalls Landauer’s emphatically positive appraisal of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s revival of the Oedipus myth.22 In his Ödipus und die Sphinx (1906), Hofmannsthal dramatically reworked the prehistory of the Sophoclean play, giving the material a distinctly untragic reinterpretation, which Landauer outlines in his review: “If I am correct, Jocaste is the one who, in more than one sense, takes Oedipus into her matrix [Geschlecht]; the one who, in her embrace, gives birth to the son once again.”23 Hofmannsthal’s play is in fact no longer about the guilt of the incestuous Oedipus, as Freud had suggested in deciphering this central Sophoclean motif; rather, it is about Dionysian rebirth through the conscious violation of taboos – just like in Landauer’s novella. Since, in Hofmannsthal’s version of the play, the story breaks off after the incestuous transgression, the tragic “trial” does not take place. In this sense, it is probably no coincidence that Landauer later became one of the first advocates of “Indian drama,” in which no oedipal motif is to be found. 20 Note that ‘Lysa’ is the feminine form for ‘Lysios,’ one of the names of Dionysos. 21 See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900); Eng. trans.: The Interpretation of Dreams (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1913). 22 See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ödipus und die Sphinx (Berlin: Fischer, 1906). 23 G. Landauer, “Hofmannsthals ‘Ödipus’,” Das Blaubuch 28 (1907): 867.



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This strong interest was underscored by his translation into German of works by Rabindranath Tagore. Together with Hedwig Lachmann, Landauer translated two of Tagore’s plays, The Post Office and The King of the Dark Chamber, which appeared in German in 1918-1919. (See n. 4, above.) Landauer saw Tagore not as a world-denying ascetic, like the religious virtuosos of the West, but rather as a quasi-pantheistic devotee of life: “He is the first one [from this tradition], who … did not disdain life, but instead talked his way out of life itself … For him, too, this world and the world beyond, also life and death, are not opposites; Brahma is not behind the world, but in all things, and in their bond of love.”24 Landauer’s comment about the ending of Post Office – a play which he was involved in staging when it was first performed in Düsseldorf – is reminiscent of the conclusion of his own Himmelheber: “There has perhaps never before been a dramatist who … not only transfigures death, but makes it virtually pleasurable. Pleasurable, but in the finest, most delicately sensitive way, and joined with melancholy like in the fleeting flash of a dream.”25 The death of Lysa is also presented in the novella in a dream-like scene, concluding almost like an elegy. In dying, Lysa recovers her singing voice, which otherwise fails her. At the last moment, her soft spoken singing, or “Sprechgesang,” eclipses her father’s powerful words.26 A key question here is how was Landauer’s aesthetic utopia of mixed (i.e., German-Jewish) cultural origins affected by his reception of – specifically Jewish – mysticism, following the appearance in 1906-1908 of Martin Buber’s first translations of Hasidic tales?27 There was certainly a shift in emphasis, as Landauer now began to articulate a positive stance toward Jewish culture – without this changing in any fundamental way his view of a necessary bipolar, German-Jewish alliance. It is known that Landauer supported and followed with great interest the revival of Hasidic legends by his friend Buber; on occasion he would use his impressive oratorial skills to read to his circle of friends from Buber’s Tales of Rabbi Nachman. In 1908, when Buber was preparing his Legend of the Baal-Shem for print, it was to Landauer that he turned for comments on the manuscript.28 Landauer’s reply came publicly in the form of a laudatory review in the journal 24 G. Landauer, “Rabindranath Tagore,” Das Programm: Blätter der Münchner Kammerspiele 10 (1916): 6f. 25 Ibid. 26 See L. Jäger, “Der Herr des Lebens und die Anarchie: Zu Landauers Novelle ‘Arnold Himmelheber’,” in Gespräch, 9f. 27 See Martin Buber, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1906); Die Legende des Baalschem (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1908). 28 See letter to Paula Buber-Winkler, December 1906, in M. Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider), 252; and letter to Landauer, 16 January 1908, ibid., 260.

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Das literarische Echo. Above all, he highlighted Buber’s revival of Jewish myth – as it flourished in the Hasidic art of storytelling – from the spirit of German language and poetry.29 Throughout, Landauer saw Buber’s work on Hasidic mysticism in relation to motifs from his own early literary work. In Hasidism, Landauer discerned a mystical literature that appeared to him to be the negative pole of his own mysticism in Himmelheber: “[Hasidism] does not have that ecstatic-erotic coloring … that we know in some eastern traditions … everything metallically demonic … all wildness, all joyful exuberance and blissful ecstasy is completely missing.”30 Yet, to Landauer Hasidic mysticism was a lived experience of “unending joy,” and as such represented another – albeit no longer Dionysian – type of affirmation of life. What is interesting in this context, is that Landauer considered Buber, this literary representative of Jewish mysticism, not only as “a renewer of Judaism for humankind,” but at the same time as “a reviver and advocate of a specifically feminine way of thinking [frauenhaftes Denken].”31 In an essay written in honor of Buber in 1913, Landauer articulates something he had already hinted at in his own aesthetic construction of a “new life,” namely, the link between the transformation of Jewish identity and the rise of a specifically modern “women’s culture.” Buber’s pointed disagreement with this assertion may lie in the fact that he – in contrast to Landauer – adhered to a German-Jewish construct in which the Jewish component was unequivocally pegged as masculine.32 In positing his aesthetic utopia of a crossing of elements from the Jewish and German cultural traditions – and this was one of the reasons he distanced himself from any metaphorics of purity – Landauer took up a most singular position between Mauthner on the one hand, and Buber on the other. Landauer showed no desire to repress Jewish culture; this is clear from his sharp criticism of Mauthner, who had advocated assimilation in an article written for Arthur Landsberger’s and Sombart’s anthology Judentaufe (1912).33 Yet Judaism could not become the basic core of his identity, as it had for Buber. This also explains why Landauer distanced himself from a cultural Zionism, which might become too strongly tied to the “ground” (Boden). Indeed, Landauer saw “nation” above all in terms of a language community and never as something anchored to territory. In his view, 29 See G. Landauer, “Die Legende des Baalschem,” in Das literarische Echo (October 1910): 148 f. 30 WM 1921, 247. 31 Ibid., 249. 32 This seems to be confirmed – among other things – by the fact that Die Legende des Baalschem, which was written in close collaboration with his German wife, Paula Winkler, was published under his name alone; see B. Hahn, Unter falschem Namen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 92 ff. 33 G. Landauer to F. Mauthner, 20 November 1913, Lebensgang I, 450 f.



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the only possible model for the relationship between Judaism and socialism was the Diaspora.34 Such a position, which was totally untypical for his time, shows Landauer’s marked tendency to distance himself from collective thinking; for him, all judgments and decisions – even those concerning Judaism – were determined on an individual basis alone.35 Paul Mendes-Flohr has aptly noted that, with Landauer, the outer limit of an aesthetical self-affirmation of the Jewish element in turn-of-the-century German culture was reached.36 This seems an appropriate remark, inasmuch as Landauer always rejected the final leap into the religious realm. Yet, it is not only as an aesthetic affirmation, but rather also as a quasi-anthropological statement that Landauer refers to a unity of diversity. Thus, in his essay, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” (“Are these Heretical Thoughts?”), he writes: “Far more – to the extent that there is a ‘more’ – than the Frenchman Chamisso was a German poet, am I, the Jew, a German … As two brothers … are loved by their mother to the same degree, if not in the same way … [S]o too I experience this strange and intimate coexistence as a valuable one, and I see in this relationship nothing primary or secondary … . I accept the complexity that I am and hope to be an even more multifarious unity than I am now aware of.”37 It is precisely the paradox of such a manifold unity – Spinoza’s philosophical legacy – which the history of subsequent decades was to render impossible. Landauer’s brutal murder in 1919 was but an ominous foreshadowing of that future history.

34 See “Judentum und Sozialismus,” (1912) Die Arbeit: Organ der Zionistischen Volkssozialistischen Partei (June 1920): 50-51; reprint in WA III, 158-159. 35 “Only the has-become/is-becoming lives … only he who takes himself, as he sincerely and truly is, along on the journey to his promised land, in that alone, does Judaism seem to me to be a living good” (emphasis mine); WM 1921, 127 f. 36 P. Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1991), 108. 37 WM 1921, 126.

Corinna R. Kaiser

Gustav Landauer’s Early Novella Geschwister: Dying to Communicate 1 Gustav Landauer’s literary works – corpus and critical reception In May 1890, the twenty-year-old aspiring writer Gustav Landauer spent a few days around Pentecost with friends at the Baltic Sea spa Swinemünde (today Świnoujście, Poland), about 250 km from Berlin.1 Though he would use this Christian holiday’s central motif of the split tongues of fire that speak different languages, only later in his novel Der Todesprediger, language, speaking, and communication were clearly on his mind at that time.2 As we know from a letter of 26 May 1890 to his friend Ida Wolf, he had just begun to write the fictional story of a brother and a sister who fail in their quest to overcome their human desires. Landauer returned to Berlin after his short vacation, but for the siblings in what was become his novella Geschwister it was a trip of no return: Landauer has them commit suicide by drowning in the sea on Swinemünde’s beach, tied together in eternal conversation with the sister’s teeth firmly dug into her brother’s ear. Gustav Landauer is known as a philosopher, anarchist, revolutionary, and theater critic, but is rarely seen or discussed as a writer of literature. My essay is a contribution to remedy this oversight and also illustrates how his early texts herald the thoughts on language that he later formulated in Skepsis und Mystik (1903) and other non-fictional texts. Quantitatively, his literary works play a rather minor role in the corpus of his work. He published only one novel, Der Todes­prediger (1893), the three novellas, Ein Knabenleben (1891), Lebendig tot (1903), and Arnold Himmelheber (1903) – also known under its first title Lebenskunst (1896/97) – , two short literary fairytales, Der gelbe Stein (1909) and Der Kinderdieb (1919), and two collec-

1 The following archival material has been used: Gustav Landauer Archives of Amsterdam (GLAA): files 36, 40, 45, 73, 98. Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Gustav Landauer Archives of Jerusalem (GLAJ): MS. Var. 432, file 89, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Landauer frequently underlined words or sentences in his texts; all underlines had to be replaced by italics. 2 It was also the time of Shavuot, with 24 May 1890 being Erev Shavuot. Since Landauer refers only to Pentecost, I will not explore here the possible relation between Shavuot which celebrates the giving of the Torah, i.e., the old law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that prohibits incest, and the novella.



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tions of anecdotes.3 However, he also left behind a number of unpublished literary manuscripts, including the early novella Geschwister.4 The critical reception of Landauer’s literary writings was for many years anything but favorable. In a 1970 essay on Nietzsche’s influence on Landauer, Luc Lambrechts criticizes Landauer’s excessive style and “tendency towards kitsch effects.”5 He dismisses Landauer as a hack writer, a verdict that had a long-term impact. In 1987, Walter Fähnders wrote in a similar vein about Landauer’s Ein Knabenleben, Arnold Himmelheber, Lebendig tot, and Der gelbe Stein that “these texts, which revolve around love and free choice of a spouse, are incredibly pompous and bad.”6 Three years later, Philippe Despoix undertook a close study of the relationship between dream and reality in Der Todesprediger, Arnold Himmelheber, Der gelbe Stein, and Skepsis und Mystik, and his overall view of the quality of Landauer‘s literary texts concurred with that of his predecessors.7 First steps towards a critical reevaluation of Landauer’s literary merits were made at a conference in Düsseldorf in 1995, when Lorenz Jäger offered the first detailed analysis of the novella Arnold Himmelheber.8 At the same conference, Thomas Regehly discussed Landauer’s “stormy confessions” in the novellas Arnold Himmelheber, Lebendig tot, and Ein Knabenleben, the novel Der Todesprediger, and the literary fairytale Der gelbe Stein. Subsequently published, these two essays were the first to pay attention to the subject of communication in Landauer’s literary works, “communication about catastrophes as well as catastrophic communication,” to quote Regehly.9 Seen from this angle, Landauer’s texts can 3 Der Todesprediger (Dresden: Heinrich Minden, 1893); “Ein Knabenleben,” in Das Magazin für Litteratur, 60 (1891), 26 Dec 1891, 821-825; “Lebendig tot,” in idem, Macht und Mächte (Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1903); “Lebenskunst,” in Litterarische Beilage zum Sozialist, 2 (1896), nos. 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51 (3 Oct 1896–19 Dec 1896), 3 (1897), nos. 12-14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23 (3 Apr 1897–5 Jun 1897). “Lebenskunst” was later published in a revised version under the title “Arnold Himmelheber” in idem, Macht und Mächte (Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1903), 1-79. 4 More extensively on Landauer’s novella Geschwister and all his published and unpublished literary writing see: Corinna R. Kaiser: Gustav Landauer als Schriftsteller: Sprache, Schweigen, Musik, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013). 5 Luc Lambrechts, “Die schöpferische Prosa Gustav Landauers. Nietzsche-Rezeption und künst­ lerische Gestaltung,” Studia Germanica Gandensia 12 (1970): 231. 6 Walter Fähnders, Anarchismus und Literatur. Ein vergessenes Kapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichte zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 206. 7 Philippe Despoix, “Von der Bühne zur Geschichte: Gustav Landauer,” IASL 15/2 (1990): 146-168. 8 Lorenz Jäger, “Der Herr des Lebens und die Anarchie: Zu Landauers Novelle ‘Arnold Himmelheber,’” in Gustav Landauer im Gespräch, 1-10. 9 Thomas Regehly, “‘Stürmische Bekenntnisse’: Gustav Landauers literarische Arbeiten,” 23, in Gustav Landauer im Gespräch. Symposium zum 125. Geburtstag, ed. Hanna Delf and Gert Mattenklott (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997 [= Conditio Judaica; 18]), 11-23.

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be understood as expressions of the modernist concern with language that was characteristic of German and European turn-of-the-century literature with such seminal texts as Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s A Letter (1902).10 I shall argue that, in some respects, Landauer was even a forerunner of fin-de-siécle language skepticism – but unnoticed because his early writings remained unpublished and because he lacked the literary skills of writers such as von Hofmannsthal. Before Landauer turned to non-fiction, he not only chose communication and language as topics for his literary writings but also experimented with possible solutions to the paradoxical situation that, as a writer, his only tool to criticize language was language. Luc Lambrechts acknowledges that Landauer had broken away from traditional genres and forms, but does not appreciate his experiments as a characteristic of modernist literature. Landauer, he claims, had simply not been able to consolidate a new cohesive form when he overstepped established boundaries. In his careful analysis of Landauer’s quotations from and references to Nietzsche, Lambrechts discredits Landauer’s intertextuality as an inadequate attempt to really acquire and absorb the ideas of others rather than recognizing it as a distinctive feature of his writing.11 Bernd Witte, on the other hand, in his essay on Landauer’s place in German-Jewish literature and intellectual history, suggests that it is by virtue of Landauer’s densely intertextual writing, i.e., the implicit and explicit references to other works of literature, that all of Landauer’s texts should be seen as literature. He however criticizes Landauer for going about it in a very amateur fashion, and argues that Landauer found his own distinctive style only when he became aware of his Jewish identity, with the result that his “speeches and essays become commentaries, which relate to the canonical texts of German and European literature in a systematic manner.”12 Even though they differ in their assessment of Landauer’s use of literary and philosophical references, Lambrechts and Witte concur in their low opinion of his expository skills – a verdict that neither can nor shall be refuted. But was he really a complete dilettante before he came to terms with his Jewishness? And when exactly would that have been? As late as his acquaintance with Martin Buber? Or, as I suggest, should not Landauer’s early literary works rather be read in a different context, as examples of texts written by a German Jew who had his roots in the Landjudentum (rural Jewry), on the threshold between the romantic ideas

10 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief” (1902), in idem, Sämtliche Werke XXXI. Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1991), 45-55. 11 See Lambrechts, “Schöpferische Prosa,” 222. 12 Bernd Witte, “Zwischen Haskala und Chassidut. Gustav Landauer im Kontext der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte,” 39, in Gustav Landauer im Gespräch, 25-41.



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of the nineteenth century – in particular its affinity to music –,13 and the emerging twentieth-century urban literary modernism and skepticism of language that Landauer encountered in Berlin and elsewhere? Therefore, my critical study of the novella Geschwister focuses on three aspects: First, Landauer’s language criticism as a critique of society; second, the intertextual references he weaves into his text in order to allow his protagonists to communicate when they cannot express in their own words what needs to be expressed, and to point his readers to what he himself wants to say but cannot; and, third, his first tentative steps towards the “musicalization” – to adopt Werner Wolf’s term14 – of his fiction not only as an instrument to overcome the limitations of language but also as a foretaste of the idea Landauer later develops in Skepsis and Mystik of humans as swaying, reverberating “Gefühlspunkte” (speckles of emotion) that communicate without language but in a universe filled with these sounds.

2 Geschwister In 1992, Christoph Knüppel published a first overview of some of Landauer’s early unpublished literary texts, such as the novellas Glück and Geschwister, and the drama Hilde Hennings, in a thorough biographical study of Landauer’s development as a writer and his attempts to publish his texts. Knüppel writes that the subject of Geschwister is “the sensual love of a pair of siblings that is, in the face of social conventions, of course, doomed to failure”;15 thereby, he challenged Ruth Link-Salinger Hyman’s earlier statement that the two were “lovers, not brother and sister.”16 In the following, I show that they were both – siblings and lovers – and how Landauer wanted this constellation to be understood. As mentioned above, Landauer began working on this delicate subject in May 1890 in Swinemünde.17 He had just finished his drama Hilde Hennings and 13 See Barbara Naumann, Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument. Das Musikalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990). 14 Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction. A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999 [=Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft; 35]). 15 Christoph Knüppel, “Die Politisierung eines Literaten. Gustav Landauer in den Jahren 18881892,” 164, in Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeption seines Werkes, ed. Leonhard M. Fiedler et al. (Frankfurt/Main; New York: Campus, 1995), 157-186. 16 Ruth Link-Salinger Hyman, Gustav Landauer. Philosopher of Utopia. With a scholarly bibliography ‘Oeuvres Gustav Landauer,’ ed. Arthur Hyman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 32. 17 Gustav Landauer to Ida Wolf, Swinemünde, 26 April 1890, GLAA 98.

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offered it to Paul Schlenther, the influential theatre critic and co-founder of the well-known Berlin Freie Bühne, in the hope of seeing it staged by this theater. While in Swinemünde, Landauer first considered writing another drama, and it is not known when or why he abandoned his original plan in favor of the novella. On 30 June 1890, he sent a first draft of the story’s conclusion to his friend Ida Wolf. The complete manuscript, which he finished in August 1890, shows only a few marginal changes compared to that draft. Over the following years, Landauer made repeated attempts to find a publisher for the novella. His friend Fritz Mauthner, who held a positive view of Geschwister, supported him in this: I enjoyed it to the end, and I deliberated over whether I should publish this spirited piece or not. I finally decided not to, because I can’t rule out the possibility of prosecution and I need to protect my young journal. However, I’m not returning the manuscript to you because I’d like to suggest something to you: I will look for a publisher for the story and then, when it has been printed, I shall express my enthusiastic opinion about it.18

In 1895, Landauer wrote Mauthner about his renewed efforts to find a publisher for the novella. Even after five years – and by then the published author of Der Todesprediger – he was still convinced that the novella was worthy of being printed: “Today, I sent Geschwister and Knabenleben to Mr. Langen; I also promised him Lebenskunst, which I have finally finished.”19 The distinguished publisher Albert Langen did not accept the manuscript, however.20 Landauer’s Geschwister tells the story of the siblings Franz and Marie whose relationship is of a closer and more sensual nature than is usual for Geschwisterliebe, or love between a brother and a sister. After their parents’ death, they are torn between their unspoken sensvol desires and constraining moral conventions – not to mention a fear of possible legal consequences. The story opens with Marie re-reading letters her brother wrote her after he had moved out of their parents’ house while she waits for him to return home for a visit. Recently engaged in response to Marie’s refusal to live with him as husband and wife and her decision to become a teacher instead, Franz will be accompanied by his fiancée Helene and her mother. From the letters the reader learns that Franz does not love Helene, he does not even respect her. The relationship deteriorates further during the visit to his parental home, and the engagement is finally broken off 18 Fritz Mauthner to Gustav Landauer, in Gustav Landauer – Fritz Mauthner: Briefwechsel: 18901919, ed. Hanna Delf and Julius H. Schoeps (Munich: Beck, 1994), no. 1a, 3. The editor Hanna Delf notes that Landauer quotes Mauthner’s letter several times, but that the letter itself is lost. 19 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Mauthner, Bregenz, 30 July 1895, in Landauer – Mauthner Briefwechsel, no. 9, 7. 20 Landauer – Mauthner Briefwechsel, 371.



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when Franz persuades Marie to live with him in their parents’ house in a relationship that is appropriate for siblings. Franz has found a position as a lawyer while Marie teaches at a girls’ school. After a night in which they realize they cannot control their sensual desires, they decide to “go away.”21 The phrase “gehn wir fort,” or “let’s go away,” not only indicates that they will leave the place where they grew up, but it is also a euphemism for their intention to commit suicide together. Landauer gives only a hint that, either in Swinemünde or on their way to the spa, the siblings commit incest before they die.

3 Incest Incest is a pervasive leitmotif in certain of Landauer’s literary texts. Few scholars, however, have attempted go beyond Freudian psychoanalytical explanations or general observations about the ubiquity of the incest motif in literature, and to analyze the specific role incest plays in Landauer’s literary writings.22 Lorenz Jäger, for example, explains the motif with Landauer’s anarchism. He claims that the most common objection to anarchism – namely that it means tyranny or will inevitably turn into such – is confirmed by the novella Arnold Himmelheber. Not only does the anarchist Himmelheber live in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, he also acts as a self-appointed master over life and death as already implied in his name ‘Himmelheber’ which means either ‘to lift heaven’ or ‘to lift somebody or something up to heaven’ in the sense of killing somebody. According to Jäger, Landauer achieves this effect by challenging the incest taboo, the cultural mechanism that guarantees the development from nature to culture.23 Jäger thus suggests that the incestuous relationship has to be understood literally, with physical incest and corporeal brutality at its core. This interpretation reduces Landauer’s individualistic, philosophical anarchism to a version of violent anarchism, bent on political assassinations, of the propaganda of the deed. As an alternative view, I read the incest motif in Geschwister symbolically, thereby following the lead Landauer himself gives in texts that are related to 21 GLAJ 89, 86-67. Two manuscripts of Geschwister are known to exist. The Ms. in GLAA 45 has to be considered the first, and the one in GLAJ 89 the final one. “Vorläufiger Entwurf des Schlusses” and “Widmung an eine Freundin” can be found in GLAA 40, the letter to his brother Fritz Landauer, in which Landauers gives an interpretation of the novella, in GLAA 73. I always cite Geschwister from the Jerusalem manuscript in GLAJ 89. 22 Cf. Otto Rank, Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage. Grundzüge einer Psychologie des dichterischen Schaffens (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 1974), 22. 23 Jäger, “Herr des Lebens,” 8/9.

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Geschwister. In 1890, while he was trying to get the novella published, he wrote in a letter to his brother: “I would maintain on the basis of my own and others’ experience that any representative piece of art is symbolic in the sense that something particular is represented as a typical example of something general.”24 He sheds more light on the ‘something general’ that is represented by incest and on his attempt to redefine the terms ‘brother,’ ‘sister,’ and ‘incest’ in the “Widmung an eine Freundin” by which he dedicated the novella to his friend Ida Wolf: It was not the abnormal case of sexual love between two full siblings that intrigued me, but something very different, much deeper, was on my mind. No other example shows more clearly how empty and trivial the moral doctrines of the utilitarians, who want to reduce everything to its usefulness, basically are. How could one refuse sexual intercourse between brother and sister if their stale doctrine of moral order were right. In this prohibition, which is generally held to be sacred as no other, there is rather a triumph of the true divine morality which at least wants to keep out anything sordid, impure, and bestial from the ideal relations between parents and children, brother and sister. This, however, is such an elevated, I should say, religious obligation, which, considering the world as it is now, only exquisite human beings can be obliged to fulfill by dint of their reason and willpower. For the present, however, it is a mystery to me how the state wants to interfere in this matter since it does not otherwise concern itself, and for a long time will not be able to concern itself, with what I call high morality. But are those few exquisite men and women not all siblings? Do they only fear the filth when they come from one womb? No, their soul is of such a divine nature, they have rid themselves of the beast so entirely, that they spend their lives in joyful renunciation and chaste love – without police and state. Do not be angry with me, dear friend, that I did not allow my pair [...] to become two such divine creatures. I was not able to represent what I could not find anywhere on earth. Surely, the high ideal for which they fought lived in their spirit. As children of their time, they did not achieve it. Stones those men and women may throw, who refrain from touching their blood brothers and sisters, but who have never reflected upon the noble motive for this human custom, who do not suspect that this is the point from which the pure brotherly and sisterly love has to spread so that we rise above the bestial filth and all become siblings.25

Landauer thus acknowledges the extraordinary moral value of the incest prohibition, but he widens the definition of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ to include the few men and women who live up to, or at least strive for, a higher, divine morality to become brothers and sisters in a new sense of the words. Living in chaste relationships with each other, they obey the incest prohibition even though they are not related by blood; thereby, they extent the area in which this prohibition is operative, but they do so out of moral conviction and not because the state 24 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Landauer, GLAA 73. 25 “Widmung an eine Freundin,” GLAA 40. With this letter, Landauer dedicated the novella to his friend Ida Wolf.



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imposes a law onto them. Landauer admits that this is – for the moment – only a utopian ideal and nothing that is already being practiced, and that those who try to achieve this ideal are likely to fail. To illustrate why and how they fail, he wrote the novella Geschwister. Geschwister is not the first text in which Landauer tackles this complex idea. Already one of his earliest literary attempts, three versions of an unfinished drama called Kain that he wrote in 1885, addresses the subject.26 One of the reasons he failed to complete Kain is that he could not settle on one explanation for the conflict between the brothers Cain and Abel. Two reasons commonly offered are a dispute about the right path to wisdom or a dispute about personal property. A third possible cause can be found in Rabbinic Aggadic texts according to which Cain and Abel had one or more sister(s).27 Some argue that Cain and Abel were only half-brothers; others reason that, since Adam and Eve were the first people on earth, their children had sexual intercourse because there were no other possible partners. Thus, the incest prohibition is turned into its opposite: it becomes a necessity and moral obligation to unite with one’s brother or sister in an incestuous relationship. Landauer developed a similar scenario for his time: a new creation or generation in the beginning of only a few ‘new people’ who were striving for a new world. As the first generation, these ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ can be expected to be attracted to each other and to engage in sexual relations – even if they fight the inclination – because there are no other suitable partners. Giving in to their urges is considered a failure, but in this exceptional constellation, the incest prohibition loses its absolute validity just as it did for the children of Adam and Eve.

4 Literary Intertexts As mentioned above, a texture of rich intertextual references – implicit and explicit – characterizes Gustav Landauer’s literary works; this expository strategy was his main instrument to express his langage skepticism without abandoning language. Already the title Geschwister, points to some literary texts of which

26 Kain, 3 sketches, GLAA 36. 27 See V[ictor] Aptowitzer, Kain und Abel in der Agada, den Apokryphen, der hellinistischen, christlichen und muhammedanischen Literatur (Vienna; Leipzig: Löwit, 1922), 1-28; and more recently Lieve M. Teugels: “The Twin Sisters of Cain and Abel: A Survey of the Rabbinic Sources,” in Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, Eve’s children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 47-56.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s short drama of the same title is the first.28 Goethe had a significant influence on Landauer, but, as Gerd Mattenklott has demonstrated, it is unfortunately impossible completely to reconstruct his reading of Goethe.29 Goethe’s drama Geschwister, written in 1776, was still popular more than a century later; in 1887 alone it was staged twenty-four times. It can therefore be reasonably expected that Landauer as well as his readers were familiar with the text. Choosing the identical title was also a way to intentionally mislead the reader and build up expectations for a conciliatory solution, a revelation à la Goethe that the brother and sister are not related. While Landauer did not live up to this expectation, both texts share one important element, the third person – Helene in Landauer’s story, and Fabrice in Goethe’s – whose entrance prompts the escalation of the conflict between the siblings. It is just a short way from Goethe’s Geschwister to Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Das Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin G*** ,30 in parts an epistolary novel like Landauer’s Geschwister. In Goethe’s and Gellert’s texts, the sister’s name is Marianne, whereas Landauer opted for the shorter but related name Marie. In 1888, the German naturalist writer Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928) published two novellas in a volume titled Geschwister.31 A keen theatergoer, Landauer was surely familiar with Suderman’s plays, which premiered in the late 1880s and early ‘90s in Berlin’s Lessingtheater. Sudermann’s stories do not break with the incest taboo, but they depict very close brother-sister relationships that end in disaster when a third person enters the scene as a partner of one of the siblings. His constellations of three persons that fall short of developing into fully-fledged ménages-à-trois are remarkably similar to that in Landauer’s novella. Just by a reference to well-known literary works of the same title, Landauer prepares his readers for what lies ahead: the story of a love between a brother and a sister that is more intense than what is usually accepted, escalated by a third

28 Johann Wolfgang Goethe: “Die Geschwister” (1776), in idem, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Hendrik Birus et al. Part I, vol. 5 (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1988), 9-28. 29 See Gerd Mattenklott: “Landauers Goethe-Lektüre,” 58/59, in Gustav Landauer im Gespräch, 55-68. In 1916 Landauer gave his fifth lecture at the ‘Berliner Frauenclub von 1900’ about “Goethe’s Geschwister and its connection with Charlotte vom Stein;” cf. Rolf Kauffeldt and Michael Matzigkeit, “Öffentliche Reden und Vorträge Gustav Landauer,” 359, in idem., Gustav Landauer: Zeit und Geist. Kulturkritische Schriften 1890-1919, (Munich: Boer, 1997), 355-362. 30 Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, “Das Leben der Schwedischen Gräfinn von G***“(1747), in idem., Gesammelte Schriften. Kritische, kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Bernd Witte, vol. IV (Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 1989), 1-96. 31 Hermann Sudermann, “Geschwister” (1888), in idem, Gesamt-Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, vol. 1 (Stuttgart; Berlin: Cotta, 1919).



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person who is the partner of one of the siblings, and presented at least partially in the form of an epistolary novel.

5 Brotherly letters Landauer wrote the first part of his novella in the form of letters to avoid offending his readers’ sensibilities, as he revealed to his brother Fritz: “In this way it is possible to briefly touch upon, rather than to represent in detail some of those things that would perhaps have left delicate souls dismayed.”32 But the epistolary form has other functions too, namely to mark the story as a love story and to utilize the difference between the written and the spoken word to hone his critique of language. From the very beginning, the letters the brother and sister exchange characterize the story as a love story, though not – if one forgets the title for a moment – necessarily as a story of a love between siblings that violates convention. Landauer provides the first clue in the description of the outer attributes of the letters: Marie keeps the letters in her desk, veiled in rose-colored paper and laced with blue silk ribbons; though he stops short of adding scent to the letters, this is also a typical example of Landauer’s use of kitschy stereotypes that earned him the title of a hack. Moving inwards, the text hints are still in a somewhat exterior layer: the salutation and closing formulas, which give no evidence of a correspondence between a brother and a sister. Marie refers to her pen pal as “the beloved writer of the lovely letters” without speaking of him as her brother.33 The reader learns only at the end of the first letter, in which Franz assures Marie how unlikely it is that he will get married in near future, that it is a brother who offers kisses to his sister. The body of the letter is full of intimations as to why he refuses marriage. Marie reading the letters is the inception of a form of meta-communication, a discourse about writing, reading, and speaking that is the essence of the novella: unable to find words for their own situation, emotions, wishes, and plans, Franz and Marie make do with uttering references to what others have written or said, to discussions about norms and expectations of how one should speak and write in different circumstances, and to gender-specific reading recommendations. Franz advises Marie to read Shakespeare, lamenting the fact that he does not know a single woman who loves and understands Shakespeare: “I would warmly recommend Shakespeare to you, but I have not yet met a girl who understands or loves 32 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Landauer, GLAA 73. 33 GLAJ 89, 4.

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him as passionately as I. And still they say that I should get married!!”34 Marie picks up this explicit literary reference in the fourth letter as it offers her a safe way to propose symbolically to her brother. The obstacle to getting married, the fact that no woman loves and understands Shakespeare as much as Franz does, has been removed and there is a wife for him: his sister who has not only read Shakespeare but has found his writing “really striking and deeply felt.”35 On the other hand, literature can also keep the siblings at a distance from one another, because of, as Franz believes, gender-specific approaches to literature. He shuns women’s ill-advised reading habits of his time that were shaped by popular guides that recommend only select texts for women to read. Shakespeare, for example, is listed only once in eight popular guides.36 Alongside the normative approach of establishing a canon of suitable reading material for women, these guides distributed information about male and female reading habits that is not too far from current research on reading and gender. When reading Shakespeare, Marie not only understands his texts on a cognitive level, but she is also deeply moved on an emotional level. This kind of emotional identification with literature prompted the nineteenth-century warnings of girls reading too much and too empathically – exactly the way of reading that Landauer champions here. One of his sources on the subject may have been the journal Über Land und Meer to which his parents subscribed and to which he submitted in 1885 his first published text, the poem, “Frühlings Einzug.”37 Amalie Baisch, author of a reading guide for women, also wrote for Über Land und Meer, where her husband Otto Baisch was editor-in-chief. In the first letters, Landauer establishes a relationship between Franz and Marie that reminds one of that in Goethe’s letters to his sister Cornelia; at a closer glance, however, it echoes even more that in Heinrich von Kleist’s writings to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge. Kleist, whom Landauer admired as the author with the most polished language,38 once bought Schiller’s Wallenstein for his fiancée. 34 GLAJ 89, 11. 35 GLAJ 89, 12. 36 See Bildung und Kultur bürgerlicher Frauen 1850-1918. Eine Quellendokumentation aus Anstandsbüchern und Lebenshilfen für Mädchen und Frauen als Beitrag zur weiblichen literarischen Sozialisation, ed. Günter Häntzschel (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986 [= Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur; 15]), 377-449. 37 “Tagebuch des jungen Gustav Landauer (1884-1886),” 13 March 1885: “Auch schrieb ich einen Brief an ‘Über Land und Meer’, worin ich ihnen mein Gedicht ‘Frühlings Einzug’ zur Beurteilung und falls es ihnen gefiele, zur Veröffentlichung vorlegte.” “... die beste Sensation ist das Ewige ...” Gustav Landauer – Leben, Werk und Wirkung, ed. Michael Matzigkeit (Düsseldorf: Theatermuseum, Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, 1995), 35. 38 See Gustav Landauer, “Martin Buber,” 168, in Gustav Landauer: Werkausgabe, ed. Gert Mattenklott and Hanna Delf, vol. 3 “Dichter, Ketzer, Außenseiter. Essays und Reden zu Literatur, Philosophie, Judentum,” ed. Hanna Delf (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 162-170.



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In the letter Kleist sent her together with the book, he explains how reading the same text will bring them together: “Read him, dear girl, I will read him, too. Then our souls will also unite in the third element.”39 He also instructs her to identify with Thekla and to see himself as Max. Whereas Landauer refers with the title of his novella to other texts that center around incestuous relationships between brothers and sister and uses Shakespeare to create a bond between Franz and Marie through shared reading attitudes, his reference to Kleist, which is much more delicate as it draws a clear parallel between the engaged couple and the siblings, is hidden and less easy to identify. Both Kleist and Landauer’s protagonist are delighted about women who feel “deeply moved” by reading; Landauer even uses Kleists’s exact words: “tief empfinden,” or “to feel deeply.” He also adopts Kleist’s words “inniges Interesse, or “heartfelt interest,” to let Franz express his surprise about his sister’s interest in literature, just as Kleist was surprised about his fiancée’s.40 And just as Kleist does in his letters, Landauer’s protagonists always offer kisses in closing their letters as a substitute for kissing the real person. Kleist bought books not only for his fiancée, but also for his sister Ulrike to whom he gave similar reading advice, though without the sensual undertones. For Landauer’s Franz, sister and lover are one person, and his advice is not purely educational as Goethe’s and Kleist’s was for their sisters, but he strives to form through reading the emotional bond Kleist had with his fiancée. Withstanding Franz’s open and hidden hints, Marie rejects his proposal to live together, and in response he changes his writing. Brother and sister realize that they cannot speak frankly about their feelings. Franz asks his sister not to stop sending letters, but to limit herself to small talk and to avoid anything too personal. In that way, they can communicate without saying anything and the letters themselves, their very materiality, replaces the content – the medium becomes the message. Now that the content is no longer important, the materiality of the letters has to change in order to express changing feelings and moods. Franz indicates a certain distance by sending a postcard – the only one he sends his sister in the novella. Marie, too, takes steps to escape the incestuous reading experience she shares with her brother and enrolls in college to become a teacher, a professional reader and interpreter of literature. Both actions, Franz’s postcard and Marie’s professionalization, are similar in that they shun the intimacy of the sealed letters for something open and public. 39 Heinrich von Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 16 August 1800, in Heinrich von Kleist, “Briefe,” 517/18, in idem., Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Helmut Sembdner, vol. 2 (Munich; Vienna: Hanser, 1977), 463-893. 40 GLAJ 89, 12. Heinrich von Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 21 January 1801, in idem., “Briefe,” 615.

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From the tenth letter on, Franz and Marie try to abstain from incestuous references and discuss literature in an impersonal, academic fashion, but Marie’s career choice also sends another, more ambiguous signal to her brother: until the Weimar Republic, only single women would become teachers in Germany. Thus, Marie’s decision conveys that she is leaving the close relationship with her brother, but it is also a signal that she will not marry and will be free for him – parallel to his announcement in the first letter that he has no intention of getting married. Feeling rejected by Marie’s course of studies and her new approach to literature, Franz turns his back on his sister and goes out to dinners, parties, and the theater. Marie passes her exams and takes up a position as teacher at an allgirls school. Franz congratulates her, but this is immediately followed by the announcement of his engagement. If his postcard was already a sign of open communication and that he has nothing to hide, he goes one step further and makes his announcement in a telegram. A telegram is not only a more public medium of communication than a postcard, it also expresses alienation because a third and fourth party are involved in converting the sender’s written words into electric signals and reconverting those signals into written text. Marie ‘gets the message,’ and she responds by sending a telegram with her congratulations.

6 Bridal Letters The ensuing correspondence can be referred to as ‘bridal letters’ in a two-fold sense: Franz writes his sister about his fiancée, and yet, it becomes apparent that in writing to Marie, he is writing to his real bride-to-be. In the first letter that follows the exchange of telegrams, he tells her about his fiancée Helene, an attractive and very cultured girl, and he still closes the letter with kisses for his sister. In the following letter, he explains that nothing will change between them in spite of his engagement. The subsequent letters, however, betray this intention. The letters become more direct, less implicit than before. Franz admits that ever since his engagement, he thinks of Marie more often and with greater tenderness, and that Helene pales in comparison with Marie. Desperate, he asks Marie why they had to be born as brother and sister and returns to literary allusions. She must save him, just as Iphigenie in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris41 saved her brother: “I catch myself echoing Goethe, Iphigenie!”42 With this reference, Landauer not only introduces another literary text about a brother-sis41 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Iphigenie auf Tauris” (1787), in idem., Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Hendrik Birus et al., part I, vol. 5 (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker 1988), 553-619. 42 GLAJ 89, 29.



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ter relationship, he also re-enforces the reference made with the title of the novella. Goethe played not only Orest in the premiere of Iphigenie auf Tauris in Weimar in 1779 but also the leading male part in Geschwister when it was first performed. A letter that he writes in his future father-in-law’s house causes a conflict between Franz and Helene and underlines that the letters to his sisters have once again become secret love letters. Helene sits in the next room, also writing a letter to Marie to which Franz wants to add a few words. This would necessitate a level of public communication, just as the postcard and telegrams had, and so he refrains. As he finishes his own letter and is about to put it into an envelope, Helene enters the room and asks to whom he is writing. The letter becomes a secret love letter when he refuses to confess that his sister is the addressee: “It is a bit childish, and I might as well have told her right away, but once it had come this far, I couldn’t have come out with it, not even under torture.”43 Aware that their correspondence is tiptoeing a fine line, the lawyer Franz is unable to write as much as his sister’s name on the envelope in the house of his future father-inlaw, a state attorney, and he has to leave the house to address the letter. Landauer underlines this increasing awareness and the importance of this moment with the help of a structural hint. It is the only point in the novella where he adds an author’s comment to the dialogue and the narration, pointing out that, when Marie re-reads the letter, her face flushes because she realizes that the letters are in fact bridal letters from her brother and lover. In the following letter, Franz recounts how he met Helene and was physically attracted to her. He concedes that it will be a marriage of convenience and not a genuine love-match. The last letter finally sums up the communication conflict between Franz and Marie. Landauer uses a reference to Martin Luther and his difficulties in translating the Bible into German, limited to the words that are used in everyday language: My dear Marie! I thank you for your letter. More than that I cannot say. I knew that you would write me kindly, and still I could not have imagined that you would hit the tone so precisely, a tone that touches my heart so deeply, gives me strength and elevates me. I vaguely remember a passage of Luther’s – I do not know whether it is in his letters or Tischreden [after-dinner speeches] or elsewhere – in which he explains the difficulty of translating the Bible, to find appropriate words in the German language that immediately evoke a sense of harmony. [...] He chooses the example of the angels’ salutation to Mary, which would be stiff, if translated literally from the Greek; he chooses the expression “fair” but then adds that if he had wanted to be really German he should have said: “Du liebe Marie” [You dear Marie], because nothing would be better. And this is what has been constantly on my mind for several days: Du liebe Marie!44 43 GLAJ 89, 32. 44 GLAJ 89, 39.

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For the first time in the novella, Landauer indicates here that the story of Franz and Marie should be more that just the story of a pair of siblings whose love for each other goes beyond societal norms and that their struggle should be understood symbolically as the emergence of a new generation and a new order – as new as Luther’s Protestantism – for whom the old laws are no longer applicable and the old language no longer sufficient. In other words, Landauer finally keeps to what he had promised his friend Ida Wolf in the “Widmung an eine Freundin” (see above), namely that he would write about something much deeper than a case of sexual love between a brother and a sister. Brother and sister long for some kind of divine transformation which requires a new sacred language with new words to describe the relation between them in a new, different light – a language that does not yet exist. Luther did not write a new biblical narrative when he translated the Bible into German, but he clad the old stories in a new sound – the sound of another language. Landauer follows a similar path when he gives a preview of the language he strives for. Marie touched Franz’s heart not with what she wrote but with the sound of her words that had the right tone to be in harmony with his heart: phonetics rather than semantics. Marie suggests that Franz break off his engagement, but he fears a disaster without Helene as a protective shield between him and his sister. That the shield is needed becomes clear when he declares his love for his sister by citing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, the text Marie is reading with her students in school at that time. Landauer seems to follow in Goethe’s steps again; Marianne declared her love to Wilhelm in Geschwister by telling him how, as a young girl, she had always read and been very moved by stories about love between relatives. Landauer (mis)quotes the templar (Tempelherr), whose plain answer when he learns that his beloved Recha is his sister is: “Sister? Also good!” (“Schwester? Auch gut!”) 45 Franz criticizes the templar for his dispassionate, cold reply and 45 GLAJ 89, 40. This paragraph on Nathan der Weise can be found in the first manuscript (GLAA 45, 16/17) as well as in the final one (GLAJ 89, 40), but it has been crossed out in the latter one. One reason could be that Landauer quoted Lessing from memory and later realized his mistake: “Tempelherr: Ich? Ich ihr Bruder? // Recha: Er mein Bruder? // Sittah: Geschwister! // Saladin: Sie Geschwister! // Recha (will auf ihn zu): Ah! Mein Bruder! // Tempelherr (tritt zurück): Ihr Bruder! // Recha (hält an, und wendet sich zu Nathan): Kann nicht sein! – Sein Herz / Weiß nichts davon! – Wir sind Betrieger! Gott!” (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: “Nathan der Weise” (1779), 625, in idem., Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al., vol. 9 Werke 17781780, ed. Klaus Bohnen and Arno Schilson (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1993), 483-627. On the incest taboo in Lessing’s Nathan see: Ortrud Gutjahr, “Rhetorik des Tabus in Lessings Nathan der Weise,” in Streitkultur. Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, ed. Wolfgang Mauser and Günter Sasse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 269-278.



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emphasizes that it is precisely the word ‘sister’ that awakens the strongest sensual feelings in him. With this reference, Franz and Marie leave the level of academic interpretations of a text – she as a teacher and he as a lawyer – for good and return to the intimate, incestuous reading that connects them and allows them to communicate about their feelings. Franz warns her not to share their Nathan interpretation with her students. 46 With this last letter and Franz’s open declaration of love, Landauer leaves behind written words and moves to the spoken. In summary, the letters allow the siblings to be in contact and to express their feelings for each other without the necessity of using their own words. Not the content of the letters but their materiality transmits their true content: they are love letters bound in rose-colored paper, letters written in secret, or postcards or even telegrams that mark a temporary disturbance of the relationship. Words are either appreciated because of their sounds that speak to the heart, or they are not the siblings’ (or Landauer’s, for that matter) own words but references to or quotations from other literature that deals with similar constellations and problems. These literary works are what Kleist had called the “uniting third element,” and the conflict in Geschwister arises exactly when Marie moves from this kind of intimate reading or identification with the text to the professional, distanced analysis of texts that is expected from her as a teacher. Franz, the lawyer who analyses non-fictional texts as a profession, has no other medium of communication than to return to the intimate and incestuous reading. That way, he can tell Marie that she, who understands and loves Shakespeare just as he does, is the one and only woman for him. Once he has used Nathan der Weise to declare his love to Marie, it is no longer necessary to refer to other books by their title. Beyond this point in the novella, Landauer does not give titles of books or names of authors. All further books are ‘Blindbände’ or dummies whose empty pages contain the literature of all times, written in all languages, with their countless stories of incestuous relationships. Even though he makes it explicit only in the last letter where he refers to Luther, Landauer employs incest in symbolic terms, as one step towards a new a-sexual divinity for which a new generation longs without knowing how to reach that ideal.

46 An overview of how Lessing’s Nathan was taught in German schools between 1830 and 1914 is given in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings ‘Nathan der Weise’ im Kulturraum Schule (1830-1914), ed. Carsten Gansel and Birka Siwczyk (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2008).

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7 Words: Spoken and Unspoken The second part of the novella begins with the arrival of Franz, Helene, and her mother at the house where Franz and Marie grew up. It is no longer an epistolary novel, as communication moves from writing to speaking – or rather to not knowing what to say and how to talk with each other. Having explored supposed differences in how men and women read, Landauer now shifts his attention to male and female oral communication, as he explained in a letter to his brother: Franz and Marie, who are siblings, have closely sided with each other and conducted a most intimate exchange of ideas since their youth. From early on, they did not avoid transgressing the limit of what is considered modest subject matter for a conversation between a man and a woman in society because they did not see why men and women shared the same language if not to communicate precisely that which they could only learn from the other.47

Landauer thus rejects the conventions of his time that were stipulated in the same books that judged only a small fraction of literature to be suitable for women; they also sought to restrict women to restrained and polite talk and to prevent them from speaking at all about certain matters. In Geschwister, the subject is first raised in one of Franz’s letters where he reminds Marie how he had instructed her to become one of those rare women who speak their minds freely: Nevertheless, mother did not like the fact that I treated you like an adult or at least wanted to make you into one. Sometimes we sat together by the window at dusk and spoke solemnly about things that are usually not spoken about between a man and woman, even a brother and sister. If it were different, if it had been as I wish, for centuries, human beings would be greater, freer, nobler, I should say more divine, than they are today.48

Years have passed since Franz and Marie had those uninhibited talks. In the meantime, Marie the teacher had become not only a professional reader and interpreter of texts but also a professional speaker. In a sense then, Marie was a good student of her brother’s; professionally, she uses a direct and objective, that is, ‘male,’ way of speaking. It could thus be expected that the siblings share a common language, though Landauer shows in the second part of the novella that it is a language insufficient not only for Marie and Franz but for the new generation of people. Leaving the written word behind, they can no longer resume their strategy of references to literature and reading, the ‘common third element,’ which is not suited to oral communication. When Marie welcomes her brother, he answers 47 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Landauer, GLAA 73. 48 GLAJ 89, 17.



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with a partial quotation from Goethe: “‘You look quite well, Franz,’ she said. ‘Better than –’ she stopped. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said with a strange smile, ‘it is not written in my face; etc., but unfortunately the continuation of the quote is not applicable.’”49 Here, they refer to a scene in Goethe’s Faust where Margarete talks about Mephistopheles and remarks that it is written all over his face “that he does not want to love a soul.”50 Landauer uses this reference to indicate that, face to face, the siblings can no longer hint at their feelings through literary intertexts, but he also reminds the reader that Franz is not a modern Mephistopheles and that he does indeed want to love a soul: his sister. Helene and her mother stay at a hotel, and Franz and Marie have the evenings and nights to themselves which gives them plenty of time to talk, but letters not only allowed them to hide behind literary references, but also relieved them of the need to be spontaneous. Talking, however, is spontaneous, and hence it is not surprising that Franz and Marie spend their days thinking of what they can say in the evening in an attempt to partially imitate the self-censorship of writing. Helene, on the other hand, is portrayed as a woman who holds up society’s norms of gender-specific communication, which makes her unsuitable as a partner for Franz. In the only sequence of the second part of the novella where Landauer allows his protagonists to return to writing, Franz breaks off his engagement in a letter to Helene’s father. Franz feels completely unable to talk either to his fiancée or her father, and he becomes ‘speechless.’ He does not lose his voice but rather his capacity to form intelligible syntactic structures, or any complex syntactic structure at all. His sentences are more and more reduced to ellipses: He had to write to her father before he could explain himself to Helene. Yes, he wanted to write to him, immediately tomorrow. To write tomorrow immediately. To write. Write immediately. Write – and with this thought, of writing immediately tomorrow, he slowly turned over on his right side again and fell asleep. The following morning, waking early from a deep, dreamless sleep, his first thought was: to write.51

His thoughts and sentences are reduced to the core, to ‘write,’ his only way of communication. After the engagement has been broken off, Franz stays at their parents’ house to live with his sister. She spends her days at school, and he has found a new position as a lawyer. In the evenings, they make small talk about their days, carefully 49 GLAJ 89, 42. 50 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Faust. Erster Teil,” v. 3489/90, in idem., Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Hendrik Birus et al., part I, vol. 7/1 (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1994), 31-199. 51 GLAJ 89, 76.

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avoiding anything too intimate in the fear they might not find the right words and rather give in to their sensual desires. The tension climaxes on an evening when Marie plays the piano, thereby renouncing language in favor of the ultimate medium of communication: music. That night, they abstain for the first time from kissing each other good night because of the erotically charged atmosphere. The next day, they try to talk about their future, but verbal communication is no longer possible, and Franz finally kisses Marie passionately. Consequently, they decide to ‘go away,’ which means not only to leave the town but to depart from this world and to commit suicide together. For the finale, Landauer changes the scene, and Franz and Marie travel to Swinemünde where he, Landauer, had first begun writing the novella. Either on the way or at the spa, Franz and Marie yield to their desire for each other and commit incest; an act that Landauer indicates only by now calling them “das schöne junge Ehepaar,” the fine young married couple.52 They spend a few days pretending to be on vacation before they commit suicide by drowning. Their last words express their concern about gossip and the scandal their suicide may cause. Only in the moment that they die, do they find the mode of communicating they had always longed for: “She kept her eyes open, she turned her lips to his ear to whisper to him, then he weakened – her teeth bit firmly into his ear – another glance – and they sank.”53 Forever united, their bodies joined – though painfully – by Marie’s teeth and lips dug into her brother’s ear. It is the independent woman, free from the trammels of speech, the piano-playing Marie, who knows how to speak and read professionally as well as in more intimate ways, who will now teach her brother a new, eternal, and utopian way of communication that does not need words or the conventional language of their time. Franz and Marie are led towards the silence, away from society, which they had previously sought in nature. Franz had moved from metropolitan Berlin to the smaller town where he and his sister grew up. When he needed to think about their situation, he left his parental home and climbed up a small hill. And Franz and Marie’s last and decisive talk took place not in their parents’ house but in a park. Though these changes of location brought them closer to nature, only the radical move to the sea, where they were alone on the beach and surrounded by the sounds of nature, liberated them. While the end sees Franz and Marie united, it is also a sign that they did not succeed in resisting their desire in this world, and that they can become part of the new generation of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ who would live in an asexual community and form the nucleus of a new world which they can enter through death. 52 GLAJ 89, 88. 53 GLAJ 89, 89.



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8 Sounds of Silence Siegbert Wolf has proclaimed Landauer’s novel Der Todesprediger, written two years after Geschwister, an important precursor to Landauer’s Skepsis und Mystik in which he presented his thoughts on language.54 I would argue that Geschwister is an even earlier text that leads to Skepsis und Mystik. Landauer’s early attempts have in common that they were literary texts rather than essays or theoretical treatises, and so allowed him to experiment creatively with language and, most importantly, with the nexus of language and music. Landauer’s key phrase “die Welt ist ohne Sprache,” “the world is without language,” from Skepsis und Mystik55 can indeed be read as a summary of Geschwister. The siblings’ constant longing for the kind of talk in which they could name their feelings and ideas, and which would solve all their problems, cannot be fulfilled, and this steers them towards the silence of nature – not an absolute silence but an absence of human language. Along the way, they experience music as a medium much more powerful and adequate than language to express emotions. Here, the turning point that characterizes the literary form of the novella is marked by music: it is Marie playing the piano that turns the story around. Listening to music has brought Franz and Marie a step closer to the longed-for utopian union as it allows them to communicate without words, but it also makes them aware that they are about to cross the boundaries that society sets. The next morning, when they have to return to language, they recognize that this world has no place for them. The story’s finale of a silent and eternal union in death as well as the importance of music are probably inspired by another intertext, Theodor Fontane’s Geschwisterliebe. Fontane’s novella tells the story of the love-triangle of Clara, her blind brother Rudolph, and her husband. The siblings enjoy making music together – he plays the harp, she, the lute and less frequently the piano – but they do not reach the same level of musical communication as Landauer’s Franz and Marie, because they prefer vocal music – singing songs and communicating their feelings with the help of the songs’ lyrics – rather than instrumental music: “pains would often play with terrible persistence on his heartstrings, without pouring out onto the strings of the harp.”56 Still confined by the limitations of 54 Siegbert Wolf, Gustav Landauer zur Einführung (Hamburg: Ed. SOAK / Junius, 1988 [=SOAKEinführungen; 39]), 41. 55 Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik (1903) (Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1978 [Reprint of the edition Köln: Marcan-Block, 1923]), 6. 56 Theodor Fontane, “Geschwisterliebe,” 56, in Der junge Fontane. Dichtung – Briefe – Publizistik (Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau, 1969), 23-56.

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language, Clara and Rudolph cannot overcome society’s norms, and Clara gets married only to die shortly afterwards. After her death, her husband befriends her brother, and when the two men die at around the same time, they finally become united with Clara in heaven. Landauer takes the idea one step further and replaces vocal music with instrumental music when Marie plays the piano. Years later, he will spell out in Skepsis und Mystik, echoing Schopenhauer, the eminence of music that “once again is the world.“57 In Landauer’s understanding, that is still heavily influenced by the Romantics’ thoughts on language and music, it is music that is free of the limits set by language. It is non-judgmental and it allows one to express all kinds of feelings and desires. Landauer allows Franz and Marie a foretaste of this communicative utopia during the evening of piano playing, but even instrumental music – composed and played by humans – is not sufficiently free to allow the siblings to advance a new generation. From Skepsis und Mystik we understand that Landauer’s choice of intertexts is not only motivated by the shared topic of incest, but that music is a decisive criterion: “In rhetoric there is music, melodious sound, the instrument that teaches us words and concepts; in comparison, in the new poetry that has come into being since Goethe, Novalis, and Brentano, the words and concepts are the instrument that lead us to music – to rhythm, to the unutterable that sways us and lets us vibrate in resonance.”58 Lessing should be added to this list. Following Shakespeare, he introduced with his Nathan der Weise a new rhythm into German literature, the blank verse, which Goethe later used in, for example, Iphigenie auf Tauris and Tasso, two texts Landauer often refers to in his literary writings. Thus, Landauer “musicalizes” his novella already by quoting ‘rhythmical’ writers such as Goethe, Shakespeare and Lessing, regardless of the subject of their texts, and not only when he has Marie play the piano. Landauer describes in detail how, after the recital, the siblings lie in their beds in separate rooms; they both listen to the tick-tock of a clock, and their hearts beat in time. He creates the image of embryonic twins that listen to their mother’s heartbeat and are in a state of peace where verbal communication is not yet necessary. Since their parents’ house can be but a poor, man-made substitute for a womb, Franz and Marie must leave it to be reborn as the children of a new Eve for whom the incest taboo will not be valid.

57 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 58. 58 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 53 (“… das in uns einschwingt und uns mitschwingen läßt”).



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9 From Geschwister to Skepsis und Mystik Just as Gustav Landauer fails as a writer, Franz and Marie fail to communicate before they commit suicide, for language is inherently inadequate and can be improved but not saved through references to literary works that have a swinging, swaying rhythm. This method is limited to written communication and cannot successfully be employed in oral communication, and so remains a feeble crutch. Over the years, Landauer improved his appeal to intertextual writing strategy and moved towards an inter-media style, but he never shook off the shackle of language as later more experimental writers did, though Hubert van den Berg, for example, sees Landauer’s thoughts on language as a prelude to Dadaism.59 In Skepsis und Mystik Landauer reflects on why references to literature are a step towards divinity, but not the final one: More important is the assertion that it is primarily printing which has changed our ways of thinking; all thought is language; but we have already ceased to think verbally, and rather think in a bookish manner. [...] All these important improvements of our memory do not, however, change the decisive fact that all this is nothing but memory.60

‘Thinking in a bookish manner’ includes citations from or allusions to literature, but Landauer longs to go back further and to return to a pre-lingual, rhythmical state. In Skepsis und Mystik, he imagines humankind and human history as a musical score, on which humans – like musical notes – are little Gefühlspunkte (speckles of emotion) that tinkle and vanish.61 Or, as he writes, “moments in the community of ancestors, which is eternally alive.”62 In this eternal community, terms like ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lose their genealogical meaning and become metaphors for the new people. In his texts, Landauer cannot create a detailed image of this utopian new generation, because he himself is bound to language. Even when his later attempts at literary writing become more musicalized or even, as with the melodrama Nach Jahren, filmic or pre-cinematic,63 Landauer cannot create utopian situations, and his texts usually end in death and catastrophe – a fact that can be understood with the help of Skepsis und Mystik, where he declares

59 Hubert van den Berg, “Gustav Landauer und Hugo Ball. Anarchismus, Sprachkritik und die Genese des Lautgedichts,” Hugo-Ball-Almanach (Pirmasens) 19 (1995): 121-81. 60 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 42/43. 61 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 59. 62 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 15. 63 Corinna R. Kaiser, “Musik und Film im Schweigen. Intermediale Sprachkritik in Gustav Landauers Melodrama ‘Nach Jahren’ (1900),” The Germanic Review 86 (2011): 37–57.

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that the “I kills itself so that the World-I may live.” 64 Or, to put it differently, his protagonists have to commit suicide, be killed, or at least cut all ties to others and the world so that they can become a Gefühlspunkt on the large score. Geschwister is an early, still rather amateurish endeavor to develop these ideas not in an essay but in a more poetic form, one that is undeniably also rife with kitsch. The strategy of using literary intertexts as rhythmical-musical elements, is clear though, and it leads from the intertexts by Goethe, Kleist, Lessing, and others, to the piano recital and the hearts of the siblings beating in time, and their drowning in which they finally become Gefühlspunkte and members of an eternal community. The novella is thus not only an important source for a better understanding of Landauer’s thoughts on language and – in a second step – on history and society, but also a contribution to the literary language skepticism of fin-de-siècle modernism.

64 Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 8 (“Das Ich tötet sich, damit Weltich leben kann”).

Hanna Delf von Wolzogen

Gustav Landauer’s Reading of Spinoza 1 Introduction Gustav Landauer’s essays on Shakespeare can in some respects be seen as his spiritual legacy and intellectual résumé. His study of Shakespeare – begun only during the years of World War I – was influenced by his ever-increasing affinity with ideas in Spinoza’s Ethics.1 In Landauer’s Shakespeare commentaries, Spinoza figures prominently as a sort of interpretative vanishing point on which the epochal portrait of Shakespeare is sketched. The interesting question is, what would make someone like Landauer – political rebel, social outsider, and avantgarde cultural critic, place Spinoza at the very top of his list of philosophers – and this at the end of the nineteenth century?2 There is no doubt that Landauer, the anarchist and social revolutionary, was one of many intellectuals who – almost as an intellectual prerequisite – imbibed Spinoza’s philosophical naturalism. What is not so readily recognized is that in Landauer’s case, this meant more than the acceptance of a general intellectual trend; indeed, a closer look at his work suggests that his reading of Spinoza had a singular impact on his own thought. In biographical terms, there is nothing that directly links Landauer to Spinoza. Although Kuno Fischer (1824-1907), who authored a historical-philosophical study of Spinoza that was very influential at the time, was one of Landauer’s intellectual mentors, there is no indication that he had any influence on Landauer’s understanding of Spinoza.3 Fritz Mauthner who, apart from being an influential theater critic, philosopher of language and author of a book on Spinoza, was also Landauer’s mentor, commented on Fischer’s book with scorn, noting that its author had “in an equally painstaking, and equally pathetic fashion now added Spinoza to the triumphant ranks of his philosophical heroes.”4 Yet Landauer was clearly intrigued by Spinoza. In fact, apart from Nietzsche – who was eagerly lapped up by the young Landauer with the former’s initial wave of fame – and 1 Baruch de Spinoza, Ethica, ed. Konrad Blumenstock, vol. 2 of Werke. Lateinisch und Deutsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980). The quotations are taken from this edition. 2 On the reception of Spinoza since 1800 see “Jedes Jahrhundert hat seinen eigenen Spinoza. Ein Gespräch mit Pierre Macherey,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, no. V/1 (Spring 2011), 5–14 and ibid., 15–28. 3 Kuno Fischer, Spinozas Leben, Werke und Lehre, 4th ed., vol. 2 of Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Jubilee edition (Heidelberg: 1898). 4 Fritz Mauthner, Spinoza: Ein Umriß seines Lebens und Denkens, rev. and exp. ed. (Dresden: Reissner, 1921), 24–25.

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Schopenhauer, no philosopher garnered Landauer’s interest or respect more than Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s works had already begun to exert their influence on Landauer’s rather dull emotions during his days as a Gymnasium student in Karlsruhe. As we are told in his autobiographical essay “Vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren” (“Twenty-five Years Ago”), this was a period in which “thought and feeling” were “so linked to one another … that all fervor and longing for love seemed to be devoted to ideas as to a lover.”5 Spinoza appears to have been one of the early loves encountered by this newly awakened young mind. Spinoza thus became a companion of sorts, and his presence is felt in Landauer’s work – especially in his Skepticism and Mysticism, Revolution, and Call to Socialism – as a kind of fulcrum for much of Landauer’s own thought. This indebtedness to Spinoza is reflected, for instance, in his frank and forthright reaction to Ludwig Berndl, who had expressed his skepticism with regard to some of Landauer’s key hypotheses: “Since you in any case … hardly know Spinoza at all, you of course cannot be familiar with the starting point of my conjecture. Because that [starting point] is the most important thing.”6 Spinoza was on Landauer’s mind even during the weeks of revolution in 1918. Before setting off for Munich to join Kurt Eisner, he challenged Fritz Mauthner – his doubting friend from Meersburg – with the curious statement: “Let whatever is meant to perish, perish and let whatever can be formed, be formed, lend a hand or get out of the way, we have not studied Spinoza for school, but for life.”7 At this juncture then, faced with what was probably the most radical political challenge of his life, Landauer seems to have felt a strong allegiance not only to Mauthner’s language critique, but also to Spinoza’s teaching. Landauer apparently saw Spinoza as a master of political practice, that is, a master of thought and life. His esteem for Spinoza is already hinted at in an earlier passage of the letter quoted above, as Landauer vehemently notes “Let me be a heretic: what in the world is what you call Germany to you, to us, or to anybody who has an awareness of infinity and a sense of humor? … Kurt Eisner, a man who previously led a miserable, pure and honorable life as a hungry writer suddenly becomes a key figure in Germany, simply because he is a man of spirit, this brave Jew, undreamt-of forces stir the people; … and it’s a matter of sense or illusion or an idea, call it what you will, whether a fighter or an onlooker, at all events [he is] a philosopher.” 5 Gustav Landauer, “Vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren,” Der Sozialist 5, no. 12 (1913): 89–91; appeared also in Rechenschaft (Berlin: Cassirer, 1919), 146f. 6 Gustav Landauer to Ludwig Berndl, 3 January 1910, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, ed. M. Buber, I. Britschgi-Schimmer (Frankfurt a. M.: Rütten & Loening, 1929), vol. I, 287. 7 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Mauthner, 28 November 1918, in Gustav Landauer – Fritz Mauthner. Briefwechsel 1890–1919, ed. H. Delf (Munich: Beck, 1994), 352.



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What he writes about Eisner also applies to Spinoza. In fact the names could be interchanged, for the Jew from Amsterdam was also reputed to have led a “miserable, pure life” in his capacity as a philosopher and grinder of lenses; a “man of the spirit” and a “brave Jew” who, after being excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam, still dared to turn down the generous offer of a professorship in Heidelberg in order to dedicate his whole life to his studies. Also, what could be a more appropriate way of describing Spinoza’s Ethics, which was published posthumously, than as a testimony of his lifelong “struggle for justice and reason”? One should also note that in the Ethics, the discussion of the question of adequate know­ ledge moves between “illusion” – this being the Dutch translation of ‘imagination’ – and “idea.” According to Landauer, it is obvious to anyone who understands Spinoza’s teaching, that the question of adequate knowledge is pertinent to practical life, regardless of whether the practical consequences are of a political nature – as they were for Kurt Eisner – or of a philosophical, contemplative nature – as for Fritz Mauthner. He reproached Mauthner on the grounds that “those who are aware of infinity” should be immune to national-chauvinistic ideologies and jingoism. As Landauer noted shortly after war broke out, “absolutely no esteem should be shown for the intellectual scions of Spinoza, Goethe or Fichte; nothing (not even the army postal service) failed as pitifully as did the German spirit during this war.”8 It was around this time that Landauer began his studies of Shakespeare, in the context of which he developed an anthropological, historical theory of freedom that explicitly refers to Spinoza’s Ethics. Yet, although his Shakespeare studies show a marked proximity to Spinoza’s Ethics – indeed, the link takes on methodological parameters – this was not the first time Landauer had made a more or less obvious reference to Spinoza. In fact, there are traces and indications of a much earlier reading acquaintance with the writings of the philosopher. The first biographical clue leads back as far as Landauer’s childhood in southern Germany. He was probably already infected with the Spinoza bug as a youngster in Buttenhausen. This small town in Württemberg was the birthplace of his father, and most of his relatives from both sides of the family lived there. Landauer was a frequent visitor to Buttenhausen and exchanged many letters with his cousins during his student days. This was also the abode of Jakob Stern (1843-1911), a Spinoza scholar and later, a Social Democrat. He was also the communal rabbi during the period when Landauer had contacts in the town, and remained in this position until he was suspended by the Orthodox leaders of the Jewish community for his – in their opinion – heretical views. In one way or another then, and to varying degrees, socialism, heretical thinking and Spinoza were very much in the air in the Jewish community of this Swabian town, and 8 Gustav Landauer to Fritz Mauthner, 2 November 1914, ibid., 292f.

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it would have been surprising if their effects had not been felt by the sensitive young Gustav. In any case, we can assume that Jakob Stern’s translation of the Ethics, first published in the Reclam Universalbibliothek in 1888 and edited by Stern himself, was also among the first works read by Landauer.9 When Fritz Mauthner arranged for Landauer to give private lessons in philosophy to his cousin, the author and patron Auguste Hauschner (1850-1924), in Berlin, the basic course Landauer announced to her in the letter he sent was – not surprisingly – “Philosophy in Connection with a Study of Spinoza’s Ethics.”10

2 “Developmental History” In 1900, Landauer already had a decade of political experience in the imperial city to his credit. In his capacity as editor of Der Sozialist, this left-wing critic of Social Democracy had quickly advanced to become leader of the anarchist opposition in Berlin and had even spent time in prison when the newspaper collapsed.11 But even the early debates in the Der Sozialist, in which Landauer’s anarchist self-image became more clearly defined, show him to be a Spinoza reader – with a mind of his own.12 In 1895, Landauer wrote a series of articles under the suggestive title “Toward a Developmental History of the Individual,” in which he criticized the theory 9 See letters from Landauer’s youth: International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Gustav Landauer estate, no.  98–104; see also Juden in Buttenhausen. Ausstellung in der Bernheim’schen Realschule, Stadt Münsingen, ed. R. Deigendesch, Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchivs Münsingen, vol. 3 (Münsingen Stadtverwaltung, 1994) and Juden und ihre Heimat Buttenhausen. Ein Gedenkbuch zum 200. Jahrestag des Buttenhausener Judenschutzbriefes am 7. 7. 1987, ed. Günter Randecker (Münsingen Stadtverwaltung, 1987). Manfred Lauermann completed a study of the non-orthodox Social Democrat and ‘Spinozist’ Jakob Stern (1843-1911). Jakob Stern, “Sozialist und Spinozist. Eine kleine Skizze zum 150. Geburtstag” in Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, ed. H. Delf, J. H. Schoeps, M. Walther (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), 365ff. 10 Gustav Landauer to Auguste Hauschner, 29 March 1900, Briefe an Auguste Hauschner, ed. M. Beradt and L. Bloch-Zavrel (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1929), 51. 11 Landauer was sentenced to nine months in prison for his involvement in the Ziethen affair. There are obvious parallels between his endeavour to expose a miscarriage of justice in that case and the events surrounding the Dreyfus affair, which was unfolding at the same time. See Gustav Landauer, “Der Dichter als Ankläger,” Der Sozialist 8, new series, no. 6 (1898), in Signatur g.l.: Gustav Landauer im “Sozialist” (1892–1899), ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 361–368. 12 Between 1892 and 1899 Landauer was the journal’s editor. It was subtitled “Organ der Unabhängigen Sozialisten,” but after the break with the Social Democratic Party the subtitle was changed to “Organ für Anarchismus-Sozialismus.” See Ulrich Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969).



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of absolute individualistic egoism, and specifically attacked “the confusion in [Max] Ommerborn’s mind.”13 Landauer was reacting to a series of articles, which Ommerborn, a disciple of the nihilistic anarchist Max Stirner, had also published in Der Sozialist. Landauer refuted the theoretical position of boundless individualistic egoism, to which Stirner’s followers adhered, by expounding his own theory regarding heredity and the physical and spiritual links that bind previous and succeeding generations. He maintained that his theory, taken together with biological findings at the time, proved irrefutably that the term “individual,” however useful it may be, is bound in an indissoluble union with all other living creatures (and all of their multifarious characteristics) and with the “chain of all ancestors reaching into infinity.” As far as Landauer was concerned, the “high-handedness of the [Stirner] individual” had been exposed and all of the latter’s misguided “moralistic terms” had been proved to be unfounded once and for all, because interest in the species is the only precept that asserts itself in the allegedly free will of the egoistic individual.14 Landauer did not regard this “captivation and compulsion of the body community” with the pessimism or fatalism of a Schopenhauer, but rather saw it as a happy and “liberating return to nature.” He writes: “I am elevated by the knowledge of being part of a whole that comes from eternity and goes on to eternity, more than everything that is resplendent with my ego,” adding further on, “how stupid and foolish all oppressors and all scourges of humanity look compared with Mother Nature, who is always at work, creating and rejuvenating eternally!”15 The emphasis on humanity and the progressive view of educational motivation it entails, are thus replaced by a new generic emphasis. This is why, even in his youth, Landauer rejected the notion of freedom of the will. Unlike Schopenhauer, who rejected the same notion as part of his criticism of Kant, Landauer couched his view in the context of a rather offhanded criticism of religion. He considered belief in freedom of the will to be a borrowing of the dogma of the “freedom and independence of the immortal soul,” that ancient “Jewish doctrine as revealed to Moses, the man of God, by God himself in the book of books, the Bible,” rather than simply an idea taken over by the Christian religion because it had proved to be “extremely useful … in exonerating the rulers of this world” for thousands of

13 See G. Landauer: “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Individuums” I–V, Der Sozialist 5, new series, nos. 12, 14, 16 (1895) and 6, new series, nos. 2, 6. (Nov. 2, 1895), no. 14 (Nov. 16, 1895), no. 16 (Nov. 30, 1895) and Der Sozialist 6 new series, no. 2 (Jan. 11, 1896), no. 6 (Febr. 8, 1896), in Link-Salinger, Signatur g.l., 317–349. 14 Ibid., 326f. 15 Ibid., 332. Following up on discussions of Darwin’s genetic theories (1859) Landauer developed some singular ideas about sexual morals and human breeding.

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years.16 This Jewish-Christian doctrine, to which Landauer attributes a good part of the “blame for Europe’s departure from nature,” is held up in comparison to the teachings of the “miraculously profound Buddha.”17 The radical immanence of the Buddhist doctrine fascinated Landauer to the same extent as the idea of an all-embracing dependence of the human soul on the body’s physical condition, on one’s ancestors, and on one’s upbringing. Landauer embraced this idea of an enormous union of body and spirit, and placed Spinoza in the ancestral line before Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, almost as a matter of course. In his attempt to bring this theoretical option (one, which was associated with political conservatism, at least as far as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are concerned) into line with his own, Landauer by no means abandoned his revolutionary anarchistic attitude. His claims were rooted in the conclusion that the “ego” no longer exists from a psychological point of view, and in this regard he was influenced by sensualist psychology with which he had become acquainted through Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923).18 In rejecting the ego, Landauer held that instead of ego there is only a complex of “desires and forces” that “sometimes penetrate the sphere of consciousness and are sometimes at work below the threshold of consciousness.”19 This reference to a complex of “desires and forces” is not meant in a purely somatic and sensual sense, but rather is congruent with ideas on the unconscious that were prevalent at that time; this is evidenced by the fact that Landauer referred to the works of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887).20 Landauer was concerned to demonstrate that the soul is not merely a function of the brain as the materialists were attempting to prove. He claimed that both the soul and the brain should be considered as relatively independent complexes in relation to one another. It was in the context of these arguments that Landauer referred to Spinoza’s theory of the parallelism of attributes.21 Spinoza,

16 Ibid., 334f. 17 Ibid., 336. 18 See their correspondence during the years 1896–1903 in Landauer-Mauthner Briefwechsel, 9–92, and Landauer’s excerpts: The National Library of Israel, Gustav Landauer estate, Ms. Var. 432, no. 59. 19 Ibid., 337. 20 On the reception of Wundt’s psychology at the end of the nineteenth century see Horst Thomé, Autonomes Ich und ‘Inneres Ausland’: Studien über Realismus, Tiefenpsychologie und Psychiatrie in deutschen Erzähltexten (1848–1914) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 169–229. On Spinoza and Freud, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 21 Whereby the attributes of thought and expansion befit all finite modes to the same extent, contrary to Descartes’s interpretation.



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he writes, was “the first person to clearly” realize that “body and soul, brain and spirit are fundamentally different manifestations of the same thing, with which we are not familiar, and of which we can have absolutely no idea.”22 Landauer based his anarchistic psychology on this claim regarding the independence of desire and emotions, and claimed with Spinoza that “the conscious mind … is not capable of imposing a despotic power over the unconscious desires.”23 Thus, with remarkable virtuosity, he devises a psycho-physiological holistic concept with anthropological, ethical, as well as aesthetic implications. It is clear in his article “The Developmental History of the Individual” that Landauer sees no contradiction between his rejection of freedom of the will and his view that the revolutionary’s mission is to create something new and to intervene in the fortunes of society. But the mere fact of being able to act – even to act in a political and revolutionary way – is by no means an indication of individual freedom. In his actions, the individual often remains totally – and unwittingly – locked in the causal mesh of conflicting interests and desires, and as such is “a small, lowly, ugly creature.”24 Landauer thus counters the concept of “individual” with that of “individuality.” It seems that the high ethical standards imposed on the sage (the one capable of “scientia intuitiva”) in Spinoza’s Ethics, have been adopted and inflated in Landauer’s revolutionary figure. Indeed, his claim that “we who call ourselves revolutionaries are certainly capable of thinking up situations … in which we would even sacrifice our lives for a great cause,” evokes a somewhat alarming image of the revolutionary martyr, the opposite pole, as it were, of the pious, God-loving homo religiosus described by Spinoza.25 Yet, Landauer also emphasizes the non-heroic face of this ideal, and emphasizes that urges and desires should not be battled and suppressed under new moral laws, but rather allowed to take effect in a self-recognition process that is relevant to the revolution and increases individuality.

3 “Anarchic Thoughts” In 1901 Landauer again entered the fray of anarchist debates, now writing from London, where he had taken up residence with his second wife, Hedwig Lachmann. Spurred by the persecution of anarchists, which resulted from the spate of political assassinations that had shaken European society in the 1890s, he joined 22 Landauer, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte”, 337. 23 Ibid., 337. 24 Ibid., 336. 25 Ibid., 348.

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in the heated debates over the “propaganda by deed” ethos, being waged in anarchist papers.26 Noting that he had long shared the basic error of this notion with the anarchists, he now distanced himself from the idea and dissociated himself from the political murders, which reminded him of the “cold, deeply ignorant, hostile logistics” of Robespierre’s goddess of reason. The essay in which Landauer took this stance, was published in Maximilian Harden’s Zukunft, under the title “Anarchic Thoughts about Anarchism.”27 Having left the revolutionary romanticism of the anarchists far behind him, Landauer responded to their runof-the-mill dogmas with his very own view of anarchy. Through the layers of Nietzschean rhetoric, one recognizes the familiar arguments:28 What I call anarchy here, without tying myself to the word itself in any way, is a prevailing mood … that exists in every person who reflects on worldly and spiritual matters. I mean the urge to bring himself into the world again, to reform his own nature and subsequently to shape his surroundings, his world, to the extent that he is capable of doing so. This supreme moment should arrive for every single person; the moment in which he generates within himself the original chaos – to use Nietzsche’s language – in which he, like a spectator, watches the drama of his desires and most urgent inwardness being played out in front of him, to find out which of the many personalities inside him should be allowed to take control, what is actually his, what distinguishes him from the traditions and legacies of the ancestral world, what he should be for the world and what the world should be for him. For me, an anarchist is someone who has the will to resist playing a double game for his own benefit, who, in critical situations in his life, kneads himself like a fresh lump of dough in such a way that he knows how to deal with himself inwardly and is capable of acting in the way dictated by his most secret being. For me, he who is his own master, who has identified his desire and accepts it as his identity and way of life, is a human being with no master, a free spirit and master of his own destiny. The road to heaven is narrow, the road to a new higher form of human society leads through the dark, overcast gate of our instincts and the terra abscondita of our souls that is our world. The world can only be shaped from the inside. The state of anarchy can only be paved in a new world, in a land that has not been discovered yet. We will find this land and this rich world if we discover a new human being through chaos and anarchy, through incredible, silent and profound experience; each within himself.29 26 President Canova of Spain in 1897, Queen Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, the Italian King Umberto in 1900, and U.S. President McKinley in 1901, were all murdered by anarchists. About the debates within anarchist circles see Max Nettlau, Die Blüte der Anarchie (1886-1894): Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. 4 (Vaduz: Topos, 1981), 177ff. 27 Gustav Landauer, “Anarchische Gedanken über den Anarchismus,” Die Zukunft 37, no. 4 (1901), 134–140. The following quotations are taken from this article, unless otherwise indicated. 28 On Landauer’s early reading of Nietzsche see Hanna Delf, “‘Nietzsche ist für uns Europäer’: Zu Gustav Landauers früher Nietzsche-Lektüre,” Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus, ed. W. Stegmaier and D. Krochmalnik, Monographien zur Nietzsche-Forschung, 36 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 209–227. 29 Landauer, “Anarchische Gedanken,” 137f.



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Here anarchy is no longer interpreted as a form of political ideology or intervention, but rather is seen in psychological terms of how one relates to oneself. This relationship is described as a mystical death, as a rebirth only through oneself, as an “essential transformation” that touches the “deepest foundation of human nature” and reveals “what is most ancient and best.” One who has been thus purified, will experience the world in a new and different way, he will never again be a stranger in the world; to him, “the world will be like himself and he will love it as he loves himself.”30 Although the religious imagery of this mystical, meditative experience is certainly a far cry from Spinoza’s rational discourse, Landauer’s characterization of “anarchy” as a purifying process of self-recognition, a journey of self-denial through the cavernous depths of the self, does show certain parallels with the three-stage epistemology in the Ethics. As in Spinoza’s “scientia intuitiva,” Landauer’s scheme also culminates in the possibility of rational knowledge beyond the learning activity of the intellect. The idea that “true” knowledge does not take place from without, but rather is bound up in the “knower,” that is, the one who is perceiving, is also found in Spinoza’s thought. Landauer imagines devotion to the world-ego as entailing a splitting of the ego, which then becomes a detached and removed entity – a spectator – who observes with indifference the “drama of his desires” and the “many personalities” that are within him. Landauer’s adherence to this notion of the necessary path through the “terra abscondita of the soul,” indicates not so much a borrowing of a page from Spinoza’s book, but rather an affinity with Spinoza in striving for this kind of human being. In this respect, he counters the “propaganda by deed” motto with one of “inner colonization,” explaining that “killing oneself rather than others … will be the distinguishing characteristic of the human being.” In the same way that Spinoza’s supreme reason recognizes the divine order of the world, this kind of self-knowledge implies devotion to, and mystical release from, the ego: “I want only to say that this freedom must first be born deep inside a human being before it can reveal itself as an external actuality.”31 Landauer, like Spinoza, believed that only a few tread the difficult road to self-knowledge; such a goal was therefore not a matter for the masses. The key concept for Landauer here is freedom, which in this context can only be attained by the few and the exceptional. The anarchists then, were those who were to be entrusted with this “future humankind,” the “prototype of progressive humanity.”

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid.

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4 Between Eckhart and Spinoza It should perhaps come as no surprise to discover that, while editing the first volume of Mauthner’s Critique of Language,32 Landauer showed enthusiasm for Meister Eckhart, and decided to translate the mystic’s sermons “into our language,” (as he notes in the subtitle) – meaning not just from Middle High German into modern High German, but also from the Christian Middle Ages into the present.33 According to Landauer, this medieval mystic’s relevance to the present can be attributed to the fact that he “is just as much an epistemologist and critic as a mystic.”34 Quoting from August Jundt’s history of medieval pantheism, Landauer draws a picture of Eckhart as a figure who combines modern, critical epistemology and divine mystical experience with rational, worldly knowledge and divine mystical experience.35 To use a more up-to-date image, one could also say that Landauer concocted a kind of epistemological, anthropological, ethical role model, comprising a post-Kantian (scientific) philosophy, supplemented by an introspective knowledge of the world according to the model of divine mystical experience. The Meister Eckhart–Spinoza combination thus stands for the polarity of rationality and mysticism. Referring to Meister Eckhart as “the greatest of all of these heretical, mystical skeptics,” he suggests in Skepticism and Mysticism that Eckhart succeeded in achieving a certain harmony between pantheism and critical epistemology: “He believed that he could create this unknown force from within himself, mystically immerse himself in it to subsequently speak of it in metaphors and allegories. He was certain that what we find in ourselves in the form of emotional experiences is a closer approximation of the true nature of the world than the world perceived outside.”36 Nature is thus seen as the subject of scientific knowledge, but at the same time has a hidden nature; this causes us to search within ourselves, and this striving for knowledge is perhaps more relevant for a meaningful life. In the years following Skepticism and Mysticism, Landauer made no substantial theoretical statements that did not contain a reference – albeit sometimes 32 Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1901; reprint, ed. Ludger Lütkehaus, (Wien: Böhlau, 1999). 33 See Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften; in unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer (Berlin: Schnabel, 1903). Together with Hermann Büttner’s translation, Meister Eckharts Schriften und Predigten (Jena: Diederichs, 1903), Landauer’s translation – completed in just a few weeks time – heralds the rise of a new mysticism in modern times. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 August Jundt, Histoire du panthéisme populaire du moyen âge (Strassbourg: Fischbach, 1875). 36 See Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluss an Fritz Mauthner‘s Sprachkritik (Berlin: Fleischel, 1903), 64f.



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veiled – to Spinoza. Spinoza is thus present in Landauer’s thought in a twofold sense. For one, the new kind of knowledge Landauer explores in Skepticism and Mysticism, shows unmistakable traces of the supposedly mystical chapter of the Ethics, in particular with regard to the scientia intuitiva, or third level of knowledge attained by the sage in Spinoza’s rational cosmos. Secondly, Landauer was guided by an almost genealogical view in regarding the Amsterdam philosopher, whom he considered to have initiated the ancestral line of a secular, assimilated Judaism, as the “first secular Jew.”37 Spinoza, to whom Fritz Mauthner had referred as a “godless mystic,” thus enabled Landauer to consider Jewish tradition in a new light, unfettered by the restrictions of proscribed orthodoxy.38 Landauer affirmed Spinoza’s importance as a Jewish thinker. He took issue with Rafael Seligmann (1875-1943), who had written an article that not only linked Spinoza with Nietzschean amorality, but also asserted that Spinoza’s thought was fundamentally alien to the Jewish spirit – with the exception perhaps of the mystically tinged fifth volume of the Ethics, which in his view bore some remote similarity to the Kabbala. Landauer’s response to this rabbinic scholar, whom he otherwise held in high esteem, was “if you take away Moses, Jesus and Spinoza from Judaism, then there will be no Jewish people. The Kabbala is just as truly Jewish as Spinoza … I consider your definition of the Jewish spirit to be completely unsatisfactory. The Jewish spirit is what you carry inside you as your best, and not what you despise in others.”39 In a review of Willem Meijer’s essay Nachbildung der im Jahre 1902 noch er­­ haltenen Briefe des Benedictus Despinosa, which he published in Das literarische Echo, Landauer offers an emphatic, though not unambiguous comment on Spinoza: “This is not the place to say who he really was: a spirit with incredible logic and a profound mystic, a man whose time had not come until the empirical sciences set about looking for a theoretical foundation for the results that they achieved for the sake of order and their own understanding, instead of wanting to establish a theory or philosophy for themselves. He will then stand there like a rock, against which the many waves will crash, and on which many castaways may save themselves.”40 Spinoza’s Ethics would appear to have been a rock of philosophical thought for Landauer himself, steadying him in those stormy war

37 See Yovel, Spinoza and other Heretics. 38 See Mauthner, Spinoza. 39 Gustav Landauer to Rafael Seligmann, 17 September 1910, Lebensgang I, 324f. See Rafael Seligmann, “Spinoza und die Weltanschauung des Judentums,” in Probleme des Judentums (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1919), 18ff. 40 Gustav Landauer, Review of Nachbildung der im Jahre 1902 noch erhaltenen Briefe des Benedictus Despinosa, ed. W. Meijer, (The Hague: 1903), Das literarische Echo 7, no. 20 (1905): 1520f.

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years. It was certainly not by chance that Spinoza became the interpretative key for his commentaries on Shakespeare.

5 Landauer, Spinoza and Shakespeare In his interpretation of Shakespeare, Landauer no longer draws on this or that specific Spinozan theory or concept – such as the parallelism of attributes or the scientia intuitiva – but rather taps the emotive theory of the Ethics as a whole; indeed this emotive appeal – reflected even in the titles of Spinoza’s two chapters, “Origine, et Natura Affectum” (Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects), and “De Potentia Intellectus, seu de Libertate Humana” (Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Liberty) – became the theoretical frame of reference for Landauer’s study of Shakespeare.41 In a letter to the editor of his Shakespeare book42 he writes: “I consider freedom to be the crucial innovation in my book. Freedom, not in a political sense, aimed at achieving a particular state of affairs; nothing is further from Shakespeare’s mind; but rather freedom in a human, private sense, particularly with respect to the relationship that has always been a problem for Shakespeare, that between desire and spirit. Freedom from formulae, conventions of a theoretical or moral nature.”43 The old theme of Landauer’s “Anarchism” essay now becomes dramatized, so to speak. Landauer seems to have found an adequate mould in which to cast the images in his mind. A mesh of manifold communication opens up before the spectator: Shakespeare’s personality provides the typical epochal transparency on which the discussion of “anthropological” freedom, as well as its historical and artistic manifestations, are presented in relation to Spinoza and Rembrandt. Landauer’s interpretation presents an unusual perspective of the alternative actions available to human beings at the beginning of the modern age. Different ways of handling power, acts of violence, and passionate entanglements are examined within the framework of drama. Shakespeare’s plays are thus read from the perspective of freedom, and so there is a direct continuation from Landauer’s social-psychological reflections in his short monograph, Die Revolution.44 41 The third part of the Ethics was first brought to scholarly attention by the physiologist Johannes Müller (1801–1858), whose writings on Spinoza’s concept of the soul Mauthner of course also knew. 42 See Gustav Landauer, Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen, ed. M. Buber (Frankfurt a.M.: Rütten & Loening, 1920). 43 Gustav Landauer to Adolf Neumann, 13 June 1917, Lebensgang II, 181f. 44 Gustav Landauer, Die Revolution (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1907).



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The polarity of desire and spirit, seen as a central conflict between dependence and freedom in aesthetics and cultural history, constitutes the anthropological constant for an analysis of the variable nature of the different dramatis personae, those “individuals as they are in transit, as they are between the ages, as they are manifold and mixed and unfathomable.”45 The ego and the world seem to coincide here. As Landauer adds in the same letter, “One must be used to searching for the mystery of the world and its processes in the deepest, innermost part of man: in keeping with the relationship between man and his ego. I read Shakespeare and his way of making people see themselves – not only in their relationships to others but also in their telltale relationships to themselves – in the closest possible relation to Spinoza’s ethics and, because it works with visualization rather than abstraction, to Rembrandt’s art.” Such a concentration of ontological, epistemological and ethically anthropological perspectives actually does exist in Spinoza’s Ethics.46 It is therefore hardly surprising that Landauer allows himself to be affected by Spinoza’s impressive discourse on human passion and the possibility of freedom. A brief outline of this theory may be useful at this point. Spinoza discusses human actions and appetites “more geometrico,” by a geometrical method, seeing them in terms of lines, planes and solid bodies, without attributing to them any value whatsoever – they are “above and beyond good or evil,” so to speak. Nothing in nature – or in the nature of the human being – is regarded as an error; everything that exists must be accepted positively as a necessity, and this applies to the emotions as well. Like every other creature, the human being strives for self-preservation. This striving manifests itself in the form of a desire, a yearning, an urge or a will, depending on the circumstances in which it occurs. Spinoza knows of two fundamental emotions from which all others emerge, and both pertain to the aspiration for self-preservation. The first is joy, which is seen as a “transition to greater completeness,” and the second is sorrow, seen as a transition to a lesser completeness, whereby the respective emotion marks the transition point. “Love” is therefore defined as “joy according to the aspect of an outside cause” and “hate” is defined as “sorrow according to the aspect of an outside cause.” Spinoza then relates his epistemology to these anthropological findings by asking himself by which means true – in this case adequate – knowledge can be obtained under conditions of manifold passionate entanglements; he uses this as the basis for the development of his theory of the three types of knowledge, whereby each of these stands in a different relationship to the emotive state of the human being. Freedom is only perfect and complete “where the effect is achieved 45 Landauer, “Hamlet,” Shakespeare I, 244. 46 Spinoza, Ethica, 256–487.

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solely and purely as a consequence of one’s own nature, as this necessity also constitutes perfect freedom”; this is of course, something that can only be said of God, and not of human beings, entangled as they are in their complex causal connections. The freedom that can be attained by humans in their capacity as both knowing and acting beings – and Spinoza sees no fundamental difference between the two – is therefore always relatively and gradually different. In Spinoza’s eyes, man’s supreme freedom consists in his having an adequate knowledge of his own nature, and this implies his knowing involvement in this necessity. Freedom is therefore tied to the necessity of one’s own nature. For Spinoza there are no “should” statements, only inviolable divine laws; there are therefore also no feelings of guilt or sin. Within this abstract structure, the term “bondage” is initially only used to describe the fact that there is “always something more powerful” in the area of finite modes – or the world – and that man, knowing and acting, will never be able to become the master of all of the changes, which he, as part of nature, continuously suffers. This is because he does not exist merely as a result of his actions. Spinoza draws a distinction in this respect, between passiones (passions) and actiones (free, adequately recognized actions). The term “slave” is used to designate someone who follows his passions blindly. A free man, on the other hand, is one who follows what he has recognized to be right. Spinoza’s concept of freedom is therefore strictly tied to epistemology. The catalogue of rules for life that Spinoza has defined for dealing with outside affections should also be mentioned here, for in some respects they are akin to the detached, inner calm of Landauer’s chastened mystic. Spinoza, for example, advises anyone who is overcome by love or hate (whether caused by himself or others), or anyone who is hurt or finds himself unexpectedly faced with injury or insult, to counter the resulting anger, hate or fear by continuously practicing contemplation of oneself, by mobilizing opposite emotions. This is because, basically speaking, anything that brings joy is good (bringing us closer to the divine nature). It is understandable that an ethics which eschews “should” statements would be seen by an anarchist as something most congenial, but this alternative betokens no lighter burden. Neither Spinoza’s sage nor Landauer’s mystic loner has an easy load, charged as they are with the task of conveying to others Trieb and Geist (desire and spirit), and the hope of a future, more humane, humanity. What interests Landauer in Shakespeare’s personality is not so much “that which projects outwardly into the world, but that which creates a new world, a new human being from within, and embodies them in works of art.”47 In Landauer’s view, this is a matter of life and death, a matter of the emotional survival of the 47 Landauer, “Shakespeares Persönlichkeit,” Shakespeare II, 390.



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individual as much as of the species. In his interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, he writes: “It is the question as to the right of darkness, unconsciousness, irrationality, the unutterable; not only the right of desire, but also its marriage to the most supreme spirit. The hours of lucidity and purpose will always come, when the spirit in us that is born of desire and sex, rises up against its fathers and wishes to be nothing other than a luminous spirit, serene and free of dross. And one day, perhaps … the hour of the human race will come, when reflection will do away with sensuality, the spirit will do away with desire, God will do away with the beast and man will do away with himself.”48 Landauer sees Shakespeare’s artistic strength, and aesthetics in general, as rooted in the unabashedly positive acceptance of life in the face of immeas­ urable horror. Drawing once again on Spinoza, he notes that “the free human being thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death, but upon life”; it is precisely this kind of “message about overcoming death,” which marks “the greatest achievement of Shakespeare, the poet.”49 This implies neither the egoistic enjoyment of desire and passion, nor their conquest by the spirit, but rather their free association; the godly and the beastly must be reconciled anew in every new specimen of the species. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, there are extreme confrontations. For example, Richard III, Iago and Falstaff are “men … subjugated by both desire and bright reason,” in whom “the wildly raging heat of the frenzied male can mate with the piercing cold of the calculating, corrupting intellect,” and “however bright it was, reason still served the musty darkness.”50 Likewise, Hamlet, the “modern man”, is a slave – albeit “a slave to thought” – and the consequences are just as deadly: “Through Hamlet’s experience as a whole, we know that knowing and doing nothing, thinking and being unable to perform an act of violence, spirit and conscience are linked to one another by a much more profound association than the most holy fear of eternity; Hamlet does not talk about this relationship, however, he lives and dies it.”51 When Landauer attempts to convey an understanding of the figure and actions of Shylock, he discusses the experience of the Venetian Jew in terms of an environment that is completely alien and hostile to him, an experience that Landauer himself, as well as Spinoza, the Jew of Amsterdam, also shared.52 In 48 Landauer, “Romeo und Julia,” Shakespeare, I, 25. 49 Landauer, “Shakespeares Persönlichkeit,” Shakespeare II, 389f. 50 Landauer, “Der Sturm,” Shakespeare, II, 288. 51 Landauer, “Hamlet,” Shakespeare, I, 237. 52 Landauer published his “Merchant of Venice” lecture in Buber’s journal, Der Jude 2, nos. 5-6 (1917): 378-405; and it was intended for a specifically Jewish audience. See Gustav Landauer.

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considering Shylock, Landauer understands that just as he was called hateful by the world around him, he was also compelled to remain in the prison of his own hatred. He writes “we see him [Shylock] only as one who reacts; as the Jew dealing with the world that made him what he is. He is nothing more than communication; he is unable to deal with himself alone. If he were capable of doing so, or if he did so, with his many buried talents, he would be a different person from the one he appears to be, he would be himself, he would come to his senses. What is merely the means to an end – money – becomes for him the end, because the world will not allow him to be himself.”53 Moreover, “he is a man of reason and desires alone and therefore – to use Spinoza’s distinction – he is an obstinate slave, bound up within himself, rather than a free man associated with his peers; inwardly bound but also falling apart inwardly and falling out with himself; this is because the higher sphere, which first calls for unity and which can make reason, contemplation, wisdom and the universal spirit out of the intellect, can turn desire into emotion, feeling and sensitivity, and which transforms avarice into longing and anger into heroism, this is completely missing … . Old Shylock is cornered, however, he has been cast out of society, there is no way forward for him.”54 It was the First World War – and the hitherto unknown degree of material and spiritual sacrifice it caused – which had a strong impact on Landauer’s reading of Shakespeare. The horror engendered by that war, strengthened Landauer’s insight that just as humans had brought their “passions before the altar of the gods” in the grim myths of the Greeks, Shakespeare’s characters – their passions, words and actions – held a grim truth that reflected the ominous reality of Landauer’s own situation. In particular, Landauer’s theory of psychological freedom reflects his debt to Shakespeare who “has shown man’s restriction and captivity in a more profound way because he has shown his freedom; because, with him, we become grimly aware that we are all our own jailers, our own servants and our own murderers, and because, with him, we perceive all of the cogs of the internal mechanism that we use to turn our hearts into torture chambers.”55 With, and despite, a growing horror, Landauer himself managed to reach an attitude of stoic equanimity, having, as he himself notes, “climbed up and beyond the steps of reason to the intuitive, superior equanimity of the spirit that lives in

Dichter, Ketzer, Außenseiter. Essays und Reden zu Literatur, Philosophie, Judentum, ed. H. Delf (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 194ff. 53 Landauer, “Der Kaufmann von Venedig,” Shakespeare I, 58. 54 Ibid., 71. 55 Landauer, “Hamlet,” Shakespeare I, 240f.



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freedom.”56 For as he concluded in his essay on Othello, one must strive to reach “the level of ethics, of peace, where all of man’s actual atrocities to man … can disturb one no longer. But we are already standing on the ladder leading to that plateau, when we observe with imperturbability, in ataraxia, how in the world the chain is unbreakable, and the weave of the depths of the human soul cannot be torn … and nature is inescapable … . One who is so imperturbable watches, like Spinoza in the little legend … how the spider catches the fly in its web.”57 Landauer discerns a certain poetic justice in Shakespeare’s work, particularly, for example in the final, joyful and peaceful scene of The Tempest, which affords a vision of what Landauer saw as the epitome of the high plane of human life, a vision in which “the elementary force of desires and passions, human savagery, violence, the cry of anger and vengeance, the craving for violence and lust … diminish, and in their place … the element of play, of serenity, of romantic magic and of a more profound meaning, of reconciliation or polemics and, at all events, of wisdom and speech [are allowed] to unfold.”58

56 Landauer, “Der Sturm,” Shakespeare II, 288ff. 57 Landauer, “Othello,” Shakespeare, I, 320. 58 Landauer, “Der Sturm,” Shakespeare II, 286.

Yossef Schwartz

Gustav Landauer and Gerhard Scholem: Anarchy and Utopia If one examines the importance of mysticism in Landauer’s thought, two points are of particular interest.1 The first pertains to the special nature of the study of mystical phenomena, whether historical or contemporary, undertaken by German and European scholars at the beginning of the last century. The link between Judaism and mysticism is important in this context not only because a significant number of the most prominent scholars pursuing this research were Jews, but also because the scholarly study of mysticism exerted a crucial influence on the development and study of Judaism in the twentieth century.2 The second point concerns the specific tradition to which Landauer himself devoted his attention, namely, medieval Christian mysticism. As Landauer himself noted, this is a tradition that begins with Pseudo-Dionysius, ends with Nicholas of Cusa, and grants pride of place to Meister Eckhart – a unique figure standing above all others.3 Indeed it is Meister Eckhart who constitutes the almost exclusive focus of Landauer’s interest in mysticism. By way of introduction to my comments on Landauer’s thought, I shall begin with a quotation from Scholem’s From Berlin to Jerusalem: To be sure, the Marxist doctrines … impressed me far less than the writings of anarchists, quite a few of which I read in the Berlin municipal library, prompted by the events of the day … . Their socialism was more meaningful to me than the supposedly scientific kind, which I never found convincing. Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf zum Sozialismus (A Call to Socialism) made a profound impression not only on me but on a considerable number of young Zionists as well. The same may be said of the personality of Landauer, who frequently lectured in those days before Zionist groups, and with whom I had several conversations toward the end of 1915 and in the following year. By that time I had already attempted to understand the three substantial volumes of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Toward a 1 My interest in Landauer’s interpretation of Eckhart was spurred by Thorsten Hinz, whose dissertation on the connections between mysticism and anarchy in the work of both thinkers – “Mystik und Anarchie: Meister Eckhardt und seine Bedeutung im Denken Gustav Landauers” – was submitted to the University of Basel in 1999. The phenomenon he investigates in this important study has been almost completely neglected in modern research, and I am grateful to him for sharing his insights with me. The thesis has since appeared in book form as Mystik und Anarchie: Meister Eckhardt und seine Bedeutung im Denken Gustav Landauers (Berlin: K. Kramer, 2000.) All citations are from the thesis. 2 See M. Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Libertarian Judaism in Central Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Hinz, “Mystik und Anarchie,” 142-153. 3 Skepsis und Mystik (Köln: Marcan-Block, 1923), 46.



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Critique of Language) to which an older student had directed my attention. Landauer, who was a great admirer and collaborator of Mauthner (though he made very negative remarks about the latter’s attitude during the war), encouraged me to read his own observations and conclusions from Mauthner’s theories which he had presented in his book Skepsis und Mystik (Skepticism and Mysticism).4

There are several elements in this important passage that are pertinent to the discussion below. First of all, Scholem notes the well-known anti-scientific and anti-deterministic nature of Landauer’s anarcho-socialism and describes how he himself had been fascinated in his youth by that political tendency. I shall argue that this is a tendency, which although it may have gone through a variety of changes, nonetheless remained a crucial component of Scholem’s thought. Another key point concerns Landauer’s relationship with Mauthner, in particular the direct linkage suggested in this quotation between the ideas of Landauer’s A Call to Socialism and Skepticism and Mysticism, and those in Mauthner’s Critique of Language. Scholem similarly indicates that Landauer had some connection – albeit an uncertain one – with Zionist groups, and that there was also a relationship between Landauer and the young Scholem himself. Another connection mentioned at a later point in the autobiography and elsewhere in Scholem’s writings is that between Landauer and Buber.5 There is, however, a different and more radical connection between Scholem and Landauer, which, though not explicitly mentioned in the above quotation, is worthy of discussion. In the description above, Scholem refers to the period of the First World War, more specifically the years 1915-1916. This period, especially between 1914-1916, turned out to be a point of departure for many German-Jewish intellectuals, in which partial similarities and intimate friendships collapsed in face of the common challenge of a assuming a defined politico-moral position toward the war. Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Fritz Mauthner, Constantin Brunner, Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Gerhard Scholem – each faced a crucial moment of truth, forced to take a clear position toward Germany’s Kriegspolitik. Scholem and Landauer vehemently opposed the war, and refused to take part in what they saw as the European death industry. Both of them rejected the national idea that called upon them to fly its flag. One could probably argue that in both cases it was the utopian-messianic vision that fueled their resistance to a society geared to mobilize for war. It was this passion that would lead Landauer to his death in Munich in

4 Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of my Youth, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1988), 52-53. 5 Ibid., 81.

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1919, and Scholem to his voluntary emigration in 1923. Yet this is the point where all similarity between the two ends – for while Landauer’s refusal to battle was rooted in his vision of a universal human ideal, Scholem’s rejection of German patriotism stemmed from his stated commitment to another, alternative or opposing national “imagined community,” one, which, for the most part, existed only in his own mind. For the young Scholem, then, Zionism could be perceived as an immediate political alternative to central European war-politics but only if it were based on the profound vision of a messianic utopia. But Scholem’s messianism, for all its similarity to the views of Landauer, Walter Benjamin, and others, is strikingly different from the universal utopianism of these thinkers, because of its strong national claims. This difference, which I feel has been all too often neglected in recent discussions of Scholem’s thought, is one of the main points to be discussed below. Several scholars have analyzed the Jewish nature and sources of Landauer’s worldview. I tend to accept Norbert Altenhofer’s claim regarding the essentially non-Jewish character of Landauer’s thought in general, and of his interpretation of mysticism in particular, but I shall not enter into this discussion in any detail here.6 Instead, I shall return to the issues introduced at the beginning of this paper, and emphasize two particular points. First of all, one can discern in Landauer’s work an ambition to create a type of political theology, which involves a secular combination of messianic-mystical or antinomian anarchism. This is the combination, which, in different guises, is common to some other remarkable figures of the time, many of whom were Jews. Landauer himself gives his anarcho-socialism a Jewish formulation, but only quite rarely and primarily in his later writings.7 But this is not all – and here I come to the second point, striving to better understand the exact way in which both Landauer and Scholem turn to history, especially medieval history, in search of a spiritual model by which to address the problems of their own day. Understanding medieval culture became for both a constitutive locus of self-defintion.8 Their historiographical engagement with the nature and scope of medieval culture was a natural choice for a his6 N. Altenhofer, “Tradition als Revolution: Gustav Landauers ‘geworden-werdendes Judentum’,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. D. Bronsen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), 173-201; see also Hinz, “Mystik und Anarchie,” 151, n. 1, for his critique of Michael Löwy. 7 For a thorough discussion of that Jewish formulation see H.-J. Heydorn, introduction to G. Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, ed., H.-J. Heydorn (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 23ff. 8 For Scholem’s political theology and its relation to Carl Schmitt, see C. Schmidt, “Das Hören der Bilder und das Sehen der Stimmen: Zu Gerschom Scholems Deutung der deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte,” Jüdischer Almanach (Frankfurt/Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994).



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torian such as Scholem, who dedicated his research to the Jewish Middle Ages. It would seem to have been a less obvious choice for Landauer, the author of Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Yet it was, and not only in light of his abiding interest in Meister Eckhart but also given the manner in which he develops Mauthner’s Sprachkritik in Skepsis und Mystik, and the theory of revolution he develops in Die Revolution. As previously noted, Landauer’s interest in mysticism as a phenomenological and historical phenomenon relates almost exclusively to Meister Eckhart. It is Eckhart whom Landauer quotes in his writings although he also refers to a long list of other philosophical and religious figures.9 In this respect Landauer differs from Scholem, as well as from Mauthner and Buber, to mention only those thinkers of whom I spoke earlier. The latter three saw their particular areas of historical research as a much broader endeavor than did Landauer his. Whereas they sought, in more or less historical terms, to point to some overall explanatory phenomenon as the basis for a true analysis and explanation of all of culture, Landauer’s concern was different. In Die Revolution as well as in his Aufruf zum Sozialismus, Landauer shows that he was certainly aware of such methods of historical explanation, but his own genuine interest did not lie in such projects. Landauer treats Eckhart as a present-day guide or hero, who is deeply involved in the philosophical questions that Landauer himself explores in his Skepsis und Mystik. Eckhart also provides a source of insight into the main social problems that Landauer addresses in his political writings. “Every time is part of eternity,” writes Landauer in Die Revolution, and this, it would seem, was all the more evident to Landauer once he had become acquainted with Eckhart’s thought.10 Indeed, by sharing that same insight with Eckhart, Landauer was able to develop a fruitful “conversation” with his predecessor. This general tendency is most clearly evident in Landauer’s translation of Eckhart’s writings. In his introduction to the translation, as well as in his closing remarks, Landauer makes it clear that he had been seeking the vital and relevant message of Eckhart, and not its scholastic setting, which he felt was a matter for scholars.11 In considering Landauer’s 9 See Skepsis , 47: “The greatest of all these heretical mystical skeptics was our Meister Eckhart, who with tremendous methods, undertook something of which only traces can be found in Spinoza , and which Schelling – Kant’s student and Boehme’s heir – couldn’t seem to manage five years later, namely bringing pantheism and critical epistemology into harmony.” 10 Die Revolution (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loeining, 1907), 30. 11 “Meister Eckhart is too good for historical acknowledgement; he must rise from the dead as a living person”; further on he notes: “However, this book has no historical objectives … . My sole aim is: the living Eckhart. He makes an impact in this volume, by means of his penetrating skepticism, [as well as] by means of his poetic power, his majestic language, and his generous and kind nature. All the rest is of interest only to the scholars.” See Landauer, Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften (Münster/Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1978), 7 and 149.

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stated intention in translating Eckhart, I shall concentrate mainly on those points which may illuminate what made this medieval Christian figure so attractive to the modern Jewish anarchist.

1 In my own research on Meister Eckhart, it has always been Eckhart the philosopher who has interested me.12 By “philosopher” I mean one who served as a professor in leading academic institutions of his time and who, in addition to treatises written in German, composed a number of scholastic works in Latin. This latter Eckhart remained unknown to Landauer, as well as to Scholem and Buber. They all based their knowledge of German mysticism on a tradition dating back to Franz von Baader (1765-1841), and including such modern scholars as Pfeiffer and Quint.13 This tradition was based on Eckhart’s German writings, sermons and treatises. Eckhart’s Latin writings were first published only in 1886 and Heinrich Denifle (1844-1905), the scholar who discovered and published them, did his best to present them as the unoriginal and unappealing fruits of a purely scholastic mind.14 It was only during the 1930s, and again after the Second World War, that more serious research on the Latin writings was conducted, and it is especially in the last generation that the new findings have been widely accepted.15 Together with the reception of this new image of Eckhart’s philosophy, the question was raised as to whether and to what extent Eckhart can rightly be described as a mystic at all. Should Eckhart not be viewed so much as a philosopher standing in a philosophical tradition, perhaps he should be considered a German Dominican and a disciple of the Neoplatonic School. Such a view is reflected in the title of a famous article on Eckhart written by Kurt Flasch (b. 1930), in which the author 12 See Y. Schwartz, “To Thee is silence praise”: Meister Eckhart’s reading in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002)) [Hebrew]; and idem, “Meister Eckhart and Moses Maimonides: From Judaeo-Arabic Rationalism to Christian Mysticism,” in A Companion to Meister Eckhart [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 36] (Leiden: Brill 2012): 389-414. 13 See I. Degenhart, Studien zum Wandel des Eckhartbildes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 113ff. 14 H. S. Denifle, “Meister Eckharts lateinische Schriften und die Grundanschauung seiner Lehre,” Archiv für Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 2 (1986): 417-532, 436; W. Malte Fues, Mystik als Erkenntnis? Kritische Studien zur Meister Eckhart Forschung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), 74: “Denifle had made a scholastic out of Eckhart, and a bad scholastic at that.” 15 For a full description of developments in research, see the two bibliographical works by Niklaus Largier: Bibliographie zu Meister Eckhart (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1989); and “Meister Eckhart – Perspektiven der Forschung, 1980-1993,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 114 (1995): 29-98.



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attempts to “rescue him from the mystical stream.”16 Some of the arguments raised in that debate reflect the willingness of scholars to accept a dichotomy in Eckhart’s personality. These scholars tend to focus, consciously or unconsciously, on either the Latin or the German writings, depending on which of these support their basic view of Eckhart’s personality. Landauer would probably have some difficulty recognizing “his” Eckhart in the scholarship associated with the corpus of his Latin writings. Yet Landauer’s intuition concerning Eckhart’s personality is of added interest in the light of the research of the last generation. One of the most urgent tasks today would seem to be to provide a description of Eckhart that might encompass the totality of his personality, both as professor and teacher. This is particularly pertinent given the growing unwillingness among scholars to credit the “traditional” view of a dichotomy in Eckhart’s personality. Moreover, it was Eckhart himself who made the distinction between the Lebemeister and the Lesemeister (“master of living” and “master of learning”) options, and decided in favor of the first.17 Naturally, he himself – like so many other medieval thinkers charged with the same “offense” – could never have conceived of such a dichotomy having any bearing on his own personality and work. The present-day opinio communis is that Eckhart was persecuted by Church authorities not so much for his opinions as for the way in which he chose to formulate them, namely, in popular German sermons.18 In his sermons, Eckhart was preaching to a different kind of audience from that accustomed to hearing his typical abstract theological speculations in the universities. In considering Eckhart’s preaching activity, then, we are in a sense dealing with the very transformation of academic, elitist formulations and their transmission in the popular arena – a process defined by the sermon. I shall argue that in Eckhart one finds a unique combination of mysticism and messianism, one that shows itself in his unique and sovereign reception of Arab rationalism, and especially in his encounter with Maimonides’ Guide for 16 K. Flasch, “Meister Eckhart: Versuch, ihn aus dem mystischen Strom zu retten,” in Gnosis und Mystik in der Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Peter Koslowski (Zürich: Artemis, 1992), (Zürich: 1992), 94-110; see also R. Imbach, “Intellectus in deum ascensus: Philosophische Bemerkungen zu einer Veröffentlichung über Grundfragen der Mystik,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie 23 (1976): 198-209, 198. A thorough critique of that attitude can be found in A. M. Haas, Mystik als Aussage (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 346ff. 17 See in Landauer’s translation, for instance: “The speaker is Meister Eckhart: One lebemeister would be needed more than a thousand lesemeister; but no one can learn and live without God.” Landauer, Meister Eckhart, 135; for the original text see F. Pfeiffer (ed.), Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2, Meister Eckhart (1857; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914), 599; see also Hinz, “Mystik und Anarchie,” 74. 18 See K. Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, vol. III (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996), 248ff.

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the Perplexed.19 In the process of internalizing and radicalizing the Maimonidean teachings, Eckhart undertook a translation of the most elitist and esoteric ideas into popular language, and did so by turning the traditional messianic idea into an individual principle. The original phenomenon of revelation and the apocalyptic messianic interpretation become stages on the path of the individual – of every individual – to self-fulfillment.20 All of this, as well as many other representations of similar phenomena during the same period as Eckhart’s, including widespread popular social movements such as the Beguines, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, or the later Devotio Moderna, and outstanding figures like Dante (12651321) or Marguerite Porete (c. 1250-1310), are all closely and historically linked with a certain development toward a modern sense of individuality during the late Middle Ages. Landauer was sensitive enough to make this very point at a very early stage, when he criticized in Die Revolution21 the improper habit of too many scholars “of regarding everything that was undeniably alive or of transitional value in the Middle Ages, as a predecessor of the Renaissance.”22 On the one hand, Landauer obviously believed that he could find some idea in medieval discourse which had much in common with his own notions of the individual and society; on the other hand, he did not conceive of this idea as an 19 See M. Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 58-100; on the basic similarity of Eckhart and the Jewish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia in their interpretation of Maimonides, see G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941; New York: Schocken, 1973), 126; M. Idel, Maïmonide et la mystique juive (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 85-86. 20 That does not prevent them of course from claiming to be the faithful followers of Maimonides precisely with regard to that issue. Such a claim is tenable; indeed, Maimonides himself suggests that a specific kind of individual may experience a spiritual process of redemption. Such redemption, however, is reserved for a very small minority. 21 Revolution, 35. 22 A note that might be considered also with regard to two other outstanding Jewish-German scholars writing on related topics and at very much the same time. The first is Martin Buber, who shared with Landauer an intuitive affinity to German mysticism as well as a personal friendship. In 1904 he submitted his dissertation to the University of Vienna under the title “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems,” in which he analyzes the aspect of individuation in the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme. A parallel concern can be seen in Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of Nicholas of Cusa in his Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 1 (1906; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 21-61. Buber’s analysis differs in many details from that of Cassirer, although he too sees in Cusa – in a formulation, which is quite similar to that of Cassirer – “the first modern thinker,” (see above, 9). It is worth noting, however, that all three, in emphasizing the negative element of the early German philosophical tradition, might have been influenced by Hermann Cohen who strives to peg Cusa as a pioneer of modern thought in many of his writings. See in particular, A. S. Bruckstein, Hermann Cohen’s “Ethics of Maimonides”: Translation and Commentary (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000).



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early manifestation of modern thought but rather as an idea with its own medieval setting. What was it then that made religious figures such as Eckhart believe they could translate the most sublime metaphysical and religious contents into the language of the masses? If one follows Landauer’s line of thought, one might argue that they were able to do so, because they knew that all levels of society were united in one basic common desire, namely the desire for religious redemption. According to Landauer’s interpretation, the medieval scene presents us with a teleological unity. In contrast to the situation of the Odysseus-seaman in the famous narrative of Adorno and Horkheimer, Landauer presents a scenario in which the seaman and navigator consciously share the same target.23 What they hold in common is the spiritual goal of human perfection: “And what united all these variously differentiated forms and bound them together at the apex into a higher unity, a pyramid whose point was not power and was not invisible in the clouds, was the spirit streaming out of the characters and souls of the individual men and women into all these structures, drawing strength from them and streaming back into the individuals.“24 Working on the basis of this same attitude, both the Christian and the Jew radicalized, each in his own cultural idiom, the same teaching of a common teacher, namely, Maimonides.25 23 M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1969), 65ff.; and contrary to the Marxist denial of those small and fragile elements in favor of the goods necessary for existence, as outlined by Walter Benjamin: “The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning and fortitude.” Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in idem., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans., Harry Zohn, ed. with an intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-264, 254-5. It is important to note that when criticizing Marx, both Landauer and Benjamin are actually speaking about their contemporaries, the Social Democrats in Germany. 24 Revolution, 44; two years earlier Landauer translated Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Entwicklung), which develops a similar evaluation of medieval culture. Landauer emphasizes the role of Geist lying above all inter-differentiation in medieval society in a much stronger sense than does Kropotkin. See also E. Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 176-178; For the differen­ces in the evaluation of that basically similar phenomenon, see Hinz, “Mystik und Anarchie,” 137. 25 There are even some remarks in the writings of both thinkers, which suggest that they understand that spiritual religious atmosphere as transcending the limits and boundaries of particular religious phenomena. In this context, one might explain Eckhart’s work on the writings of Maimonides as well as his famous claim regarding the basic similarity of the teachings of Aristotle, Moses and Jesus. Also, see Meister Eckhart, Expositio sancti evangelii secundum Iohannem, n. 185, LW III, ed. K. Christ and J. Koch (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936), 155, 5-7: “Idem ergo est quod docet Moyses, Christus et philosophus, solum quantum ad modum differens, scilicet ut

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It is almost universally agreed among Maimonides scholars that Maimonides himself held a Platonic, dichotomous, elitist position; both in his capacity as a religious leader and in his political and philosophical roles, he was substantially different and distant from the larger community.26 But Maimonides also accepted such a dichotomy out of a basic assumption that there is a certain unity underlying the social stratification of his community. He accepted it as his mission to make his own religious personality the only possible bridge that might connect the different realms of the political, the philosophical and the religious. Here is the crucial difference between Maimonides and Spinoza; the latter may have held the same metaphysical views but he belonged to a completely different society.27 This is precisely the process described by Landauer in the first part of his Die Revolution, a process that leads from this medieval harmony to the reality of the ongoing revolution. This is a reality within which brilliant individuals like Spinoza lived in total isolation from their community: “The age of individualism approached in a twofold sense: the age of the great individuals and that of the atomized and abandoned masses.”28 In Meister Eckhart we see the desire to move that bridge from the realm of the Platonic philosopher-king to that of the individual religious personality standing autonomously before God. Redemption thus becomes private, immediate and something for which one is always prepared. Such a phenomenon might be – and indeed often is – regarded in terms of religious anarchism. In such a process, simple individuals nurture their specific concern, both for their own personal redemption, as well as for that of society in general; they are no longer willing to relinquish their religious-political sovereignty to political and religious leaders. As they come to be legislators of and for themselves, they develop a kind of communal framework, which maintains their personal autonomy while enabling them to satisfy their sense of communal responsibility. This leaves us with the credibile, probabile sive verisimile et veritas”; one can see this tendency in Abulafia in his free usage of Christian and Islamic notions and symbols, as well as in his treatment of the phenomenon of the plurality of religions. See, for instance, in his commentary on The Guide for the Perplexed, “The life of the Soul,” MS Munich, heb. 408, fol. 43b; and in “Secrets of the Torah,” MS Paris, heb. 226/3, fol. 132b-136a. 26 A thesis that was most strongly suggested by Leo Strauss; see his Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 12ff.; and see Y. Schwartz, “Friedrich Niewöhners mittelalterliche Aufklärer,” in: Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Georg Tamer, eds., Kritische Religionsphilosophie. Eine Gedenkschrift für Friedrich Niewöhner (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2010): 25–34. 27 However, if we accept the interpretation of Leo Strauss, Spinoza shares principally the same political ideas as Maimonides; see L. Strauss, “How to study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 142-201, esp. 177ff. 28 Revolution, 50.



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medieval “community of communities” which spreads that inspiration among all its members. Eckhart represents that populist tendency much more than do the others whom Landauer mentions as belonging to the same tradition, namely, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Erigena and Nicholas of Cusa. In this respect, Eckhart was a faithful member of his Dominican order, a community that was established in response to the earliest manifestations of the needs of the urban and proletarian community in Europe; they sought to inspire the new cities with that one spirit, enabling the development of a certain diversity without its negative implications of atomization and the loss of identity. Other late medieval mystics, such as Abraham Abulafia (1240-after 1291), and Ramon Llull (ca. 1232ca. 1315), on the other hand, never belonged to any religious or political establishment. They fashioned themselves into a one-man mission, aiming for the same goal, namely, a messianic redemption through knowledge, such as would be sought by individuals but have a collective effect, spreading through all the world and all of humanity.29

2 This personal, internalized move suggests exactly the kind of messianism that Scholem defines as Christian. In his article “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”30 Scholem writes: Any discussion of the problems relating to Messianism is a delicate matter, for it is here that the essential conflict between Judaism and Christianity has developed and continues to exist … . A totally different concept of redemption determines the attitude to Messianism in Judaism and in Christianity; what appears to the one as a proud indication of its understanding and a positive achievement of its message is most unequivocally belittled and disputed by the other. Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event, which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance. In contrast, Christianity conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm, an event which is reflected in the soul, in the private world of each individual, and which effects an inner transformation which need not correspond to anything outside.31

29 See Idel, Messianic Mystics, 97ff. 30 Found in G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 1-36, 1. 31 For a critique of Scholem’s view, see Idel, Messianic Mystics,18ff.

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A closer look at Scholem’s own messianic idea and its political implications is in order. For now it is important to note that the kind of private redemption promoted by the Jewish thinker Abulafia and the Christian theologian Eckhart is defined by Scholem as an interior Christian redemptive vision, one that is totally opposed to Jewish belief. Scholem and Landauer would agree on this point. Landauer never tired of emphasizing the Christian nature of the European medieval community of which he spoke. The difference between Landauer and Scholem lies in the fact that Landauer would have had no difficulty placing Maimonides or Abulafia within that framework – just as he had no hesitation about placing himself in it. For Landauer, Judaism then and now, was no more than one particular community within that “community of communities,” sharing the same human and social ideas. He formulates these ideas most clearly in a later article, in which he reveals the Jewish character of his messianic vision: “On the basis of one’s nationality, one works for a cause that certainly has different ramifications and names, but which, in all its diversity, is the cause of humanity, which is to become reality.”32 He then announces that “like a wild cry to the world and like a voice that is hardly whispering within us, a voice that we cannot ignore tells us that the Jews can only be redeemed together with humanity and that to wait for the messiah, dispersed and in exile or to be the messiah of the peoples is one and the same thing.”33 Indeed, the only way to prevent such a common spiritual ideal from resulting in tyranny or in the foundation of a new religious establishment is to preserve its inner nature within each individual. Landauer’s claim is certainly not individualistic. What one finds within oneself, one’s innermost nature, as it were, is God or – taken as a synonym for the Divine – the world. At a later point, one then finds community; and it is through community, which is prior to the individual and superior to secondary notions, such as the state and the Church,34 that the realistically understood universal notion of “man” is conveyed to its members.35 As previously noted, there was no way Landauer could have known that the purported dichotomy in Eckhart’s thought would be the subject of crucial debate several decades later. Nor could he have known that Eckhart would be “discovered” to be the medieval Christian thinker who, more than anyone before or after him, had allowed himself to be influenced by Maimonides. Joseph Koch was the 32 G. Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” first published in 1913, is quoted here from WM 1921,123. 33 Ibid., 125. 34 Landauer writes “there have never been isolated individuals at all, society is older than man.” Revolution, 48. 35 Skepsis , 13ff.



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first, in 1928, to determine Eckhart’s intellectual debt to Maimonides.36 I believe, however, that Landauer would have readily accepted such a “discovery,” since it reaffirmed his own “universal” intuition. For the purposes of our discussion, there are two theoretical aspects with regard to Eckhart that are of particular significance. The first relates to the definition of anarchism, which in the medieval context involves the demand to abandon the Platonic-Arabic political ideal – and this was the demand that lay behind Maimonides’ ideology – and advocates in its stead, a full transfer of responsibility to the audience as a community of individuals. In this respect Eckhart, like many others, prepared the way for Luther, though Luther and Spinoza were, as Landauer rightly notes, already living in a totally different framework, namely, that of revolution.37 It is clear to see how such an ideal is totally consonant with Landauer’s political thought. Landauer did not hesitate to point out the connection between the different fields of his intellectual interest. In Skepticism and Mysticism, Revolution and A Call to Socialism, as well as on many other occasions, he identified his political, historical and philosophical program. In a letter to Fritz Mauthner he writes “the critique of language is certainly an inseparable part of what I call anarchism and socialism.”38 Scholem’s intellectual endeavor shows an opposite tendency to that indicated by Landauer in the above passage. Scholem’s whole life’s work reflects an overarching concern to establish the boundary between public affairs, or the political realm, and the scientific realm of historiographical research. It is against the background of this “scientific” self-image that Scholem’s insistence on the non-messianic and non-mystical character of Zionism has to be interpreted. At the same time, it is easy to see that for Landauer, the very justification of Judaism and Zionism – as far as the latter can be justified in terms of Landauer’s system – lies precisely in their non-messianic, non-mystical character.

36 J. Koch, “Meister Eckhart und die jüdische Religionsphilosophie des Mittelalters”, in Kleine Schriften, (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1973), vol. 1: 349-365; earlier, in 1908, a key article was published by J. Gutmann describing in detail the “influence of Maimonides on the Latin West.” Not a word was devoted to Eckhart in this study. See Jacob Gutmann, “Der Einfluss der maimonidischen Philosophie auf das christliche Abendland,” in Moses ben Maimon: Sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss, vol. 1, ed. W. Bacher, M. Brann, and D. Simonsen (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1908; repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1971), 135-230. 37 Revolution, 50. 38 This quotation is taken from T. Regehly, “Die Welt ist ohne Sprache: Bemerkungen zur Sprachkritik Gustav Landauers, ihren Voraussetzungen und Konsequenzen,” in Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) ), Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeption, eds. L. M. Fiedler, R. Heuer, A. TaegerAltenhofer (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995), 219-245, 219.

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3 Scholem’s critics would argue that in his work he hides behind the mask of the historian, so that although in fact a most apologetic thinker, he is perceived as an “objective” scholar. Such criticism might be too extreme, but the apologetic stance adopted by Scholem’s followers seems even less justifiable. I refer here in particular to a series of articles written by Joseph Dan of the Hebrew University, which touch upon this issue and argue that Scholem was engaged in historiography and had no historiosophy of his own whatsoever.39 Taking up the issue of historiosophical concerns, it should be noted that Landauer had much more in common with Scholem than is commonly assumed. Both speak of a universal revolutionary mechanism in which social, messianic and private, mystical motivations are inseparably involved. Both speak about the one concrete and relevant example of that universal phenomenon, namely, secularization in the West. Landauer makes this point clearly in his Revolution, and makes reference to “only one revolution,” which began “with the so-called period of the Reformation.”40 The stages of that revolution, then, included the initial religious crisis, the secularization process, the Peasants’ War, the English Revolution, the Thirty Years War, the American War of Independence, and finally the French Revolution. This last event – spanning a period from 1789-1871 – which Landauer declared to be a general European development, marked the peak of the “revolutionary” process, though certainly not its fulfillment. The latter still lay ahead, totally dependent on the willingness and spirit of those who are part of humanity. As is well known, Landauer opposed any deterministic or scientific reading of history, such as Marxism, and especially any interpretation based on a belief in an inevitable revolutionary process. As far as he was concerned, nothing was inevitable in that ongoing revolutionary process: “We find ourselves at present in a short interval and, whether we regard the point at which we stand, as a turning point, a decision, or as a place of great weakness and weariness depends entirely on our nature, on our will, on our inner power.”41 Scholem, for his part, delineates a process beginning in thirteenth-century Europe, reaching its first peak in the early sixteenth century, developing through Sabbatianism and Frankism to the Jewish Enlightenment, and culminating in 39 J. Dan, Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History (New York: SUNY Press, 1987); and J. Dan, “Gershom Scholem – Mystiker oder Geschichtsschreiber des Mystischen?,” in Gershom Scholem zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. P. Schäfer and G. Smith (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 32-69. 40 Landauer, Revolution, 25. 41 Ibid., 26.



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antinomian Zionism as the messianic secular revival of Judaism. An entire group of Scholem’s students and disciples have done their best to represent Scholem as a historiographer who systematically differentiated between his own political personality and Zionist ideology on the one hand, and the mystical and messianic ideas he investigated, on the other. Again I must note that such a description of Scholem’s scholarly endeavor, though maintained by several scholars, nonetheless remains a matter of some debate.42 A more serious discussion of this problematic issue – and one that is highly pertinent to the present discussion – is found in David Biale’s article “Scholem und der moderne Nationalismus.”43 Biale’s argument, relying as it does on a different evaluation of Landauer’s contribution to Scholem’s anarchism, can be taken almost as a mirror image of the argument presented here.44 According to Biale, Landauer’s political anarchism inspired Scholem, and this in turn shaped the latter’s distinctive Zionist attitude and, more specifically, his formulation of an anti-nationalist ethos or “anarchistic Zionism.”45 The Jewish immigration to Palestine was accordingly envisioned as a stage leading to the establishment of a Landauerian type of anarchic community.46 From such a perspective there would seem to be almost no discontinuity in principle between the Zionist pacifism of the young Scholem during the First World War and his political activity in Palestine several years later. As Biale notes, “his Zionism was not directed toward a Jewish state, but toward the creation of a new community of Jews. He perhaps oriented his view of the political structure of this community toward Gustav Landauer’s anarchism.”47 Biale goes on to argue that Scholem struggled to establish a pluralistic and non-essentialist notion of Judaism and that, during all his scholarly years, he opposed any attempt to use messianic or mystical language within the political framework.

42 See for example H. Bloom, “The Strong Light of the Canonical,” in Gershom Scholem, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 55-77, esp. 62ff., 70ff. Bloom writes, “we may wonder why Scholem worked so much of his life under the evasive mask of the dispassionate and scholarly historian … . The enigma of Scholem is that he was himself anything but a mystical messiah.” Bloom, 67. The most political statement is to be found paradoxically in Arthur Hertzberg’s apologetical article, entitled “Gershom Scholem as Zionist and Believer,” in the same volume, 189-205. 43 David Biale, “Scholem und der moderne Nationalismus,” in Zwischen den Disziplinen, 257-274. 44 Ibid., 259-60, 263. 45 He writes “my thesis is that, to the extent that his history of the Kabbalah creates a ‘counter-history’ of Judaism, his [Scholem’s] historiographical writings and political reflections also constitute a kind of ‘counter-nationalism’ within Zionism, which even now, at the end of this century is still quite remarkable.” “Biale, “Scholem und der moderne Nationalismus,” 259. 46 Ibid., 260. 47 Ibid., 263.

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My disagreement with Biale’s analysis relates to almost every part of it. The passage quoted at the beginning of this article, in which Scholem gives an account of his early encounter with Landauer, reflects a genuine fascination on the part of the young Scholem with socialist and socio-anarchist views. My claim, however, is that Scholem consciously gave up that political vision and that this shift was shaped by, and reflected in, his attitude toward Judaism and Jewish nationalism, with all these tendencies reaching their climax in his private act of emigration. It was precisely because of his own messianic national belief that Scholem was so sensitive to the misuse of that same messianic idea by his political opponents, whether in the neo-Orthodox group around Isaac Breuer (1883-1946), in the Zionist Revisionists’ camp or in the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim movement. Biale is correct in asserting that Scholem’s attempt to combine secular Zionism as a national movement with the vitality of religious symbolism led him to a certain “ambivalence.”48 However, his further claim that such ambivalence characterizes all modern nationalism seems to be an unjustified generalization. Indeed, Biale’s inclusion of this general claim at this specific point in the article functions as a bold attempt to sidestep a prominent difficulty in his argument. In any case, one can hardly imagine in what way exactly, Landauer’s universal anarchist position could inspire such an attempt to reformulate the Jewish ethos in rhetoric taken from the arsenal of “modern nationalism.” I shall limit myself here to a few quotations from Scholem’s article from 1963, “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time.”49 The article, based on a lecture given in Jerusalem, raises the question of whether a new Kabbalah is possible. In addressing this issue, Scholem makes the following claim: Anyone attempting today to bring matters of inspiration and mystical cognition within the range of public understanding, without seeing himself, with a clear conscience, as being connected in an unqualified way with the great principle of Torah from heaven ... is a religious anarchist … . All of us today may to a great extent be considered anarchists regarding religious matters, and it should be stated openly … . It follows from all this that, if we inquire about manifestations of mystical impulses in Judaism today, we find ourselves confronting a reality of Jewish religious anarchy. It is this problem which confronts the present generation, which asks whether there is any hope of creating public forms of fundamentally mystic inspiration even in the absence of any positive dogmatic basis.50

48 Ibid., 266: “Scholem’s ambivalent attempt to create a Jewish nationalism that would be secular even though it is nurtured by religious symbols, is characteristic of the whole of modern nationalism.” 49 In Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. A. Shapira, trans., J. Chipman (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 6-19. 50 Ibid., 14-16.



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In his answer, Scholem begins by pointing out three fundamental elements of the religious situation of his generation. First, he observes that, “we have no clear knowledge as to whether mystical experience can in our generation assume a crystallized form obligating any sort of community.” Secondly, he claims that this must be connected to the analysis of the matter of secularization. A third and related claim is that “during this generation most of the creative energies of our people have been invested in other and different forms of building than those established in the earlier tradition.” Coming now to his answer, Scholem asks rhetorically, “who knows where the boundaries of holiness lie.” It is no coincidence that he chooses to mention Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) at this point, as he reflects “perhaps mysticism will be revealed, not in the traditional garb of holiness, but as Rav Kook saw it, in his daring words, as somehow seeking to restore things to their traditional perception.”51 We are not dealing here with mysticism as a form of anarchism, but with the familiar dialectic between tradition and anarchism, seen as the only form of religious activity capable of establishing the normative tradition of the future. But in order to demonstrate the role of the messianic idea in Scholem’s political theology, one must better understand its immediate political function. For this purpose, one must consider Scholem’s critique of other Jewish responses to the problem of Jewish existence in a European, and especially German, reality. Scholem was critical of the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars, but was also vehemently opposed to the middle-class, nationalist sentiments typical of his own family. His criticism was also directed at the various socialist experiments of the day and at those contemporary German Zionists who were hesitant to fulfill their own calling. His attack on the idea of the German-Jewish dialogue or symbiosis is well known, although here too, I am not sure to what extent he was revealing his true underlying motivations. His critical comments are addressed both against the cultural function served by the ‘science of Judaism’ among German Jewry, as well as against some of its main historiographical assumptions. The hidden argument is of a purely political nature, and is linked to the Zionist claim against diaspora Judaism in general. If one reads a very early article Scholem published in Der Jude in 1917,52 one discerns the basic, underlying motivation of his work, which certainly underwent a series of modifications thereafter, yet in my opinion remained essentially the same: “The demand can essentially be expressed in, and developed from, one 51 Ibid., 17. 52 Gerhard Scholem, “Jüdische Jugendbewegung,” Der Jude 1 (1916-1917): 822-825; also in: Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis; Selected Essays, trans. W. J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 49-53.

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word: wholeness.”53 He further explains that this is “our way, that is to say: to move ourselves toward Zion as wholeness and in wholeness.”54 Toward the end of this article, Scholem claims the following: If our youth were not so completely bent on preserving its many-sidedness – it suffices to point to the relevant problem of “German Jewishness” (Deutschjudentum) – we would be further along; if syntheses were not always sought but dogmas erected, if there were not always reconciliation but battle, if in the hour of danger alliances were not always formed with the others – the others in and around us – than a great strength would rise as the tide, and the rising tide might be followed by the breakthrough of the movement. The rippling away of our creeks in all directions will never turn into a roaring waterfall.”55

Toward the end of this essay, Scholem claims that “one is not permitted to call oneself a Zionist if one wants to stand both here and there, in Berlin and in Zion. We, however, will know where we have to stand if our cry is to be heard.56 How far that call is from the words of Landauer in his essay “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” (“Are These Heretical Thoughts?”) is clear enough.57 But one should also take note of the common role of the religious impulse and tradition in their secular and antinomian versions – “Zionism is the border-case of Torah in human existence” – in that great national project as conceived by Scholem.58 Years later, in 1931, Scholem writes: “As long as we do not rebuild the ruins of the nation in a national organism in the Land of Israel, there is no place to think of the renewal of Judaism.”59

4 Alongside Landauer’s religious anarchism, we see the role of skepticism, of systematic negation and of the critique of language as essential components lying at the heart of mystical as well as social developments. According to Landauer,

53 Ibid., 51. 54 Ibid., 52. 55 Ibid., 53. 56 Ibid. 57 Landauer, “Ketzergedanken” (see note 34, above). 58 The concluding remark of the unpublished “Esoteric Zionism,” in G. Scholem Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance (Hebrew), vol. II (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), 54. 59 “What are we arguing about?,” Sheifotenu, 6 (1931) [Hebrew]; reprinted in Scholem, Explications and Implications, 74-82, 76.



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negation is an essential component of the revolutionary mind. True systematic negation of the “topia” is a necessary stage on the way to the “utopia.”60 The same principle holds for the search for truth. The revolutionary impetus cannot, as it were, derive from an absolute and true understanding of history and of humankind. It can only base itself on an ongoing negation of all truth as well as of all existing social phenomena: “Truth, however, is a completely negative word, it is the very negation in itself, and therefore it is indeed the subject and aim of all science, whose lasting results are always of a negative nature.”61 Behind this claim lies a true messianic ideal, one that Walter Benjamin, in the final paragraph of his fragments on history, referred to as a typical Jewish expectation.62 That which is the fulfillment of that truth, as well as of reality, is something “totally different”: Everything is different: This is the formula of all our truth … . What is behind our reality? Something different! What is the world in itself? Different!”63 If one examines Landauer’s special relationship toward Eckhart’s teaching it is important to note that his understanding of that teaching is more scholarly than one might expect. Eckhart’s skepticism is one that characterizes Christian Neoplatonism already and especially in its earliest Eastern Orthodox manifestations.64 In the fourteenth century this skepticism develops in Eckhart – as well as in his contemporary William Ockham – into a radical critique of language. In both cases it has to do with a nominalistic and univocal tendency. In Ockham, it assumes the arbitrariness of the divine will against the absoluteness of the concrete objects of perception. For Eckhart, it is the absolute and immanent divine presence, the true being of any creature, which stands alone against the plurality of the things in the world as non-beings. Both Ockham and Eckhart agree on, albeit from two different poles, the denial of the Thomistic form of analogy, maybe the most meaningful medieval experiment to save language within a religious framework.65 In that sense one can no longer accept the simplistic distinction between “realists” and “nominalists” suggested by Landauer. Eckhart is not a realist in the trivial sense of the word. It is precisely this special position – which could be termed “transcendental nominalism” – that makes him so attractive to 60 Revolution, 12. 61 Skepsis 1923, 45. 62 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 264: “This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” 63 Skepsis 1923, 46. 64 A. H. Armstrong, “The Escape of the One,” Studia Patristica 13 (1957): 77-89. 65 On Ockham’s direct critique of Eckhart see William of Ockham, Tractatus contra Benedictum, L. 4, C. 4, in Opera politica, vol. III, ed., H. S. Offler (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1956), 251,20-252,8.

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modern, and especially to idealistic, philosophy. This position has to do with his formulation of the uniqueness of the individual experience of religious ascent at the very moment of breaking through into the most universal and transcendent realm. That mystical moment cannot be understood without the negative speculative move that precedes it. The special kind of mysticism that emerges from that consciousness in the case of Eckhart is not a Platonic one. It is not a call for the elimination of the self, but rather a call to replace mythical revelation with a new framework in which the individual personality finds those mythical elements within itself. The mystical ideal thus no longer pertains to the one historical event in which God became incarnate in Herod’s day and was crucified in Pontius Pilate’s day. Rather, Eckhart formulates an alternative myth of divine birth within the soul of the believer. The same process can be discerned in the thought of Abraham Abulafia – who in that respect also holds opinions nigh identical to those of Eckhart – when he turns messianic ideas into a personal individual mission. In this way there appears an all-idealistic process of creation of the entire cosmos through the ego. Only thus, out of the pure idealistic paradox, can this very “anarchism” toward which Landauer strives, finally emerge. It might be appropriate to conclude this paper with the words of Eckhart that Landauer took as the epigraph for his Skepticism and Mysticism: “Therefore, I am the cause of my self according to my eternal essence and my temporal essence … . At my birth, everything was born, and I was the cause of myself and of all things, and had I so desired, neither I nor anything else would exist, and if I did not exist, then neither would God. It is not necessary to understand this.”66 One can see why these words would hold such an appeal for the anarchist Landauer. In a similar vein, one can understand why the political theologian and religious anarchist Scholem devoted so much attention to the understanding of the messianic phenomenon. Both thinkers employ medieval material as a vehicle for their own exigent political concerns. In so doing, they represent the two poles of an intellectual endeavor, in which messianic and mystical energy is rehabilitated in the context of modern political thought.

66 Skepsis 1923, 1; The quotation is taken from Eckhart’s famous Sermon 52, which is supposed to have been written under the direct influence of another significant heretical figure of the time, namely, Marguerite Porete, who was executed in 1310. See M. Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. B. McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 65-86.

Wolf von Wolzogen

Ina Britschgi-Schimmer: Co-Editor of Gustav Landauer’s Letters 1 Introduction Ina Britschgi-Schimmer is a little-known, but nonetheless important figure in the context of German-Jewish intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century.1 A self-proclaimed devotee of practical science, she was one of the early social scientists in Germany and showed an indefatigable devotion and practical ability both in her innovative research and later in her pioneering work in Palestine, where she took up residence in 1933. Although Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s name is familiar to those who have done research on Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber, the significance of her work in this area – especially in editing, together with Buber, Landauer’s letters – has not been widely acknowledged. Born in Vienna on 23 September 1881, Ina (originally Regina) was the second child of Hermann (Hersch) Schimmer and Cäcilie, née Csarna. She was an excellent student and the only one among her parents’ five children to pursue an academic career. After completing high school, however, she first worked with several large transport companies in Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin. It was in Berlin that she took the most important step for her future career when she joined the then newly founded Jüdischer Verlag at the beginning of 1903. This publishing house, established in the wake of the 5th Zionist Congress (1901) by Chaim Weizmann, Martin Buber, Berthold Feiwel, Davis Trietsch and E. M. Lilien, sought to promote Jewish literature and art among the Jews of Western Europe. In addition to administrative tasks, Ina was responsible for editorial work and was involved in plans for Buber’s and Weizmann’s project of a journal entitled Der Jude, a kind of European review with a programmatic approach to the study of Judaism, not as “an entity of the past confined to strict formula but [as] a living national tradition in all its breadth and depth, in its variety, in all its forms and declarations.”2 For a number of reasons – mainly financial – the project did not get off the ground at that time; it was only more than a decade later, in 1916, that the journal was finally launched. Ina Schimmer had left the publishing house at the end of 1903, and in the following years pursued studies in Berlin and then in 1 See H. Delf, “Ina Britschgi-Schimmer – Social Scientist,” in Jüdische Frauen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Lexikon zu Leben und Werk, ed. H. Delf, J. Dick, M. Sassenberg (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), 81f. 2 See H. Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1979), 297.

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Zürich, where she received a Ph.D. in political science in 1915 and also met her future husband, Dr. Josef Britschgi. For a time she was in charge of administration in the editorial department of the Hebrew weekly, Ha’olam issued by Misrad Zioni, the Zionist organization in Berlin, but a year later she moved together with her department to London. In the following years she concentrated on literary and academic work, publishing articles for German newspapers, and completing her book, Lassalle’s letzte Tage. This important work, which draws on previously unpublished correspondence from the last years of Ferdinand Lassalle’s life, was published in 1925.3

2 The Task of Co-Editing Landauer’s Letters In the same year, she also began what was to be a lengthy and intense period of collaboration with Martin Buber on an edition of Gustav Landauer’s letters, which was eventually published in 1929 in two volumes as Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen.4 As Buber explained in the foreword to the work, the process involved the rather arbitrary selection of letters – a difficult task, given the scarcity of source material – and their ordering in a way that would illustrate the different phases of Landauer’s life and establish a link between his private and public domains. According to Buber, every letter could be considered a significant document in its own right as well as a personal statement concerning Landauer. He explains how Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Berndl, for example, both endeavored to present a general idea of the course of Landauer’s life and the relationships that affected it, on the basis of a few spontaneous personal messages and the odd comment expressed by Landauer at different points in his life. Whereas only a small number of letters were missing in the case of Mauthner, Berndl witheld most of his correspondence from publication. Working on his own, Buber would not have been able to carry out the time-consuming search for letters and at the same time deal with the task of corresponding with former acquaintances of Landauer’s and their heirs. Buber had originally planned to work jointly with Hans Lindau (1875-1963), his old friend from student days and from the period when he was head librarian at the Berlin National Library. Following his conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1924, Lindau abandoned the project. Buber, nonetheless expressly acknowledged Lindau in the book for his extraordinary commitment to the project in its prepara3 I. Britschgi-Schimmer, Lassalle’s letzte Tage (Berlin: Axel-Junker, 1925), 29. 4 See Lebensgang I/ II.



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tory stage, even though he had had basic objections to some aspects of the work (particularly during the early stages, which spanned several years). Buber also mentions Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s tireless work, particularly in preparing the notes to the text, which were “intended primarily to provide additional information about the biographical connections cited in the letters themselves.”5 What Buber fails to mention, however, is that it was Ina Britschgi-Schimmer who conducted the painstaking and intensive search for the letters, and capably coped with the many unpleasant conflicts of interest that arose between the editors and their correspondents. Her correspondence with Martin Buber also indicates that she occasionally even spent her own money to finance the copying and transcribing of letters. She is mentioned in the foreword alongside Max Kron­ stein, Landauer’s son-in-law, who had originally intended to collaborate on the project but later decided – due to fundamental differences of opinion – to publish a separate volume on Landauer’s early correspondence, the so-called Jugendband, which never came to pass; Ludwig Berndl, who also planned to publish his correspondence with Landauer in a separate edition, is also mentioned in the foreword.6 Ultimately, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer expected that her dedication to the task would be formally acknowledged and assumed that she would be mentioned as the co-editor of the volumes. Thus she was deeply disappointed that Buber decided otherwise when the book finally went to print. Given the interest and import of Landauer’s correspondence, it is worth taking a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the gradual process of editing this work, and at the repeated delays and postponements that preceded its eventual publication. Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s involvement in the project began at a point when no essential editorial decisions had as yet been made. She had only taken up the memorandum for the project from her predecessors. An enormous amount of time and effort was involved in obtaining the addresses of people who had long since moved elsewhere and establishing contacts with relatives and executors of the estates of Landauer’s erstwhile correspondents to convince them of the project’s importance. Ludwig Berndl, for example, was willing to grant only limited permission to print letters because of his own plans for an edition of correspondence. Franz Werfel informed Britschgi-Schimmer that the suitcase which most probably held his Landauer letters had been lost, and Ernst Toller made the rather macabre suggestion that she “address inquiries to the authorities who had 5 See Gustav Mayer, Erinnerungen: Vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Bibliothek des deutschen Judentums, ed., Julius H. Schoeps (Zürich: G. Olms, 1993), 328. 6 The Berndl letters are located in the Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. See GLAA, no. 112. Another copy of the letters is located in the Gustav Landauer collection in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

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confiscated them,” stressing their scholarly import, if she wanted to recover the letters.7 Ina Britschgi-Schimmer was reminded again – and rather ungraciously – of her role as a “staff worker” when Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) – whom Landauer had put in his place in no uncertain terms during the days of the revolution – reacted with great indignation to the form of inquiry related to the project. Hiller, like every other contributor, had received a formal letter of inquiry, without Martin Buber’s personal signature, and was affronted that he had been approached by mere “dwarves.”8 In September 1926, the material prepared by Britschgi-Schimmer was sent to Buber. This included material from Erich Mühsam, Constantin Brunner, and Landauer’s daughter Gudula, who, Britschgi-Schimmer notes, had been surprisingly uncooperative at first, but had finally gotten around to taking out some of her father’s material from a cupboard in Karlsruhe. Britschgi-Schimmer informed Buber that letters from only a few people – Margarete Faas-Hardegger, Kropotkin, Fritz Mauthner and Kurt Hiller – were still outstanding. As it turned out, Hiller, who had eventually been convinced that an edition of correspondence was a sound idea, failed to respond to repeated inquiries, and in the end, the edition was published without his correspondence with Landauer. At the time, Britschgi-Schimmer was also still waiting for Constantin Brunner’s permission to print his material. This delay caused some concern in view of the fact that Brunner had expressed his wish that the letters from 1911 – a “period of conflict” in his relationship with Landauer – be omitted.9 On 3 November 1926, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer wrote to Buber about the problem, offering her understanding of the whole conflict: “I recall that Landauer later turned away from Brunner, which anyone would have a right to do. The manner in which he called the fact [of his reservations regarding Brunner’s concept of das Geistige or “spiritual elite”], to Brunner’s attention, as if this antipathy had existed from the outset, seems rather strange, as his letters to Brunner in the early years clearly express admiration for Brunner as a person and for his accomplishments. Brunner is only right in pointing this out by citing a number of passages in support of his position.”10 Since Brunner was also of the opinion that the matter should not be stirred up again, Britschgi-Schimmer felt it would be better not to raise the issue, especially 7 See Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer File A 110, 11: Ina Britschgi-Schmmer to Martin Buber, 13 February, 1926. Hereafter: CZA; IBS to MB. 8 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 14 November 1925. 9 See CZA, File IBS A 110, 8: IBS TO MB, 9 October 1926. 10 See CZA, File IBS A 110, File 8. This section – on the task of co-editing Landauer’s correspondence – is based in part on the correspondence between Martin Buber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, found in CZA, IBS File A 110, 7, 8, 10 and from 1925 to 1929; specific references are given only when passages are directly quoted.



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since the forty-seven-page hand-written letter from Brunner to Landauer that attempted to summarize the whole conflict, was bound to confuse rather than enlighten the readers! She thought Buber should have the last word, however, and that he should write a few lines to “calm the rather mistrustful gentleman.”11 In editing the correspondence between Landauer and Fritz Mauthner, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer faced the fundamental problem associated with every edition of letters – that of selection: “The wonderful friendship between these two people, which spans a period of 25 years, is so beautiful and intense, the intellectual bonds between them so strong, that one almost regrets putting aside most of the letters that have to be excluded. It is worth considering the possibility of publishing a special edition of the Mauthner-Landauer correspondence at a later date.”12 Ina Britschgi-Schimmer also offered some specific suggestions for such an edition. The total number of letters had reached nearly four hundred at this point. Although she had originally proposed the year 1900 as the beginning date for the selected correspondence, she now had second thoughts; since she had found “a number of exceedingly beautiful, mature letters from the period before 1900,” in particular some relating to Fritz Mauthner and Hedwig Lachmann, she now tended to favor the year 1895.13 Buber criticized her for changing her mind, since he was inclined to set 1899 as the beginning date. She also suggested providing a translation of Latin passages, or at least a Latin transcription of the many passages quoted directly from original Greek sources, as an aid to present and future readers, because one should “anticipate a working-class readership as well.”14 In this connection she recalled the specific criticism that had been directed at her Lassalle book, in which passages quoted in French were not translated. Buber agreed to the idea in one of his customary marginal notes. She also sought further clarification regarding the professional designation for the contributors, as the use of the term “writer” or “author” alone struck her as too unconventional and subjective. The numbering system employed for the letters was also based upon her suggestion. She was thus meticulous in all phases and aspects of the preparation. While reading through the galley proofs for the second volume she discovered that the publishers, Rütten & Loening, had deleted a paragraph that neither she nor Buber had specified for omission. She wrote, justifiably, to ask whether the publisher “[had] the right to delete passages he finds inappropriate for politi11 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 3 November 1926. 12 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 17 October 1925. The extant correspondence between Mauthner and Landauer was edited and published only in 1994! See Mauthner, Briefe. 13 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 17 October 1925 and elsewhere. 14 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 22 January 1926.

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cal reasons.” The bone of contention was a letter from Landauer to Hedwig Lachmann, in which Landauer wrote “I know for a fact that practically every pimp in Berlin, nearly every member of the criminal class who has somehow managed to escape imprisonment, has gone to war; I know of horrible, indescribable things in Lower Bavaria; I know of [dreadful] deeds by Prussian militiamen and I mention all of this truly not as an accusation against any one of them but as an accusation against the primitive state into which your capacity and will for judgment and justice have fallen.”15 Buber authorized some of the deletions on legal grounds: “On the basis of the expert report presented to me in the original, I have reduced the number of intended deletions (which were actually more far-reaching) to those passages [the legal scholar Hugo] Sinzheimer thought might provide grounds for legal action against the publisher.”16 Ina Britschgi-Schimmer found Gustav Landauer a fascinating personality. She asked, through Buber’s mediation, that Landauer send her a copy of his Eckhart translation, and for many years weighed the possibility of writing a thesis on Landauer or even his biography. When Professor Julius Goldstein from Darmstadt, publisher of the journal Der Morgen, suggested that she write an article on Ferdinand Lassalle, she replied that instead she thought of an idea for a project much closer to heart: “It occurred to me that I should do something on Landauer, perhaps on his attitude toward Judaism. What do you think? Maybe I could find some things in the letters as well that would make it possible to refer to the edition of letters.” As was his habit in relaying comments to Britschgi-Schimmer, Buber wrote a reply in the margin of her letter to Goldstein, a copy of which she had sent him, and then returned it to her. He remarked “that is a good idea. Once you compile the material, I can provide you with some supplementary remarks, if need be.”17 Three months later, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer requested Buber’s assistance once again for her article on Landauer’s attitude toward Judaism. The point of departure for her reflections was a pair of essays by Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” and “Ostjuden und Deutsches Reich.”18 She also mentioned that “in the letters to Mauthner there are several passages on the Jewish question, which generated a lively debate between the two men.”19 Buber finally responded, noting with some reservation, that his suggestions, which included some familiar items, were rather exiguous. His selection, listed below, nonetheless, reveals a great deal about his assessment of Landauer’s Jewishness: 15 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 5 September 1928. 16 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 13 September 1928. 17 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 11: IBS to MB, 14 July 1925. 18 See WA III. 19 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 17 October 1925.



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1) Sind das Ketzergedanken?; 2) Zum Beiliss-Prozeß; also in Der Sozialist the brief preface to the Kiev issue; 3) the article “Ostjuden und Deutsches Reich” [“Eastern European Jews and the German Empire”] in the first volume of Der Jude (was initially suppressed by the military censorship bureau, but I printed it in full [illegible]); 4) The article on me; 5) The discussion of the “Baalschem” in Literarisches Echo;. 6) In Shakespeare the essay on the Merchant of Venice; 7) Strindberg’s Historische Miniaturen, and 8) the related note in the preview issue of Juden (Vol. II); 9) The remark “Christian and Jewish” in the first volume of Der Jude; 10) The remark “a serious case” in the second volume of Juden. There was an excerpt-style review by [Hugo] Bergmann of L.’s lecture “Judentum und Sozialismus” [“Judaism and Socialism”] in Selbstwehr; perhaps I can find it. There must also be printed reviews of other lectures as well. Other literature: 1) the Landauer issue of Arbeit, which also contains my brief address (in my long lecture, which is printed in the Landauer “Masken” issue, there is also a passage on L’s Jewishness), 2) [Ernst] Simon’s essay “Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude” [“The ‘Becoming’ Man and the ‘Becoming’ Jew”].20

With regard to the question of Landauer’s ‘Jewishness,’ Ina Britschgi-Schimmer distinguished between “being” and “desire” (Wesenheit and Wollen), especially in the context of her meetings with Gustav Landauer. She eventually came to know Landauer personally and repeatedly asked him questions about his Judaism. Her wish to understand this aspect of his life more profoundly is also reflected in the letter she sent to Martin Buber in the early phase of her editorial work on Landauer’s letters. She writes, “I often thought of L(andauer) when he was in [the Berlin suburb of] Hermsdorf, and I intended to write an essay about him. That was the only time I often met him … . At the time, I never perceived in him any strong solidarity with Judaism, neither in terms of his work nor in his personality. This also applies to the period during which he founded [the journal] Der Sozialist … . I have often asked myself whether it was you who later awakened the Jew in him, making it very exciting for him to be a Jew. As a result, he started to participate actively in Jewish events.”21 Buber conceded, albeit with some reservations, that he had had an influence upon Landauer’s attitude toward Judaism and on Landauer’s own developing sense of Jewishness: “You are surely correct in assuming that there was some influence from me. And this influence began to have a formative effect on Landauer’s attitude toward Judaism at the point at which my own had matured and stabilized – that is, beginning around 1909, and from then, on in line with my own development.”22 Shortly before completing the editing of the volumes, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer wrote to one Dr. Lewin, stating that her soul had been “relieved of a heavy burden … . Only the corrections for the index remained to be done. It will probably be 20 Parentheses and translation mine. See CZA, IBS File A 110, 11: MB to IBS, 19 November 1925. 21 See Martin Buber Archive, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Mss. Varia 350/684; CZA, IBS File A 110, 11: IBS to MB, 21 November 1925. 22 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 7: MB to IBS, 14 December 1925.

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published in November and December [1928].” She then adds that she is “currently working on an article on Gustav Landauer’s contribution to the Munich Revolution and the Soviet Republic.”23 Indeed, included among her unpublished works is an 18-page manuscript, revised by Martin Buber.24 In places, her writing is reminiscent of Landauer’s own fiery style. She mentions that, in keeping with the true “spirit of the revolution [of 1918-19], which calls not only for freedom but also for love, community and fraternity,” Landauer had been “alert and had worked actively, with an unflagging and self-sacrificing dedication on behalf of the people.”25 In her quest for historical and human authenticity in illustrating the last phase of Landauer’s life, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer did not rely on archives, but rather on the letters, which she regarded as an “authentic source” of information. In carefully tracing the specific measures implemented by the Bavarian Republic under Kurt Eisner, she discussed not only the emotionalism and utopian quality of the revolution, but also the lack of consistency with regard to historical events. She gave a detailed explanation of Landauer’s concept of a federal German republic, which he hoped would give rise to a “new spirit” that would transcend the old party system, and she defended Landauer’s idea of a republic governed by commissioners, against critics who argued that Landauer wanted to establish a dictatorship. “Landauer’s aim,” she wrote, “is true democracy. In his passionate life’s credo, A Call to Socialism, he defines the bond, the community, as the fundamental form of the true creative communal life, the germ cell from which everything grows.”26 According to Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, Landauer became a member of a Council Republic as a people’s delegate – thus acting in contradiction to the principle that had guided his entire life, according to which inner transformation must always precede outward actions – because he recognized the necessity of “adhering to one’s own ideas while, at the same time, adapting to the current situation … these are the words of a person who, observing the declining fortunes of his cause with sorrow and despair, comes to the conclusion that he must force himself to act in the interest of that cause.”27 Whenever Britschgi-Schimmer refers to a change of attitude in Landauer, one can discern a common ground 23 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 18: 3 November 1928. 24 See “Gustav Landauer’s Weg durch die Münchener Revolution: Eine Darstellung von Ina Britschgi-Schimmer,” Ms. CZA, IBS File A 110, 12. 25 Ibid. 1. 26 Ibid. 8. 27 Ibid., 12f. Britschgi-Schimmer’s point of view is in line with what Martin Buber had already described from a “male” perspective in his eulogy “Landauer und die Revolution” in 1919. See Literaten an der Wand: Die Münchener Räterepublik und die Schriftsteller, ed. Hansjörg Viesel (Frankfurt/Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1980), 318.



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between the two. In her view, he had reached a stage in his life, where he was no longer satisfied with words but wanted to see things done.28 Was this one of the guiding maxims of Landauer’s life that Ina Britschgi-Schimmer adopted for herself as well? She certainly describes Landauer’s last decision – to join the Bavarian Revolution – in a sympathetic tone, noting that “the time [had] come when he no longer needed to be cautious but to act for the sake … of the renewal of humanity.”29 It is not surprising that Ina Britschgi-Schimmer took it upon herself to do something about the problematic fact that there was at the time no useful biography of Landauer. After all, she had abundant material in her own desk drawer. She sent Buber a draft of a lecture on Landauer, which she had planned to read in Gustav Mayer’s seminar at the University of Berlin. Explaining to Buber that “it never came about, because I was helping Mayer prepare the last volume of Lassalle’s unpublished works, and then proceeded to do my own book on Lassalle,” she now asked Buber whether she should publish her lecture – after expanding the individual sections – perhaps even before the release of the letters.30 In yet another of his notes in the margin of her letter, Buber expressed support for her plan, advising her to expand it. However, the piece was never published. Contrary to her expectations, work on the letters went on for another two years. At the beginning of 1927, Ina Britschgi-Schimmer wanted to send Buber a list of correspondents, and inform him of the number of letters, before putting them into chronological order. By this time there were 468 letters and, taking into account the anticipated letters of Margarete Faas-Hardegger and Hedwig Lachmann, the total was approaching the five-hundred mark. (In the end, the published correspondence contained no less than 594 letters.) Ina now envisaged a two-volume publication, comprising some two hundred letters in the first volume, and some three hundred in the second, with the dividing line drawn at 1914. “In the period before 1915,” she explains, “there are long philosophical discussions with Mauthner and Berndl, literary ones with Bab, Hauschner, etc. The most numerous and significant letters date from the years 1915 and 1918/19.”31 Martin Buber and his wife made an extended visit to Palestine from March to May 1927, and this gave Ina Britschgi-Schimmer an opportunity to work even more intensively on the volumes, especially on the index and footnotes, and also to put an end to the incessant quarrels with Max Kronstein. In this regard she suggested that Buber “send back the miscellaneous material, which could only 28 Britschgi-Schimmer, “Gustav Landauers Weg,” 13. 29 Ibid., 17. 30 CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 27 January 1927. 31 CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 27 January 1927, and elsewhere.

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be used in that way, on loan. This would be preferable to either sending [him] all of the letters from the Munich period at that time or the corrections later. I do not want [Kronstein] to be entering things into the corrections at the last moment that I may not be able to look over. I would rather have the notes finished before the manuscript is set.”32 The conflict with Kronstein was to escalate further. On 27 June 1927, she informed Buber, with an almost audible sigh of relief, that the manuscript had finally been sent to the publisher. With a hint of uncertainty she then asks: “What now? For I have derived a great deal of enjoyment from this work. And, because I have you to thank for that and because it has given me a sense of sharing something with you in this work, I wish to take this opportunity to shake your hand.” Although everything appeared to be finished and she had “gone over the entire manuscript again in the process of entering the numbers and pages during the last few days – a backbreaking job – and compared questionable points with the original,” she promised to give Buber her post-office address in Switzerland, where she was to vacation, should any queries arise.33 Yet her struggle was not over, and she was once again plagued by concerns about the printing of the letters, noting that “if they are to appear in the spring, we shall have to begin typesetting very soon.” As time passed, this was the least of her problems. In particular, she was embarrassed to bring up the matter of the publishing credit. She informed Buber that after receiving his response to her inquiry regarding this matter, in which he stated that “the title page would read: ‘Edited by Martin Buber in collaboration with Ina Britschgi-Schimmer,’”(Unter Mitwirkung von Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, herausgegeben von Martin Buber) she was “very depressed.” She explains her position in frank terms: I have the feeling that, on the basis of this phrasing, only your esteemed name will be mentioned in the public announcements and reviews etc., and hardly anyone will take notice of my ‘collaboration.’ I don’t know whether you are aware of this, or [of the fact] that the very benefit to me from the publication of the letters, which you envisioned at the time – namely, that my name would become better known – would be nullified as a result. The formulation I had in mind, and one that seems best suited to this purpose, was simply ‘edited by Martin Buber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer.’ I have asked myself whether there isn’t also an objective justification for proposing equality between us with respect to this work. Because this is and must remain the only criterion. Under no circumstances would I seek to take advantage of your benevolence toward me for personal gain in literary matters. I think I can answer the question in the affirmative without risk of exposing myself to the accusation of presumptuousness and self-deception. You know me well enough to understand that there is nothing of the kind [involved]. I do not even wish to mention the arduous work of collecting [the material], 32 CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 10 March 1927. 33 CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 27 June 1927.



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since that is a rather more technical aspect. But who, better than you, is able to judge the amount of time, effort and care required in editing the notes alone, which are then read easily and as a matter of course by the reader. Nonetheless, I did not wish to let my subjective feeling be my only guide, and sought to hear a more objective assessment instead. Since Prof. [Gustav] Mayer has more experience with [such] editions than anyone else in my circle of acquaintances, I asked for his opinion, having described to him my contribution to the work. He said that he was now in the best possible position to answer my inquiry. He had just been commissioned by the Social Democratic Party to edit an edition together with a young Russian. Although the latter was to be responsible only for the comparison of texts and he – Mayer – would be writing all of the notes, the entry on the title page of the book would read ‘edited by Gustav Mayer and … .’ He also said that he considered such wording appropriate for the Landauer letters and offered to write to you about the matter, since he had something he wanted to relate to you anyway. I turned down the offer, however, because I prefer to discuss these things with you directly. So, now I have told you what is on my mind. For I cannot but honestly admit that I would find it hard after two years of work not to be acknowledged as the co-editor – if not in the book itself, at least in the public announcements concerning it. And whether I am mentioned or not is not without consequence with respect to my future work opportunities. What I do not know is what you think of my work and whether you believe it is deserving of equal mention. If you see things differently, then please let me know. Sincerely yours, Ina.34

Buber’s answer was prompt: You appear to assume that this is a matter of my own intentions and my own arbitrary wishes alone. This is not the case. I am bound by Landauer’s last instruction (see the entry in all of the books from his literary estate edited by me) [that I] assume sole responsibility for the edition. And that is why, although I value your contribution to the project highly (your share of the work was much greater than mine, but I alone remain responsible for every letter selected and for every deleted sentence), I cannot mention you on the title page in the way you wish. I will ensure, however, that your involvement is suitably accentuated in the press releases, so that your name will surely be mentioned in every review. And it goes without saying that you will not be left unnamed in any official announcement. In this way, your well-earned right to be mentioned will be honored to the extent justified by the facts of the matter.35

After Buber wrote the foreword, Britschgi-Schimmer once again raised the issue of the title page and publication formalities, stating that she preferred the wording “with … ” in lieu of “in collaboration with … ,” and adding, “if that does not suit your wishes, then it can remain as it is.” She concluded by saying that she was very happy to know that the book would soon be issued. Buber’s response the following day indicates little willingness to accommodate her concerns: “As I 34 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 8: IBS to MB, 28 November 1927. 35 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 7: IBS to MB, 30 November 1927.

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explained to you in my earlier letter,” he says, “the question of the title page is not in the least a matter of ‘my wishes,’ but rather of an obligation and responsibility that have been imposed upon me personally. I was convinced that you understood this at the time, and I am surprised to learn that you did not. You are surely aware of how seriously I take language, particularly at my present age. It is not for me to grant or deny any wish of yours in this matter. Please also have a look at the back of the title pages in the books I have edited from Landauer’s literary estate. To ensure that the facts are clear this time, I have added two words to the preface, so that the passage at the bottom of p. IX now reads: ‘in accordance with Landauer’s last instruction to me.’”36 It was at this time – and no doubt in reaction to Buber’s response – that Britschgi-Schimmer decided to abandon her fervently outlined plans for a Landauer biography, a work for which she had already begun preparing a detailed draft. It seems that in the light of the power wielded by men – and particularly in the shadow of Landauer – her faith in her own talent had faltered.

3 The Reception of the Edition of Gustav Landauer’s Correspondence In their announcement for the forthcoming publication of Gustav Landauer. His Life in Letters, edited by Ina Britschgi-Schimmer and Martin Buber – here the two appear as co-editors – the publishers Rütten & Loening, set the tone for the reception of the work: Nowhere do we catch a glimpse of world events during the first two decades of this century in such a vital, intensely personal reflection as in this document of a magnificent [representative of] humanity. Landauer strengthened and tested his basically solitary spirit in a fertile exchange with friends such as Fritz Mauthner, Constantin Brunner and Martin Buber and in correspondence with some of the outstanding minds of his time, including Julius Bab, Alfred Mombert, Ludwig Berndl, Richard Dehmel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Frederik van Eeden and Margarete Susman. In his correspondence with his wife and children, and especially with his life companion Hedwig Lachmann, we witness how Landauer matures and flourishes as a human being. Gustav Landauer predicted the outbreak of war and, as it drew near, struggled against it: not as a member of a political group, but as an individual and a solitary figure, and not by means of programmatic slogans but by exposing and revealing hidden realities. He foresaw the revolution and, although passionately devoted to the humanitarian revolution, he [himself] – as an individual and a solitary thinker –

36 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 7: MB to IBS, 6 November 1928.



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submitted it to relentless, clear- and far-sighted criticism. He joined it, fully aware of the sacrifice involved, although he steadfastly adhered to his own critical stance.37

Even though ten years had passed since his brutal murder, the appearance of Landauer’s Life in Letters had a powerful impact on friends and foes alike. In addition to all the well-known men referred to in the letters, many of the women with whom he corresponded are also mentioned for the first time in this volume. In the Chemnitz Volksstimme Landauer was referred to as “a preacher of socialism who had no understanding of the conditions underlying the class struggle [and no knowledge of] the true spirit of the proletariat.”38 Even those who dismissed Landauer as either a left-wing renegade or a utopian, referred to the militant aspects of his life. In a letter to the poet Emmy Hennings (1885-1948), printed in the Kölnische Zeitung, Hermann Hesse noted that the letters reveal “poor Landauer” as a “noble and knowing person who nevertheless ran blindly into the machinery of hell that was the revolution.”39 Gustav Mayer, however, referred to Landauer as “a man of the word, not of violence,” a writer and speaker called upon by Kurt Eisner “to serve as a spokesman for the reformation of souls.”40 Other commentators, viewing Landauer from the distance afforded by the passage of time, saw him in a more nuanced light, suggesting that he both was, and was not, a politician: “We do not begin to sense the intellectual energy that radiated from this restless man until we read his correspondence … [He was] a fighter possessed by the intellect and, above all, a human being.”41 The comments of Chemnitz Volksstimme editor Eduard Weckerle, reflected the political correctness of the time: “A man possessed by a forward-looking, stormy élan and global spirit. Such a man must inevitably be tempted to overestimate the mind and to underestimate the power of matter.”42 Leo Hirsch (1903-1943), who wrote reviews for a number of newspapers, emphatically reaffirmed Landauer’s vitality and vision: “Landauer foresaw and predicted the war … as it had to and did come about, and even his best friends failed to understand him”; he then adds with an almost Landauerian flourish “his life was lived consciously and deliberately, [it

37 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 10: “Reviews of Gustav Landauer: His Life in Letters, edited by Ina Britschgi-Schimmer and Martin Buber, Frankfurt/Main, Rütten & Loening, autumn, 1928.” Publisher’s leaflet announcing forthcoming new volumes. 38 Chemnitz Volkstimme, 2 May 1929. 39 Kölnische Zeitung, 22 December 1928. 40 Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 May 1929. 41 Kölner Tageblatt, 2 May 1929. 42 Chemnitz Volkstimme, 2 May 1929

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was] led in harmony and ended tragically. True to himself yet unselfish, obedient to natural destiny in an almost humble devotion to justice.”43 In Landauer’s view, socialism was a “way of life: a life that must be lived to the full, and well and with reason, and the revolution one must begin in oneself.”44 His correspondence bears witness to just such a life. Although editions of correspondence are assessed on the basis of different criteria today, Grete Schaeder, editor of the three-volume edition of Buber’s letters, referred to Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s editorial work, especially her notes, as exemplary. There can be no doubt that Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s notes, based on conversations and first-hand information, will remain an important source for future scholars of Landuer’s legacy. Citing Landauer’s Life in Letters in her own introduction, Schaeder suggests that the correspondence may well be regarded – in a significant sense – as a form of biography, or even as a substitute for it.45 Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s fear that she might not receive any recognition for her labors in editing the Landauer letters appear to have been confirmed, for in the thirty-five reviews found in the Britschgi-Schimmer collection of the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, she is hardly mentioned at all – and if so, only indirectly.46 Upon her death in Jerusalem on 14 July 1949, an obituary appeared in the news bulletin of the Association of Immigrants from Central Europe, in which she was aptly remembered as an individual full of hope and optimism – striving for her ideals in a pure way, unwilling to make any compromise with the brutal powers that were unfolding, driven by a strong will, accompanied by a sense of realism that accepts truths that other people find hard to recognize, showing a commitment that is rare in others.47 Her edition of Gustav Landauer’s letters was but one of Ina Britschgi-Schimmer’s achievements, but it is one of the important reasons that her name warrants more than a footnote in the documents of German-Jewish intellectual history.

43 Berliner Tageblatt, 8 March 1929. 44 G. Landauer, “Anarchische Gedanken über Anarchismus,” Die Zukunft 37, no. 4 (1901): 134-140. 45 See M. Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. Grete Schaeder, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: Lambert-Schneider, 1972-1975), vol. 1: 21. 46 See CZA, IBS File A 110, 10. 47 See the bulletin of Irgun Olej Merkas Europa, 29 July 1949.

Chaim Seeligmann

Gustav Landauer and his Judaism Gustav Landauer has been a somewhat forgotten figure in Israel, despite the fact that two books on him appeared in Hebrew in the 1930s, one edited by Ya’akov Sandbank, the other by Israel Cohen. After a long hiatus in work related to the anarchist thinker, Yad Tabenkin, the research institute of the United Kibbutz Movement, published translations of some of his writings, previously unavailable in Hebrew. These appeared along with texts by Bernard Lazare and Erich Mühsam, which likewise appeared in Hebrew for the first time.1 This essay focuses on Landauer’s Jewish identity and also deals briefly with his impact on the Kibbutz Movement. I shall first sketch the Jewish elements in Gustav Landauer’s life – which is not a simple task. His Jewish self-awareness seems to have developed over a long period of time, but in contrast to the other researchers, I see this not as evidence of some kind of discontinuity, but rather as an indication that Landauer became conscious of his Jewish identity in a slow process over time. Landauer grew up at a time when liberal Judaism was prevalent in Germany and highly pervasive in his native city of Karlsruhe. Liberal Judaism in that period was already in the process of becoming denominational, in other words, it began to align itself with religious perspectives on life similar to those found in other faiths. This denominational liberal Judaism comprised many elements, which essentially reflected general, even universal, perspectives on existence and belief, and hence dispensed with all the national elements of traditional religion. This was in marked contrast to the other trends in German Judaism, such as neo-Orthodoxy. Prayers were recited in Hebrew but a majority of the congregation were unable to understand their content. Many considered themselves to be Germans of the Jewish faith, or Germans living in a certain phase of that faith, and there was a rather limited emphasis on the normative rules and obligations. Of course,

1 C. Seligmann, and Y. Goren, eds., Lazare, Landauer, Mühsam: Jewish Anarchists (Ramat Efal: Yad Tabenkin Research Center, 1997); idem, eds., Gustav Landauer: About Him and By Him (Ramat Efal: Yad Tabenkin Research Center, 2009). Both these volumes are in Hebrew. The reference to the two earlier Hebrew volumes on Landauer are: A collection of essays on Landauer edited by Ya’akov Sandbank, Gustav Landauer. Twenty Years since His Assassination (Tel Aviv: The Hebrew Workers Federation in Eretz Yisrael, 1939) and Israel Cohen’s Hebrew translation of Aufruf zum Sozialismus and Die Revolution – these translations appeared in one volume published in Tel Aviv by Am Oved in 1951. Also see the Hebrew memorial volume by Shmuel Hugo Bergmann and Hans Kohn, In Memory of Gustav Landauer (Tel Aviv: Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair, 1929). (Paul Mendes-Flohr‘s note)

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these brief introductory comments present a rather sweeping and general picture of what was in fact a very nuanced form of Judaism. Urbanization played an important role in this regard. Urban Jews were more amenable to assimilation than were Jews in rural areas, who placed far more emphasis on tradition. In the case of Gustav Landauer, there appears to have been precious little in the way of normative Jewish observance in his parental home life. One exception relates to the death of his father. At the time, Landauer was in prison – or the cloister as he called it – and not for the first time. He received a seven-day furlough to sit shivah with his family, in keeping with the Jewish custom of mourning. There is no evidence in his writings to indicate whether he remained at home for the entire period, but we do know that the prison administration added on the seven days at the end of his sentence. Although the liberal Judaism of Landauer’s milieu was greatly susceptible to the threat of assimilation – and the danger of being absorbed into the surrounding society – it was actually a form of Judaism which allowed the individual to preserve his or her own inner Jewish essence (jüdische Substanz). For Landauer, as for many others, however, the process of identifying positively with Judaism was a lengthy one. The evidence for this can be found in a series of texts and articles in which Landauer either addresses or comments on Jewish problems, or deals with his own Jewishness. In a lecture he gave at the Neo-Philological Association of the University of Heidelberg, which was the first university he attended, he refers to Jesus of Nazareth, to the Essenes, to Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and to tolerance in the three monotheistic faiths. He also makes a host of other observations that point to his knowledge in the sphere of Judaism and its relationship to Christianity. That paper, entitled “Religion,” was unfortunately never published. Also, in the preface to Landauer’s novel, Ein Knabenleben, published posthumously in 1928, Max Kronstein (husband of Landauer’s daughter Charlotte) mentions that while studying in Berlin, Landauer attended the lectures of the philosopher Chaim Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899). It is hard to imagine that those lectures did not touch on Jewish topics. In his early work, Landauer often dealt with religious questions, for example in his article “Die religiöse Jugenderziehung” (“The Religious Education of Youth”), published in the journal Freie Bühne in 1891.2 In this article one has to read between the lines to discern any reference to Judaism, however, in a letter sent to his friend Ida Wolf in Berlin on 15 July 1891, he clearly addresses the problems of faith, doubt and religion and refers to his own situation: “I was never truly drawn to the standpoint of Jewish (or Christian) clergy, even in my earliest years. I owe this to my upbringing, which was devoid of religious faith as much 2 G. Landauer, “Die Religiöse Jugenderziehung,” Freie Bühne für modernes Leben (11 February 1891).



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as possible. I do not by any means have a religion, yet surely more so than most Orthodox Jews, but it is my own.”3 Here he seems to be confronting his Judaism or at least his awareness of belonging to the Jewish people. He uses the term ‘religious faith’ and also refers to those in his native Karlsruhe who were strictly Orthodox, forming a congregation that existed outside of the larger liberal community (Gemeinde). In 1898, Gustav Landauer published an article in the journal Die Zukunft, edited by Maximilian Harden, entitled “Der Dichter als Ankläger” (“The Poet as Accuser”). Without going into too much detail, I shall show how Landauer, as he himself stated, “writes first, as a Jew, second, as a German and third, as an anti-politician.”4 In my opinion, this statement is another indication of his acute awareness of Jewish issues at the time. Indeed, it would be impossible to overlook the significance of this period, in which the Dreyfus affair commanded much attention, especially among Jewish thinkers. In another article, “In Sachen Judentum” (“Of Things Jewish”), which appeared in 1901 in the Viennese periodical Die Zeit, he criticizes Helmut von Gerlach’s essay on anti-Semitism in Germany, which had appeared in an earlier issue. Landauer writes: “In the last issue of Die Zeit, Herr von Gerlach gives an objective report on the current attitudes of Germany’s non-Jewish majority toward the Jewish minority. [In it] he neglected to form any arguments of his own. I must confess that from the standpoint of culture, as well that of my Jewish qualities (!) I find it offensive when a modern person allows himself to report on such hateful hostilities without taking a stand.”5 It is not possible here to discuss the article in its entirety, but it is interesting to note that in it Landauer deals with the role of laws governing food, with the place of marriage and with the question of race in the shared life of modern society; naturally enough he adopts a modern position, but without neglecting the Jewish background to the issues. These then are some of the literary sources and incidents from Landauer’s youth that bear on his Jewish identity. Even though there are not a great number of statements to be found regarding Judaism or the fact of his being Jewish, it still appears justified to at least conclude that a certain jüdische Substanz – which, in my opinion was also present in liberal Judaism – played a role in this process. In subsequent years, it was to play an even larger role, particularly during the several years of friendship between Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber. The two met in the Neue Gemeinschaft (New Community), which the Hart brothers had 3 G. Landauer to Ida Wolf, 15 July 1891. Cited in Ruth Link-Salinger (Hyman), Gustav Landauer: Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977), 31, fn. 33. 4 G. Landauer, “Der Dichter als Ankläger,” Der Sozialist (5 February 1898). 5 G. Landauer, “In Sachen Judentum,” Die Zeit (23 February 1901).

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founded, and the encounter was definitely decisive for Landauer’s profound relationship with Judaism. From the time of their first acquaintance onward, he and Buber had a close – albeit often fairly strained – relationship, and a strong bond developed. However, it was not unusual for Landauer to experience tensions with close friends, and there was even friction between him and Fritz Mauthner. Landauer, whose attitude toward Judaism was of a decidedly Western European nature, became acquainted with Hasidism thanks to Buber, and experienced the fascination that was to attract other Jews with a similar Western European orientation, several years later. Buber introduced him to this movement and its meaning, and Landauer was captivated by it. Landauer read the legends of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav relatively early and, later, the stories of the Baal Shem, about which he published an article in Das literarische Echo in 1910.6 It should be mentioned here that he harbored many doubts about the article up until its publication. One should also mention the letter Buber wrote to his wife Paula Winkler in December 1906, in which he tells her, “by the way, Landauer read from the Nachman [book] at [Constantin] Brunner’s suggestion and wrote to me, saying that it had caused him “deepest joy, … was startling, astonishing, but also splendid.’”7 The correspondence between Landauer and Constantin Brunner (1862-1937) is still available to the public only in part, and many of the letters they exchanged are still not known to most scholars. Among the letters published in Buber’s first edition of Landauer’s correspondence is a letter from Landauer to Brunner, which is relevant to our subject. It should be mentioned that Brunner’s knowledge on Jewish subjects was not negligible. In one of the letters from 1909, Landauer takes issue with the views of Eugen Dühring, a well-known anti-Semite, arguing that Dühring’s prejudices notwithstanding, his writings on socialism were of worth and import. Confronting Brunner, who had apparently challenged Dühring, he writes: “Rest assured that I haven’t the slightest intention of forgetting even for a moment the pleasure [afforded by] my Judaism.” He adds, “my Judaism demands that I hold in disdain stock-market Jews, which there are, and the newspapers of stock-market Jews, which there also are, and to call them what they are.”8 This is without a doubt, a strong remark, especially for those times. But it does say something about how Landauer understood his Judaism. With regard to Landauer’s friend Fritz Mauthner, it must be noted from the outset that it is not possible here to delve adequately into the extensive correspondence between the two. I will only comment briefly on the Jewish “moments” 6 G. Landauer, “Die Legende des Baalschem,” Das literarische Echo 13, no. 2 (1910). 7 M. Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. Grete Schaeder (Heidelberg: LambertSchneider, 1972-1975) vol. 1, 252. 8 G. Landauer to C. Brunner, Lebensgang I, 261.



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in this relationship, such as, for instance, when Landauer wished Mauthner a “happy [Jewish] new year,” in one of his earliest letters.9 It is also worth noting the fact that Landauer went to great lengths to find for Mauthner the writings of Solomon Maimon, the Jewish scholar of Kant. In the figure of Solomon Maimon, one sees a rather remarkable phenomenon: a young Jewish scholar, emerging from the context of Hasidic Judaism, who regards German culture of the time as a stellar example of the Enlightenment. It is not clear why Mauthner, who was far removed from Jewish questions, was so keen to have the Maimon book, perhaps it had something to do with his family’s Frankist roots. Nevertheless, Landauer did find it for him. In another incident, which took place in 1906, Landauer defended Mauthner in response to an article in Ost und West, a Zionist journal, in which Mauthner was described as an apostate and anti-Semite. In a letter to Mauthner written on 18 May 1906, Landauer notes, “I haven’t seen Ost und West for over a year; Dr. Buber sometimes had an article in it in earlier years. If the journal has not changed its direction over the years, it is the organ of the Young Zionists who affirm their Judaism from a national-individual perspective and do not emphasize the religious aspects. For these and other social reasons, they want to engage in establishing a Jewish colony. So it appeals to me.”10 Landauer’s statement is interesting because it says something about himself and his position on Zionist settlement in Palestine. It can be understood as a national, Jewish or perhaps even a Zionist position, and in this way expresses something about his Judaism. Let us not forget that it was Landauer who demanded that Mauthner actively defend himself against the hostile propaganda. It is also important to note that Landauer generally took the Jewish standpoint in many discussions he had with Mauthner concerning Jewish questions, but Mauthner, who was clearly the more assimilated of the two, also admits to having an occasional Jewish line of thought. It appears that even Landauer’s friendship with Erich Mühsam was not without its Jewish concerns. One should note that Mühsam grew up in a relatively Orthodox family in Lübeck and surely knew more about normative Judaism than did Landauer. But in his few Jewish writings, for example, in the “Song of Golgotha,” which deals with Jewish questions and with Zionism, Mühsam displays a knowledge of Jewish subjects, with which his dear friend Landauer was surely also familiar. We now come to Landauer’s relationship with Hedwig Lachmann, his second wife and the daughter of the cantor of a small Jewish community in Krumbach in southern Germany. Hedwig Lachmann’s parents were conservative Jews. Her 9 G. Landauer to Fritz Mauthner, 11 September 1899, Mauthner Briefe, 25. 10 G. Landauer to Fritz Mauthner, 18 May, 1906, ibid., 129.

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father was a cantor and collected Jewish prayer melodies in that area of Germany. We may assume that Hedwig Lachmann at least brought with her Jewish experiences from her childhood. It appears that her brothers, especially Norbert, were particularly uncompromising in this regard. Landauer, for his part, saw Hedwig not only as the talented poet and translator from many languages, but also as his wife, “my Jewess,” and this influenced him greatly.11 It is not possible here to analyze Landauer’s A Call to Socialism on which there exist a number of unparalleled and extensive studies. Suffice it to say that the complexity of the ideas underlying this great “call” appears to be due in part to Landauer’s spiritual disposition, or what I have referred to above as his jüdische Substanz, in particular his affinity to questions of redemption and messianic thinking. These were the years in which Landauer took a stand on a great number of Jewish questions and in which his Judaism or his Jewish identity, as described above, was expressed more forcefully and profoundly. Hanna Delf von Wolzogen’s book, Gustav Landauer: Dichter, Ketzer, Außenseiter (“Poet, Heretic, Outsider”), introduces us to Landauer’s multi-faceted Jewish thinking in all its guises.12 One example is his rather harsh debate with his friend Julius Bab on Jewish poetry, in which he made a case for the proven poetic ability of the Jews, in contrast to Bab who rejected the argument.13 The article was published in Freistatt. Alljüdische Revue in 1913. Another key article is his “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” (“Are these Heretical Thoughts?”) which he wrote in 1913 for inclusion in a book entitled Vom Judentum (On Judaism), edited by Bar Kochba, the Zionist student association of Prague.14 Buber had solicited Landauer’s contribution to this volume, which had considerable resonance. Landauer’s publications and lectures of that period include his discussion on “Judentum und Sozialismus,” which he presented on different occasions, such as at the opening of the Jüdisches Volksheim in Berlin, founded by Siegfried Lehmann who was later a key figure in the children’s village at Ben Shemen in Israel. The meetings at the Jüdisches Volksheim, where Landauer held seven lectures on socialism, appear to have been decisive for him. There he met young Jews, including many from Eastern Europe; we know from various later reports that his lectures where enthusiastically received. At one point, Landauer also asked his daughter Charlotte in a letter of May 1916 to pay a visit to the Jüdisches Volksheim.15 11 “Ich dank Dir, Hedwig, Frau, Jüdin Meine.” See Lebensgang II, 61. 12 WA III. 13 See J. Bab, “Assimilation,” Die Freistatt: Alljüdische Revue, 1 (1913-14): 171-176; and G. Landauer, “Zur Poesie der Juden,” Die Freistatt, 22 (1913-14), 321-324. 14 G. Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?,” (1913; repr. in WM 1921). 15 G. Landauer to Charlotte Landauer, 19 May 1916, Lebensgang II, 136-137.



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Martin Buber, about whom Landauer had also written articles at the time, began editing the well-known journal Der Jude. In various issues of the journal, Landauer published articles, which especially affirm his sense of Jewish belonging and identity: “Eastern European Jews and the German State”; “A Serious Case and Unusual History”; “Christian and Christian, Jewish and Jewish”; and “The Merchant of Venice.” The latter warrants special attention, not only from a Jewish perspective, but also from a critical literary perspective, for it is an important scholarly contribution to studies on Shakespeare.16 In the last years of his life and in the wake of Hedwig Lachmann’s untimely death in February 1918, Landauer’s publications on topics pertaining to Judaism began to wane. It is, however, important to mention his exchange with the wellknown Zionist Nachum Goldmann (1895-1977) and his plans to take part in a meeting of socialist Zionist intellectuals. In the end he did not participate, possibly because of the general political situation in Germany, although the specific reasons are unknown. This was the short and tragic period in which he was drawn into the center of the political upheaval and revolutionary fervor in Munich, which was also the scene of his tragic death. In closing, a few short remarks on Landauer and the Kibbutz Movement are in order. It would be difficult to imagine the development of the Kibbutz Movement without the influence of the various youth movements, and more specifically the Zionist Youth Movement. It is not possible to give a uniform description of all the movements involved, because of the radical differences between them. However, the best source for understanding Landauer’s importance for the Zionist Youth Movement are the pamphlets and brochures which were published by these movements. For example, in Germany, Brit Olam’s Der junge Jude, or in Latvia, the Hashomer Hatzair Nezach, as well as Gordonia and Hashomer Hatzair, all printed works by Landauer. A Call to Socialism was widely printed, but texts such as Die Revolution, published in the series edited by Martin Buber, “Die Gesellschaft,” also received attention. These texts, not to mention the articles on the settlements and on the Sozialistische Bund (Socialist League), definitely had a great formative influence. In the Jewish workers movements in Germany, particularly in Hapoel Hatzair and its publications such as Die Arbeit, or in Joseph Hayim Brenner’s Adama, we find references to Landauer. In this context, Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann were particularly active in promoting his legacy. Landauer’s letters, which were edited by Buber, and published in the two-volume collection Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen (His Life in Letters), were read by a German-speaking public. Nevertheless, we should not exaggerate Lan16 See Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen, ed,. Martin Buber (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1920).

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dauer’s influence on the Kibbutz Movement. As time passed, far less attention was given to his life and work than had been in the early years of the movement. Yet in more recent years, the movement – perhaps as a result of having distanced itself from the Marxist Zionist conception of Ber Borochov (1881-1917) which was so dominant in previous years – seemed to undergo a general return to a humanistic socialism and a more libertarian conception of society, which in turn led to a certain Landauer revival. Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia, which devotes an important chapter to Landauer, also contributed to this renewed interest.17 In conclusion, the facts presented here in the form of statements or articles by Landauer on questions or aspects of Judaism, provide evidence for my hypothesis regarding Landauer’s positive Jewish orientation, based on what I refer to as “jüdische Substanz” or an inner Jewish essence. It is true that this development was slow in the early period, but the Jewish content of his writing became more pronounced during the years 1913-1917. In the final analysis, it is clear that Gustav Landauer saw himself as a Jew and lent expression to his Judaism on many occasions. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain – I would not be the first to ask, for example, whether Landauer knew Hebrew. One also wonders whether Landauer – who showed such a close affinity to the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart – had a substantial knowledge of Jewish mysticism, or whether his deep interest in mysticism arose from a perspective which took note of the anarchist – or at least antinomian – current in mystical thought. Ultimately, it seems justified to say that Gustav Landauer considered himself – as he considered Moses, Jesus and Spinoza – to be a true son of the Jewish people. Translated from the German by Eric Jacobson

17 M. Buber, Paths in Utopia, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).

Ernst Simon

Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude: Gustav Landauer’s Development as a Human Being and Jew1 In reverent gratitude to the living memory of Rabbi Dr. N. A. Nobel2

1 For danger is the gateway of deep reality, and reality is the highest prize of life and God’s eternal birth. Martin Buber in Daniel 3

Both as a calling and as a theme of writing, politics today has lost much of the prestige it enjoyed a hundred and fifty, even fifty years ago. The vicissitudes of imperial, wartime, and reformist Germany have together contributed to a situation in which an individual given to higher aspirations, while firmly believing himself able to develop his “talent” (or rather talents) in the “flow of the world,” nonetheless deems “tranquility” (Stille) essential for the cultivation of his “character.” But the platitude, so deeply indicative of our time, about politics corrupting character, denotes the very opposite of the verse from Tasso, which we have just invoked.4 However, alongside this transformation in valuation is another of opposite tendency in practice: the pursuit of politics, the unrestrained devotion to its ties and temptations, has, contrary to the age wherein it was esteemed, 1 Ernst Simon, “Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude.” Der Jude 6, (May 1922): 458-475. Trans. by Carl Ebert. We should like to thank Uriel Simon for permission to republish his father’s essay. For an alternative translation, under the title “The Maturing of Man and the Maturing of the Jew,” see A. A. Cohen, ed. The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber’s “Der Jude,” 1916-1918, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (University, Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1980), 130-146. Notes introduced by an asterisk are by Ernst Simon, all other enumerated notes are by Paul Mendes-Flohr. 2 Nehemia Anton Nobel (1871-1922) was a learned and charismatic Orthodox rabbi, who exercised a profound influence on young German Jewish intellectuals. 3 *M. Buber, Daniel. Gespräche von Verwirklichung (Leipzig: Insel, 1913). 4 The allusion is to Torquato Tasso, a verse play by J. W. Goethe, which traces the emerging conflict between the poet Tasso and the statesman Antonio, signifying the spiritual and moral tension between the artist and practical individual devoted to action.

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risen immensely. Both these phenomena stand in such a relationship to one another that the politician of today cedes to the demands of so-called reality, and observes the crumbling of his character in perfect resignation; he knows his fate and cynically admits that, after all, he cannot change it. Tacitly or openly, lying is granted him as a tool of his trade, just as the poet is granted “poetic license,” the lawyer the duty to “defend his client under any circumstances,” the merchant tax evasion, and the burglar the use of the picklock. In those cases and amid those circles which have accommodated themselves to the trades under discussion, the verdict regarding the individual is secondary to what he “otherwise” (i.e., outside his métier) does and is. For those who find themselves unable to accept this, there is no recourse but to reject this corrupt world, [withdrawing] into solitude or to the literary café. Nevertheless, in such times of transition, there repeatedly appear solitary and tragic men, considered utopians by their contemporaries. They want to confirm their “character,” their existence and its meaning, not in sheltered solitude, but in perilous activity. They are cognizant of the hopelessness of their struggle at present, but believe in its triumph in the world of true reality, which they are helping to build. They pursue politics with the “non-political” means of truth, although, and because, they know just as well as the cynics that this does not work. Their call for socialism, for a true state, for a genuine community, has borne various names in the history of mankind, and produced various effects. The succession of these men and their deeds betokens die werdende Menschheit (‘becoming’ humanity) – and Gustav Landauer’s life and death stands before us as their (for the time being) latest representative.

2 God finds no room in someone who is full of Him. Buber in Baal Shem5

Plato and Jesus, Solon’s seisachtheia [releasing the Athenians from the onerous burden of debt], and the similarly conceived remission in the Jubilee Year of ancient Israel – these comprise Landauer’s lineage, insofar as he was the scion of mankind. And, as a scion of his time, which he surely was, he also had mentors of diverse casts, but always of exceptional stature.

5 *M. Buber, Legende des Baalschem (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1908).



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In his first theoretical work, Skepsis und Mystik (“Skepticism and Mysticism”),6 he aims to elaborate Fritz Mauthner’s “critique of language,”7 in the formulation of which he had already taken part. The young and vehemently consistent thinker undertakes a kind of epistemological Bolshevism, seeking the way to a new edifice by means of total destruction. As already in Mauthner, the word is shown to be the omnipotent master of our thought and life, and for this very reason is exposed in all its nullity. The constancy of substance and material is drawn into the endless ebb and flow of events, and for this very reason is raised to new meaning: the point of confluence and evening out of counter-currents. Belief in God, the creator, and in the world he wrought, succumbs to a form of atheism which seeks to prove that this representation is our representation, that is to say, the work of man, an idol – which, for this very reason, affords the creative ego the possibility of creating God and the world anew, or (as Landauer preferred to express it) to be God and the world. It is thus that the deepest skepticism engenders the highest mysticism. We can recognize in this world-view the traces of Plato’s poetry of ideas, Meister Eckhart’s God-intimacy (Gottinnigkeit), the pantheism (Naturbeseelung) of Spinoza and Goethe, and Fichte’s ego-pride (IchStolz) in a singular and meaningful transfiguration, whereby ego-pride is tempered by the skeptical knowledge of the (alas!) so dubious nature of this word: I – the God-intimacy of its circumscribed compass released by the expanse of an all-embracing love of nature and the world, so that every element is changed and transformed by every other, and absorbed into something new and whole. Thus Landauer’s world-view possesses the self-enclosure of a system of philosophy – not, however, in such a way that his edifice stands complete before us as in Hegel’s Encyclopedia or in Hermann Cohen’s great œuvre,8 but rather in the systematic concern for unity (Einheitsbezug), which reigns in Landauer’s writings and actions. This basic attitude pulses and breathes through all his articles, lectures, and criticism; indeed, it forms their very essence. His Aufruf zum Sozialismus (“A Call to Socialism”),9 Die Revolution,10 as well as his earlier collec6 *Skepsis, 1903. 7 Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923) pioneered the philosophical critique of ordinary language. A radical nominalist, he characterized as “word superstition” the assumption that reality can be known through language and the corresponding belief that all words refer to something real. The philosopher’s task is to show that what we commonly regard as substance, as things in themselves, are social conventions. Ordinary speech then has a pragmatic, but no epistemic value. 8 *H. Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, 1st ed. (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1919). Mendes-Flohr: In the subsequent editions of this posthumously published work the definite article “Die” was dropped as a misunderstanding of Cohen’s intention. 9 *Aufruf, 1911. 10 *Revolution.

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tion of essays, Rechenschaft (“An Accounting”),11 and to no less a degree his new and highly significant Der werdende Mensch (“The Becoming Man”),12 invariably show the entire man; it is invariably Gustav Landauer. His ego is never full of the overflowing sense of his own existence; it is always imbued with God, the world, and one’s brethren on earth. And it is at this point that another lineage enters, one represented by the great names of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. The misleading word influence should also be eschewed when Landauer’s relationship to these anarchists is considered. It is better to think of the palpable and cogent image of lineage, just as every person discovers within himself characteristics and impulses of long-dead ancestors, whose direct influence he cannot experience. So it is, in essence, with Landauer’s totally original thought. What he wrote about Walt Whitman also applies to himself: “Although Whitman read much, he was by no means merely a reader (Leser) and compiler (Zusammenleser); he took into himself only what was already there.” And this is how it should be construed, when we find tenets of his precursors in Landauer’s social teachings (as in his philosophical position). First of all, he held three basic notions in common with Proudhon, whom, in grateful acknowledgement, he customarily called the “greatest socialist”: hostility toward the State and its principle of murderous mechanization, which stifles life and misuses it for such virulent purposes as war and exploitation; the conception of Money, which evolved from a useful means of exchange into a detrimental end in itself, and via baneful embryonic segmentation begot the abhorrent monster of taxation; but also its positive counterpoise – the idea of the co-operative, of free and mutual aid, not, however, in the limited form of the barter bank, which was feasible in Proudhon’s time, but not in ours. Landauer’s desire to abolish the Bodensperre (“land enclosure”), to employ Franz Oppenheimer’s expression [for private property], reminds one of Bakunin’s communism; his principle, which he happily defined in both theory and practice as “reciprocal action” (not a trite term for him), recalls Kropotkin’s “mutual aid”; and his sharp repudiation of violence, his protest against using unholy means to a holy end, his religious will to shatter the vicious cycle of cause and effect, utopia and topia [i.e., unromantic reality], revolution and restoration, in order to finally start afresh, and break new ground – is reminiscent of Tolstoy. And so he becomes the fiercest – and sometimes unjust – opponent of all attempts to scientifically foreordain the fate of men and nations, and thereby preclude the possibility in principle of such a new “ground-breaking.” Marx’s economic concep11 *Rechenschaft (Berlin: E. Fleischel, 1903). 12 *Edited by Martin Buber in accordance with Landauer’s will and published by Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1921.



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tion of history, Freud’s materialistic psychology, and Hegel’s dialectic ascent – as shackles on the free act of the revolutionary man – were all equally repugnant to him. Higher development and progress, socialism and world peace – these will surely not arise, if we, as men, fail to bring them about at this very moment and in this very place. The rebirth of the world will issue from the rebirth of the “I.” Landauer’s mystical desire to “find the cosmos incarnate in himself,” is also the basis of his social philosophy, which, beginning with the smallest cell, the commune (Gemeinde), in which “love dwells,” spreads outwards organically in ever wider circles, seeking to construct the community of a free people on free soil. “Neither the moral Philistine nor the Übermensch is the aim of the cosmos” – but rather, so we may continue, the free citizen. This conviction already obtains in Skepticism and Mysticism, and reveals the common source of Landauer’s philosophical and economic ideas.

3 To love one’s fellow men means to feel their need and to bear their suffering. Rabbi Moshe Leib in Buber’s Great Maggid13

How can the ‘idea’ and the ‘world’ find one another and jointly beget ‘reality’? – this is Landauer’s key question. Reality is a problem for him. He does not accept it with the naive realism of someone who has faith in the word, nor does he discard it with the naive idealism of the philosophy professor; it is rather that he wrestles with it in thought and deed. Neither surfeit nor lassitude, neither complacency nor aversion are, in his view, attitudes worthy of the true man; it is rather that the will to change and the strength to persevere are indispensable. That “which transpires in the lengthy course between the ‘I’ and God, between the rapacious drive and servitude, is life.” Life – but not suffering! And if he cited Strindberg’s confession, “I am condemned to suffering,” with deep empathy, we are entitled to say that Gustav Landauer himself was condemned to ‘life.’ He bears his fate with joy, well-being, and natural vigor. A handsome figure, he peers into the world through clear eyes, and no illusion saddens his gaze or lightens the deed. He foresees that this war must come, and he knows and prophesies that Social Democracy will not be able to prevent it, but, indeed, will abet it, and even that 13 *M. Buber, Der grosse Maggid und seine Nachfolge (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1922). Cf. Buber, Tales of the Hasidim. The Later Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1948), 86.

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the Revolution will only be powerful in the negative, and will then go to wrack on the urgently needed provisional government, because it resorted to the falsest means: terror. That he is keenly cognizant of this can be seen with ruthless clarity in his writings. And so this great man, deemed a compromiser by visionaries, a visionary by compromisers, was, in actuality, one of those rare individuals whose vision is unclouded. This is what gives these individuals that uncanny assuredness of a dream, or, as Landauer preferred to say, of a ‘delusion’ (Wahn). Just as mysticism arose out of skepticism, and the community evolved out of the “I,” so the antitheses are likewise bound up in a unity on this most central ground: the ‘will to delusion’ arises from knowledge of the world. It is the true motive of all action: God, nation, humanity are at one and the same time delusion and reality, just as in Strindberg’s Dream Play (whose ‘concrete fantasy’ Landauer admired), life takes form only from dream and drive in tandem. In order to fully comprehend the selfsame notion of Landauer’s ‘delusion,’ Mauthner’s ‘conscious illusion,’ Hölderlin’s ‘myth,’ Buber’s ‘legend,’ Strindberg’s ‘dream,’ as well as Ibsen’s ‘life-lie’ (on a deeper level, being pragmatic), one should not imagine something vague or fanciful, but rather a reality concealed in the midst of life. Landauer, who dubs the reality of nation (Volk) [translated here as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ depending on the context] “a genuine delusion,” and for whom revolution possesses “the harried tempo of a dream,” expresses the concreteness he has in mind in the following terms: “Fantasy, the ideal of delusion … is life itself. How could we live, if we did not dream?” And, as in his language critique, where words considered as elements of logic are only ‘metaphors,’ and thereby become ‘symbols,’ so the ethical will of the “language critic of praxis” forges the realities of dream and delusion for the sphere of action. The truth to which we sacrifice ourselves becomes the delusion. Still, we should sacrifice ourselves, knowing in so doing that this transformation is taking place. So it was that he offered up his life to truth, to delusion, to reality – to revolution. In philosophical discourse, “pre-established harmony” denotes the state which can only be fully attained in the fairy tale (Märchen), in which all things accord with one another. Good is always triumphant, and evil is always punished. After the baneful fairy, Sleeping Beauty finds another, who blesses her. The beggar couple in Rabbi Nachman’s tale find seven beggar friends, who had once favored them with kindness, and who now, one after the other, grace each of the seven days of the wedding as a “new face.”14 For the law prescribes that new guests have to be present, if all seven blessings are to be spoken. Thus the tale and the law seek the same result. In real life, however, this situation does not exist, any more than does its opposite, “pre-established disharmony,” in 14 *M. Buber, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1906).



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which everything is out of joint, and which places us in the realm of ‘tragedy. Our life runs between harmony and disharmony, between delusion and the world, between fairy tale and tragedy. In their aura (but not necessarily in their issue), times pregnant with meaning approach the placid world of the fairy tale; times devoid of meaning resemble tragedy, in which heaven and earth are rent apart. Philosophers who are content with their age (e.g., Aristotle, Leibniz, and Hegel) cast their systems in the reassuring form of pre-established harmony; those who are discontent choose utopia, parable, fairy tale, delusion. This observation should help to clarify two points. First of all, the extent to which these men of delusion act axiomatically. They literally tread with the “self-assurance of sleep-walkers,” and their existence is balanced and symmetrical like a work of art in the classical tradition of form, until – and this is the second point! – they succeed in forging an active ‘force’ out of their ‘nature,’ until, that is, they are obliged to actualize their delusion. At this moment they are displaced from the realm of fairy tale to that of tragedy. Nevertheless, here, too, they preserve the Apollonian aura of their inner self-assurance, and it is precisely this trait that accords their life its lucid sanctity, and their death its placid joy. They ‘know’ of the world’s unhappiness, they are alert to it, but do not ‘believe’ in it. For a yearning resides in them, and it repeatedly drives them out into the sphere of trial and temptation; it is the yearning for a world commensurate with themselves. What is hard for them to bear is the self-imposed solitude. How hard it was for Landauer is shown by his interpretations of Goethe as a politician and of the poet Hölderlin in Der werdende Mensch (“The Becoming Man”). Here, too, the more vividly and truly he discusses such great men, he is speaking wholly about himself. And this is the bliss and fatality, the office and defeat of all those fairy-tale people in the realm of tragedy: they seek the reciprocal action, the equipoise, the unity between dream and instinct, between delusion and the world. It is not compromise they seek – compromise, in which both elements are stripped of their essentials in order to become capable of union. Nor is it synthesis, in which their essentials are extinguished, neutralized in the process of fusing together. It is rather that unity of a higher order, for which not even Landauer can think of a better term than ‘reciprocal action,’ in which both elements, remaining intact, forge reality in an endless process of give and take. Landauer is so completely possessed by this fundamental precept of his theory and practice that he even views Shakespeare wholly in its light: the conflict and recurrent reconciliation between “instinct and spirit,” which he discovers in him ever anew (in his two-volume work, Shakespeare, posthumously published by Martin Buber in the publishing house of Rütten & Loening, Frankfurt a. M., 1920), and which signifies, on the plane of poetry, nothing other than Landauer’s own constructive

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political endeavors on the plane of life. The final act of the “Merchant of Venice,” in which all the contradictions are bound up in a cheerful play arising from the depths [of despair], is hardly to be distinguished from the ideal which induced him to inject his Socialist League (Sozialistischer Bund) directly into the tragic reality of our days. It is this will to unity which explains the singularity of Landauer’s style, in which incompatible notions, such as “hopelessly joyous,” are placed abruptly side by side, in order to show that their association delimits their respective meanings. When he writes of Whitman that he unites, “like Proudhon, with whom he is intellectually akin in many things, the conservative and revolutionary spirit, idealism and socialism”; when he avers that in the Jubilee Year ancient Israel possessed “sedition as its constitution”; when he represents Tolstoy and Rousseau as “a unity of rationalism and ardent mysticism”; when he concedes true artistic freedom only to the “play of necessity”; when he deems “apathy imbued with action” the most important property of revolutionary enterprise – we sense ever more forcefully and vividly behind these biographical depictions and political maxims the great dual-unity (Zwei-Einheit) of his humanity. He was a “gentle hero,” as Shakespeare called Brutus – Brutus, in whom Landauer saw more than a model, a reflection of his own self, his true brother. But he was too high-minded to love just his correlates: Cassius, noble and driven, Caesar, conscious of his greatness, even Shylock, ruinous and smoldering … them, too, he dubbed man and brother. He belonged to that rare breed of those who know the nature of men and yet love them. His love for humanity is not self-deception; his recognition does not become hardness; it is rather that knowledge and love grow together in him, as they grew together in the spirit of the Hebrew language, which has the same word for these deepest antitheses (tiefste Gegensätze) of human conduct.15 For Gustav Landauer was a Jew.

4 They had hastened the end, and were burnt up in its breath. Buber in his introduction to the Great Maggid

In his book, Der werdende Mensch, (“The Becoming Man”) all of Gustav Landauer’s key essays “Concerning Life and Letters” are brought together. It includes his 15 In biblical Hebrew the word for erotic love and knowledge is identical, da’at.



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national Jewish and likewise German confession, which, written for the Zionist collection, Concerning Judaism, bore the title: “Are These Heretical Thoughts?”16 In fact, they are heretical thoughts, but of a fertile and liberating nature. And they offer us an opportunity to consider Landauer’s position on Judaism incisively and critically within the framework of his overall philosophy. Landauer was early aware of his blood[-tie], even when he wrote Skepticism and Mysticism. “A man’s race and his racial community are his innermost and most secret essence.” Thus he was a national Jew from the moment of his earliest self-scrutiny, when he probingly scanned the foundations of his own being. But for him “nation” was no more a criterion of exclusivity than any other concept. He deemed himself bound to the German nation no less than to the Jewish, to the elect nation of the “spiritual” just as much as to that of a “becoming mankind,” to the nation of individuals as much as to that of the proletariat. His definition of “nation” is extremely broad, as can be inferred from the above examples. Literally it reads as follows: “Nation is the particular way in which collective humanity and the discrete individual express themselves in a society which has coalesced on the basis of shared history.”*17 The simplest criterion of this commonality for him is language, whose special forms of expression he examines with a mind honed by his language-critical approach. Thus there arises for him the possibility of being a Frenchman, if he “can wholly understand a French turn of phrase without having to translate it.” On the other hand, he also feels himself akin to those who “in foreign nations belong as individuals to Walt Whitman’s nation (Volk).”18 By this he means not Americans per se, but Walt Whitman Americans. A common language is merely the simplest and clearest, but by no means the only form by which a sense of community can be expressed. There is another which exists within different language domains, and thus Landauer – in this very study – expressly recognizes the Jewish people, despite being divided by language, as a people (Volk). Thus we confront here an exceptional expansion of the concept of “nation,” one which, by the laws of logic, entails the contraction of its contents. Not land, not language, not race, but rather a common mode of expression based upon a common history (which can also be the history of the world proletariat) forms the foundation of a nation. But shared experiences of this kind in the past and present 16 “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” Vom Judentum, ed. Jüdischer Studentenverein Bar Kochba, Prague (Leipzig: K. Wolf, 1913), 250-57. For an abridged translation, see P. Mendes-Flohr and J. Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World. A Documentary History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 27-28. 17 *From his essay, “The Problem of Nation,” in Der werdende Mensch. 18 The reference is to Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself.”

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can link the man of culture with diverse circles, and therein resides the possibility for Landauer of belonging to diverse “nations” simultaneously, above all the German and the Jewish. “My German-ness [Deutschtum] and my Judaism are by no means detrimental to one another, and in much they are mutually beneficial.” He refused to hear of an Either/Or, and believed himself capable of abiding by an “And,” one which, here too (in the sense of our prior observation), was not to be construed as an idle compromise (that of assimilation), nor as a vague synthesis (some sort of East-West cultural mélange), but rather as clear reciprocal action between two clear components. “I have never felt the need to simplify myself, or to unify myself by means of self-abnegation; I accept the complexity that I am, and hope to be an even more multifarious unity than I am now aware of.” It is self-evident that the Jewish component in this complex had its clearly delineated task; and, to be sure, it is the “office” of the Jewish people “to steadfastly await, in exile and dispersion, the coming of the Messiah, and to be the Messiah of the nations.” This theory of mission coincides very closely with the well-known doctrine of liberalism (i.e., liberal Judaim), and has to be exactingly distinguished from it. It was not Gustav Landauer’s intention to pave the way to a ‘becoming’ mankind via the abstract dissemination of Judaism’s “ethical postulates,” but rather by founding the Socialist League, by furthering just communities of men in Germany and throughout the world, including Palestine. The ethos of his messianic campaign is enormously different from that of liberalism. But – and it is imperative to add this – this enormous difference is just one of degree. It is from this Jewish perspective that Landauer undertakes his deeply concerned, yet severe criticism of the Renaissance movement of the Jewish people – Zionism.19 It was with uncanny acumen that he recognized its point of weakness, which was then (1913) hardly as patent as today: the danger of vacuous nationalism, which, spinning around itself like a whirring wheel, is yet lacking the connecting drive-belt, and hence the possibility of moving something else, something concrete, the machine, the actual people. “Nation is a readiness or disposition which grows stale and empty and rackety, if it occurs without any attachment to objective reality, to tasks and projects, if it is other than their source and temper.” We can affirm that the two thousand years of the Diaspora, replete, as they were, with the creation and elaboration of the Talmud, were possessed of a high culture. But not of movement! And we have to admit that Zionism often gives the impression of wishing to jettison the entire cultural ballast of the past, and to be nothing other than movement, and yet to represent the entire people. Culture 19 Cf. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), ch. 1.



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without movement is dead, and movement without culture is empty, and Gustav Landauer believed that Zionism, together with the Jewish people, was prone to this latter danger. Still, it was not himself that he wanted to move, but others; he wanted to act, and not to wait; he wanted a passionate present, the here and now, and could not content himself with the vain promise of future work and fulfillment. But an empty movement, such as he deemed Zionism to be, has no present, but only a distant goal; it finds no resistance in the objective world which abrades and constrains and renders it fearsome, but only self-promotion, the propulsion of itself as a movement. For this reason it demands that its recruits renounce their present and aspire to be nothing other than “a bridge for coming generations, a preparation, seed and fertilizer.” However, “no-one who feels a calling within himself … is capable of living in suspension.” “To be a nation means to have an office” – and to fulfill this office with one’s own strength during the brief term of one’s human life. Landauer’s ‘today’ was socialism, his ‘here’ was German soil and the German language – and so Zion possessed no reality for him, nor was Hebrew the expression of his Jewish soul. It is conceivable that his point of view represents the most ingenious and yet most human conception which has even been set in opposition to Zionism. Nevertheless, in abiding reverence for Landauer’s high intellect and even higher life, we shall yet attempt to refute his ideas in terms of his own approach. In the realm of fairy tale, of delusion, of pre-established harmony, the choice of the right way occurs only once, and never again – just as in the world of tragedy. But life, which runs between these two extremes, is the realm of decision, or of degree. Landauer knew this very well, and once even stated explicitly that differences of degree are what is truly decisive in life. But it exceeds the strength of a man to encroach upon the land of tragedy from two sides simultaneously, and to expose his ‘fairy-tale’ security to this double danger. And because he built while searching for ‘becoming’ mankind, and searched while building, it escaped him that Judaism today is not delusion, but world, not reality, but becoming. On account of the ‘becoming’ man, he forgot the ‘becoming’ Jew, or was unable to perceive him, and demanded perfection of things and men in the process of development. Thus, the caricature of the Zionist movement displaced its authentic image; he failed to appreciate sufficiently its stern corporeality, which is embodied in the incipient reconstruction of the land; he did not perceive the fair actuality which blossoms from the self-discovery of the scions of the nation who have already set off; he did not understand sufficiently that the same was underway here as in his Socialist League: to rebuild the world on a small and modest scale, from the cell up, but to begin today, and “not hasten Redemption.” The decision to undertake the long trek and the will to active perseverance were so vivid to him in his socialist endeavor, and so totally absorbed by it, that he asked the impossible

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of Zionism. He was most disturbed by the ‘self-consciousness’ of Jewish national sentiment, by the convulsive manner in which it sought to convince itself and others of something which was, after all, self-evident. “Seek not, and ye shall find”20– it was something of this sort he might have cried to the yearning Jew. “Seek not – and ye shall then have all ye seek.”21 It follows directly from this attitude that – despite “Beilis”22 and Shylock! – he did not see Judaism in its tragic discord, and he posed a challenge to it which is doubtless valid for the ultimate questions, for God, but not for the penultimate ones, which stir us as men, if we are Zionists or socialists. “Socialism, which stands so very high for me, does not stand so high that I bind it to the absolute; likewise, the verbal expression for world-feeling (Weltgefühl) does not stand so high for me that I make the desire for the way of life (Lebensordnung) of men, for socialism, dependent upon concord in these options of expression.” Landauer affirms this in his essay “God and Socialism,” and we can let his statement here testify against himself.23 Zionism is the desire for the way of life of Jews – and thus is exempt from this metaphysical inquiry, just as much as socialism is. This does not mean, in either case (nor does Landauer so intend it), that no connection exists between the two; on the contrary, the penultimate is impossible without the ultimate: the world without God, becoming without delusion. But other criteria apply to action! Here there is decision and choice, consciousness and will, overcoming and strength – not only marveling and nature, matter-of-factness and charming play, as in God’s realm of fairy tale. “If socialism were contingent upon a consensus of men concerning the purpose of human life, then it would be a sorry state of affairs. Compared to these bold questions and incomparably bolder answers, socialism is a very unassuming business.” “This is rather socialism’s greatness, that it leads us away from verbal constructions to the construction of reality. That it unites men in the clear perception of what needs to be done in order to address the moment, men who in word and delusion are not agreed and do not care to be.” Let us substitute Zionism for socialism, and Landauer provides the answer for himself. The fear, too, of being just a bridge is voided by this observation. Landauer himself maintained that every period is “one of decay and simultaneously one of preparation and renewal.” It is merely the Hegelian notion that we find intolera20 Cf. Matthew 7:7. 21 Simon is referring to the rabbinic caveat not to undertake acts to hasten the end of days, i.e., Jews should wait with patient faith for the Redemption. 22 The reference is to the Beilis Trial. In July 1911 the Ukrainian Jew Menachem Mendel Beilis (1874-1934) was accused of killing a Christian child in order to draw his blood for ritual purposes. The trial of Beilis, which took place in Kiev, commanded international attention and condemnation as a regression to medieval bigotry. Beilis was ultimately acquitted. 23 “Gott und der Sozialismus.” Der Sozialist, 15 June 1911.



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ble – that certain periods, namely, are more transitional than others, and hence merely a step toward an epoch of a higher order. In reality, however, every period is simultaneously the manure and the blossom, just as a man is simultaneously son and father. It is exactly in this sense that we Zionists feel the entire immediacy of being Jews and men: the sons of fathers and the fathers of sons simultaneously … finally, after thousands of years, capable of truly being both. It was just so that Landauer felt himself a member of ‘becoming’ mankind, and the herald and precursor of all its members who would follow in his wake. In the ever-flowing stream of humanity, the individual of course finds not his place of repose, but rather his place of action – and it is precisely as such that his task grants him the longed-for sense of being present and the active awareness of the here and now. And so we can apply Landauer’s saying concerning socialism to ourselves, and believe together with him: “Those who live after us will thank us, even if it is not for them, but for ourselves, our own souls, that we live. For it is thereby that we live for them.” If Gustav Landauer had seen Zionism as it must be seen, as an affair of the in-between realm we call life, which is inhabited by figures from both fairy tale and tragedy, but not controlled by them, his theory of the nation would have been clearer and more distinctly limned. How could it remain hidden from him that a difference of degree exists between the sublime manner of “being a Frenchman” by linguistic empathy and the cultural circumstances which defined him as a German – and, moreover, that his being German had to accommodate itself to the historical and biological potency which made him a Jew in all thought and deed? He never posed himself the question concerning the primacy of his belonging to his own or a foreign nation, and therefore he answered it amiss – that is to say, in favor of his German-ness. By the same token, he neglected to pose himself the question concerning the primacy of the task confronting the Jewish people today. His theory of mission is premature. Many Zionists hope eventually to supplant and realize the liberal notion of world happiness by means of national work for humanity in Eretz-Israel, and each of our practical steps should derive its meaning and benediction from this final goal. But it is precisely for this reason that these practical steps have to be taken, just as Landauer was not prepared to await the state of the future, but, proceeding from the Socialist League, sought to establish the Kingdom of God by degrees. It proves necessary to repeat ad nauseam that basically the same applies here, since Landauer’s lofty image is readily exploited by those of tepid and torpid disposition, the bourgeois idealists and idle dreamers, to shroud their own weakness. The simplistic demand for “All or Nothing” is costly and dangerous for the one who draws the inference of “All” and dies. The bourgeois, by contrast, experiences this demand as a psychological (seelisch) safety-valve, just as

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charity and social legislation are the capitalist’s economic safety-valve. The bourgeois cites them gladly to the revolutionary, but he himself draws the inference of “Nothing”! And thus we must ponder this gruesome fact over and over: that on 2 May 1919, Gustav Landauer was assassinated in Munich by white beasts.24

5 To him who dies in defeat, the abyss speaks its merciless word. Buber’s eulogy for Landauer, The Holy Way.25

“And then they slew him!” This announcement, appearing under Landauer’s picture in the socialist weekly Freie Welt causes us pain anew every time we think of his death. But before we venture to interpret his end on the basis of his life and work, and even trace it back to a noble fallacy, it is necessary to yield once again to the feeling of sadness and rage in our hearts. But then we are permitted to honor Gustav Landauer’s death with the tribute of objectivity and inquire as to its meaning. He died amidst a foreign people, and on the soil of a foreign spirit and substance. He brought his Jewish passion and his Jewish pace of life and change to bear upon slower and more ponderous men. And it is upon this schism that his task came to grief. When Landauer speaks of Hölderlin’s deep yearning for harmony with his surroundings and his dread of the terrible loneliness that afflicts one who is misunderstood, he is presaging the contours of his own destiny. And so we may aver that Friedrich Hölderlin’s madness and Gustav Landauer’s death belong to the same matrix – that both betoken the martyrdom of a burning will that was unable to abide and persevere. But what is truly painful about Landauer’s end, even more so than the dimming of the most brilliant of all German Hellenes, is this: that his destiny was fallacy and not fulfillment, that it was not tragic, albeit so sad. We certainly do not mean to claim that he would have found complete fulfillment within the context of the Jewish people, but we nevertheless believe

24 The allusion is to the so-called “White Troops,” dispatched by the federal government in Berlin to suppress the Räterrepublik established in April 1919, and in which Landauer served as the commissioner for “Enlightenment and Public Instruction.” 25 M. Buber, Der heilige Weg. Ein Wort an die Jugend und die Völker (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1919). This booklet was dedicated to the memory of Gustav Landauer.



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that the deepest understanding and the most far-reaching of possibilities would have been his portion. And there is something else that renders his death so terrible: Gustav Landauer died because he failed to see Zionism in its living substance, because he challenged it plainly to be a realm of fairy tale and delusion. For once he made things too easy for himself – and for this single error he died. The bourgeois who compromises with, or dodges “reality” lengthens his days and lightens his office; the hero, however, who bears the godly onus in this world, falls through such mistakes. It is here that his sad end is elevated to the sphere of tragedy, where it otherwise does not belong. In his Great Maggid,26 Martin Buber relates the following wonderful story of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, who was the last to plant Hasidism on the soil of the Holy Land: At the time when Rabbi Menachem resided in the Land of Israel, it happened that, without being noticed, a foolish man climbed the Mount of Olives, and blew the shofar from its summit. The news quickly spread among the people in tumult that this was the hornblast that heralded the Redemption. When the tidings came to Rabbi Menachem’s ears, he opened the window, gazed out into the world, and said: “There’s nothing new outside.”

It was in like manner that Gustav Landauer felt obliged to address Zionism. But it was with respect to his own cause, socialism, that he experienced this before his end. Gustav Landauer erred. He had to. But Goethe’s saying in the Aufgeregten (“The Aroused”), which he himself once invoked, also applies to himself: “One can go astray on the right path, and follow the false one rightly.”

6 One always wishes to bring together everything one loves in the same manner. Landauer in Skepticism and Mysticism

Martin Buber once summed up the essentials of his religious demand, whereby it was requisite “to mould the Absolute from the substance of the earth, to sculpt God’s face from the slab of the world.” It is with these words that Gustav Landauer’s faith can also be defined. 26 Buber, Der grosse Maggid und seine Nachfolge.

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So we see that these two men, bound by deep friendship throughout their lives, were in accord in the depths of their being. Buber, whose systematic expositions in Daniel and in his discourses concerning Judaism are complemented (not by chance, but in a highly meaningful way) by historical and field research in the realm of Hasidism, is also a philosopher within the Hasidic world. But Gustav Landauer’s mental make-up is likewise to be understood on this basis. For (admittedly unbeknown to himself) he, too, was a Hasid. The methodological foundation of his philosophy is language critique, which in Hasidic thinking means taking the word in earnest, being accountable toward it. It is easy to perceive that language critique and letter-based mysticism contradict one another only on first impression, that, in actuality, they are different forms of the same impulse, namely, to construct the world-ego (Welt-Ich) from the word-ego (Wort-Ich). Freedom vis-à-vis the word, which language critique affords us, is not to be construed in the main as freedom from the word, but equally and even more so as freedom toward and in the word, the freedom of interpretation and of that mysticism which springs from skepticism. Now whether, in Buber’s Great Maggid, the Rebbe of Rymanow judges the abuse of the word to be the equivalent of murder, or whether Landauer seeks to prove that the humanity of modern writers is prone to puppet-like frivolity by dint of their “seraphic” style – in both cases it is the same thing. In the positive sense as well: just as a Hasidic tradition justifies its pantheism, its Spinozist deus sive natura, in that the numerical value of Hebrew letters for ha-teva (nature) and elohim (God) is identical, so Landauer once derived the Middle Ages in its entirety from the verbal radical “fro,” which first of all means Lord (Fronleichnam), and then produces the appropriate mood, that of joy (Freude), whilst imposing its opposite, forced labor (Fronarbeit), on the serfs, and finally in its ultimate meaning, frouwe (mistress, woman), it also added Minnedienst (love service, i.e., courtly love) to the emblems for church, feudalism, joy, and labor. In respect to Mauthner’s studies, too, we suspect that this taking of the word in earnest represents an archaic Jewish impulse, albeit unrecognized – as reflected in Amos’ admonitions and Jeremiah’s visions – and which becomes determinative for the Kabbala and Hasidism. The above example of Landauer’s method appears in an essay in the Becoming Man which bears the title Arbeitselig (“Laborious,” literally “Labor-Blest”). Its theme is the fulfillment of the double entendre hidden in the title, one more familiar to us in the common word mühselig (“toilsome,” literally “toil-blest”). The joy, the blessedness of labor and toil, is what Landauer seeks to awaken in us throughout his enterprise, in order to bridge the fateful cleft between trade and leisure, and to involve the entire man in all of his activities. One can clearly see here the similarity to the Hasidic outlook, which likewise accounted joy the highest duty and the sole possibility of true God-intimacy (Gottinnigkeit). With



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the same animosity and lack of recognition with which Landauer and his ideologically orthodox (gesetzestreu) opponents, the Marxists, struggled against one another, so it was with the Hasids and the rabbinically conservative Mitnagdim. Two different spheres, but the same human discord exactly. It is also from this vantage-point that Landauer’s rejection of asceticism and his distrust of every form of “return to nature” should be understood. In spite of his reverence for Rousseau, technology and civilization per se were not for him emblems and manifestations of evil, as they were for “the greatest of the Swiss”; they became so only when they were raised to an end in themselves, thereby forfeiting their function as intermediaries. So it was that in his essay, “The Message of the Titanic,” he actually intones a paean to the latest achievement of wireless telegraphy, which, by dint of its ability to link lands and peoples, seems to him, “one of the many signs that mankind is in a state of becoming.” In his essay on Rousseau he expresses himself similarly concerning the possibility of exploiting the invention of the railway in a manner that will serve to further culture. In this attitude we once again recognize that Hasidic trait, according to which man’s evil drive and, indeed, worldliness (Irdischkeit) in general do not warrant destruction, but, on the contrary, should be elevated to the heights of the divine. By this reasoning, Abraham is higher than the three angels, for, as a man, he has the possibility, of which the couriers of God are deprived, to transform the bestial function of eating into a sacrament – not by means of abnegation, but rather by consummation. The salvation of man resides in himself, and he can realize it at any time and anywhere – irrespective of technology, environment, and circumstances. Everything is useful to him who uses it and does not enslave himself to the world’s base principle. As master, he will also have a true servant in the evil instinct. Even the Hasidic notion of the transmigration of the soul is found in the same form exactly in a dialogue bearing the title “Bairam and Schlichting,” which was written in 1911 and published in the book Rechenschaft. It is a parley of the dead (surely inspired by Mauthner), in which the advocates of the heavenly Areopagus – Proudhon and Mazzini, in the present case – dispute with one another in the Elysian Fields concerning the admission of the two candidates. Bairam is an Armenian insurgent, who was executed because, out of national antipathy, he shot Colonel Schlichting, a German in the service of the Turks. Proudhon finds many good reasons to justify Bairam’s admission, Mazzini likewise to justify Schlichting’s, until the supreme tribunal pronounces both to be right and wrong. They are sentenced to return to earth in altered form, in order to “pursue the battle they began,” until it is finally fought out. This judicial presentation (with which Landauer is not, perhaps, merely playing) coincides exactly with the Hasidic stance, as is plain to us from many stories of “Baal Shem” and the “Great

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Maggid.” The idea that the transmigration of the soul has to proceed until the final stage of purification, is certainly also inherent in other religious outlooks. Here, however, a specifically Jewish component is involved, one which we hinted at earlier in considering the distinction between “ultimate” and “penultimate” things. In the Jewish conception, it is only the sins of the “ultimate” sphere, those which transpire between God and Man, which the Creator can forgive on his own behalf on the Day of Atonement. The crimes of life which have transpired in the “penultimate” sphere (i.e., between man and man) can only be forgiven by one man to another. And only then, after men have spoken their redeeming word, can the Holy One speak his. It is only this construction which fully reveals the meaning of Landauer’s social mysticism, a mysticism whose actualization, according to Buber, God concedes not within a man, but between men. At this point it should be borne in mind that we do not aim to derive Gustav Landauer’s mature thinking from “models” or “influences,” even less so are we seeking to establish “priorities.” And therefore it does not constitute an objection if many of the ideas alluded to above can also be identified in other forms of mysticism (the German and Indian, for instance), and they had their effect on Landauer. The particular admixture in which these elements assembled in his spirit corresponds exactly to the complex of Hasidism, which likewise reveals points of contact with many different systems, without being educed from them. And while a relationship of dependence between Landauer’s faith and Jewish mysticism should by no means be averred, it is certain that the same hidden stream of common blood nourished both manifestations of the divine in the world and brought both to light. We wish to make Gustav Landauer’s religious genius as vivid as possible in its singularity and wholeness, and in this endeavor we also find the two main tenets of his teachings akin to Jewish mysticism – in his conception of tsimtsum and hashpa’ah, the clarification of which has been greatly enhanced by Buber’s introduction to the Great Maggid. Tsimtsum means concentration, focusing, contraction. It approximates the concept in the philosophy of German Idealism (especially in Schelling) that betokens the negative stance of God, his self-abnegation, self-enclosure vis-à-vis the “other,” his self-contraction vis-à-vis the world. This is the act of creation: God set the world free. The world derives from the heavenly sphere, but no longer resides in it; instead, it runs its course according to the logic (so hateful to Landauer) of the causality of natural law; it “breaks the vessels” of the divine (which engender from the source) in its midst, and thereby incurs the Fall of Man. The divine abides in the world, even now; but the Shechina (the Divine Presence) no longer possesses a dwelling-place, neither with the creator in seclusion, nor with the creatures in dispersion. And it is here that the free act of the individual (so well-loved by Landauer) enters the picture: by means of ichud, the act of unifica-



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tion, which is neither compromise nor synthesis, but the living reciprocal action of living men and – above all – of living streams in the heart of the single, the unified man – the tsaddik. The righteous man who redeems himself contributes to the redemption of God, to the reunification of the Shechina with the creator. Hashpa’ah, by contrast, means emancipation, emanation; it betokens the stance of the ‘warranting’ (gewährend) God, who creates and recreates the world ever anew, and inundates it with the streams of his glory. The “waves of God” break on the “finality of sensory things,” thus again in our own ego, and we find our way to them and thereby to God himself when we split through the earthly shell which surrounds our and the world’s kernel. Thus tsimtsum and hashpa’ah are not antitheses, but are rather to be construed (as our mentor Nobel taught) as the breathing in, breathing out of the divine soul, as the systole and diastole of the divine heart: two phases of the same action. The God of tsimtsum, who created once, and God of hashpa’ah, who eternally creates anew, the transcendent and the immanent God, are thus united within our souls. And thus we can experience contraction and emanation as interior processes, and warrant them by choice as the bearing of our mundane reality (Erden-Wirklichkeit). With this step we find ourselves in the middle of Landauer’s world – Landauer, who characteristically experiences joy and suffering only, but also always in the ego. Strength and Nature is how he terms these antitheses; Strength is his tsimtsum, Nature is his hashpa’ah – their Reciprocal Action is his ichud. In his wonderful lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin, he states that the strength Nietzsche derived from the overcoming of self granted him the momentum of flight, whereas Hölderlin’s nature was borne of itself by virtue of its own buoyancy. Landauer favors hashpa’ah over tsimtsum; the way in which the beams of the Supreme Spirit (Genius) glide down to the astonished world is for him the “lovelife of matter-of-factness”; the withdrawal, the reconvening of the beams, such as the Baal Shem once undertook before an arduous task, entails for Landauer too much that is conscious, convulsive, and arrogant. But the final unification is also being prepared here: just as, in Hölderlin’s “Rhein,” it is precisely restraint that impels the river to productive labor; just as a reveler becomes a founder of cities and a citizen (a bourgeois – not, however, a Philistine, a petit bourgeois) – it is therein that one discovers the overarching unity of life, which forms the intermediate realm (Zwischen-Reich) of man from the tsimtsum of tragedy and the hashpa’ah of fairy tale. This cleft between Strength and Nature stays open only so long as man leads a split existence. But just as man is bound to God in his breathing in and breath-

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ing out, so too is he in his innermost being, “whose achieved unity,” in Buber’s fine phrase, “has the purity and reticent strength of the elemental.”27

7 Gustav Landauer is dead. Were it not for the terrible circumstances of his death, Jewish youth would not be able to look up to him, the eternally ‘becoming’ man, with the total commitment and devotion that is possible today. It is thus incumbent upon us to refrain from self-reproach, and to honor instead the governance of the Invisible One, who mends the small rents in ripping open the last and deepest rent [an allusion to Landauer’s violent end]. For fog already threatens to shroud and distort his vivid image. Those who are well-disposed to him, see in Gustav Landauer the paradigm of the “patient sufferer,” those who fear him, by contrast, the “impractical dreamer.” He was not a pure fool, a Dostoevskian idiot, an “idealist.” He was a man of the peaceful struggle, the goal-oriented and conscious life, of deeply deliberate and meaningful action. Not a saint, but one of the righteous. It is so important to realize this because men all too readily distance themselves from their few great individuals by [crowning them with] a halo, so that they may be exempt from emulating them, in order to rank them as [representing] a fundamentally different kind of human existence, one which is unattainable. Saints are the idle excuses of the conscience, the righteous man its spur. The goal of the righteous is to establish the sacred in the midst of life. That was Gustav Landauer’s doctrine and deed. That is the hallowed law of Judaism. May it prove to be the path of its youth! Translated from the German by Carl Ebert

27 In his introduction to Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (Leipzig: Insel, 1910). Cf. Buber, Chinese Tales: Zhuangzi. Sayings and Parables, and Chinese Ghost and Love Stories, intro. by Irene Eber (Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanity Books, 1991).

Brigitte Hausberger

My Father, Gustav Landauer [Brigitte Hausberger was the youngest of three daughters of the noted German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). Born near Berlin in 1906, she was educated mostly at home by tutors. Her mother, the poet and translator Hedwig Lachmann, died of influenza in February 1918, and her father was murdered by soldiers in Munich on 2 May 1919, during the Bavarian Revolution. Brigitte married Dr. Igor Peschkowsky in the late 1920s (he later changed his family name to Nicholas, after his father, Nicolai), and they had two sons, Mike Nichols, the theater and film director, and Robert Nichols, a physician. Brigitte left Germany in 1940 and settled in New York. After her husband died, she married Dr. Franz Hausberger, who had come to the United States after the war and was a research physician in Philadelphia, where Brigitte, who had a Ph.D., assisted him in his laboratory. In her home hung beautiful portraits of her father and mother, painted in the early part of the century. Brigitte had some books and photographs, but she had sold her father’s library. His correspondence and papers are housed in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and in the Martin Buber Archive at the National Library of Israel, in Jerusalem.]

I was born in Hermsdorf, a suburb of Berlin, in 1906. My mother, Hedwig Lachmann, was Father’s second wife and the daughter of a cantor; that’s why he calls her “Jüdin” [Jewess] in some of his letters. My sister Gudula was born in 1902. Charlotte (“Lotte”), Father’s daughter by his first wife, also lived with us. Father dominated our home both spiritually and physically. He was six feet five inches tall and Mother five feet two. What a sight! When they walked together, people would turn and look. Then there was his fur hat, which made him even taller. But apart from his height, it was his constant seriousness that made me, as a child, regard him with awe. He was very strict, and his height made him all the more forbidding. Father slapped me three times during my childhood. The first time was when I yelled “scheisse” [shit] at a playmate, a boy, who had spit at me. Father was on the balcony and heard me. He ran down and slapped me, then gave the little spitter quite a scolding. I got the second slap once when we were having beetroot soup for dinner. I didn’t like it and said, “It tastes like sand mixed with soap.” Father did not allow any criticism of food. Food that was prepared had to be eaten. We had to finish it all. Gudula and I were not even allowed to take the film off boiled milk, but we found a way to do it without his knowing. The third slap occurred somewhat later. In the meantime another lesson in behavior took place in Krumbach, where we spent the summers. It was in 1918, the year my mother died. A man used to come to the house selling mushrooms. he had a terrible stammer: “P-p-p-pilze,” he would say. When he left, I mimicked him and said that it took him half an hour to say Pilze. Father was greatly annoyed. Instead of laughing

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at my talent for mimicry, he put me on his knee, took his watch from his vest pocket, and told me to repeat Pilze with a stutter for half an hour. I kept it up for ten minutes before I had to stop. I then burst into tears. Father let me down from his knee, patted my head, and said nothing. But the lesson has remained with me to this day. Whenever I hear or read of an exaggeration, I recall the word Pilze. But Father did not slap me that time. The third slap came when I was amusing my sister Gudula by imitating the Catholic prayers that I heard people recite in the street over their rosaries. I copied their sing-song intonation. Father came in and slapped me for making fun of these people, pious people. Such punishments do not conform with present-day pedagogy, but they did teach me not to use vulgar language, not to refuse any dish at the table, and not to make fun of any religion. In our own house we celebrated Christmas every year and had a large tree, the biggest that Father could find, decorated with shiny ornaments. Father played Santa Claus and would read us a Märchen of [Clemens] Brentano. And Easter was also a big event. We would go to the woods and hide Easter eggs, and afterwards would all go on an egg hunt. Once I found a golden necklace in an egg left in our house. There was a note with it: “Dear child, Give this to your mother. The Easter Bunny.” I still have the necklace! Those were the things he did, thoughtful things. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Hermsdorf, and I played with Jewish children, but we were the only ones who celebrated Christmas and Easter. We were known as freireligiöse or “dissidents.” At school I was the only child who sat alone while the others studied religion and recited their prayers. But I attended school only briefly, and Gudula had no formal schooling at all. Instead, Father hired private tutors for us and also taught us a lot himself. In our home, as a rule, silence reigned. Mother, a poet and translator, was occupied with her writing, and we had to be quiet because she was at work. Yet I can recall how much I enjoyed cuddling against her arms, which were so soft. She was a very quiet person, and it was Father who helped us with our education. Father worked very late at night, but before he went to bed he would come into my room, put me on the “potty,” then back to sleep. He did that, not Mother. I was at that time no more than three years old, yet how vividly I can recall every sweet moment of motherly and fatherly affection. There wasn’t the family “togetherness” that one finds so often today: We met at meals, but otherwise did little together as a family. Father and Mother were working, and we had to be quiet. Our main meal was at midday, with a light supper in the evening: blueberries and milk I especially liked! Father, by the way, was a good swimmer and an even better ice-skater. In winter we went ice-skating on Sunday mornings, which we all liked very much. He smoked a lot – cigarettes, Russian cigarettes, with large mouthpieces. In the attic in Krumbach where he worked we found a large trunk filled with these mouthpieces.



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Every Sunday we had guests, such as the Bubers, Richard and Paula Dehmel, Julius Bab and his family, and other literary and artistic friends.1 We would play with their children and dance and laugh together. The evenings would often become musicals, with Mother at the piano. But we had no anarchist guests. Father met his anarchist friends away from home, which was far from downtown Berlin, and he spoke very little to us children about anarchism, though once he painted for us a picture of an ideal socialist village, founded on mutual aid, without money but with comradely affection, and where each would work freely and peacefully at his own preferred craft. Father revered Kropotkin and called him “my great friend.” And one day a man in a tattered suit came to our house, and the maid told father that a “beggar” was at the door. Father came down and exclaimed, “Aber, es ist der Mühsam!” It was the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, whom I liked very much.2 That was around 1915. One time when Father visited Willy Spohr he took me along, in 1912 or 1913.3 We went for a rowboat ride, and they argued about the coming war, so much so that they didn’t see a big boat in our path until I warned them, and we got out of the way at the last moment. Speaking of the war, Bernhard Meyer, a wealthy furrier, told me that Father often said to him, “Herr Meyer, war is coming. Leave Germany.” So they went to Switzerland and missed the horrors of the war. Herr Meyer said. “He had the foresight to send us out of Germany.” We ourselves were on a train, coming back from our summer vacation, when the war broke out. During the summer we used to visit both my grandmothers, at Karlsruhe and at Krumbach. Now we were returning from Krumbach to Berlin. In the same car were some English tourists. Mother, who spoke and translated a number of foreign languages, conversed with these tourists in English. The train was stopped at Weimar. Mobilization had begun. I remember the hostility of the other passengers toward the English, who had suddenly become our “enemies,” and toward my mother who was speaking affably with them. Mother began to weep quietly. That year we stopped exchanging gifts for Christmas. We still had a tree and candles and spent time together. But no gifts. Father didn’t want to celebrate in 1 Philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber, the poet Richard Dehmel, and drama critic Julius Bab, were all friends of Landauer’s. Buber (1878-1965) included a chapter on Landauer in his Paths in Utopia (1958). 2 Erich Mühsam (1878-1934), writer and poet, editor of Kain and Fanal, and one of Germany’s leading anarchists, along with Landauer and Rocker. A member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Council during the Bavarian Revolution of 1918-1919, he was later murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. 3 Wilhelm Spohr (1868-1859), a German writer and translator, was a longtime friend of Landauer’s and a collaborator on Der Sozialist.

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wartime, when people were suffering and dying. A nephew of Father’s, Walter Landauer, had been mobilized into the army. When he came home on furlough we went to meet him at the station. His train was late by several hours. It was cold and drafty in the station. Mother began to cough. That was the year of the great influenza epidemic, and Mother became very ill. Father did not leave her bedside through the whole week that she was sick. She died in our home in February 1918. Father did not allow me to look at my mother’s body. “I want you,” he said, “to remember your mother just as you remember her now.” Many people came to pay their last respects. I overheard Father telling one of the mourners that I was his “only sunshine in those dark days.” I took that literally and would not allow myself to show my grief. I was what he wanted me to be – sunshine. I tried so hard to be gay that my aunt scolded me: “Your mother just died, yet you are laughing.” I bottled up my grief, and did so forever after. Nor did Father take me to the funeral. Gudula went – she was sixteen – but I stayed home alone. Mother’s death was a severe blow to my father. For he was bound to her in spirit, as he so eloquently expressed it in a famous letter to her. I recall how in 1915, in the very midst of the war, my mother composed an anti-militarist poem called “With the Defeated,” some lines and phrases of which Father helped her to polish. Father was so inspired by this poem that in a letter to her he wrote, “I thank you, Hedwig, you Jewish daughter and my dear wife.” That poem appeared later in the German paper Der Jude, and I learned to recite it by heart and remember it to this day. I recall, too, how the First World War ended. My father plunged himself at once into the thick of the revolution in Germany, especially in Munich. In those stormy days and nights he was seldom at home. Yet however busy or far away he was, in his letters he never ceased to concern himself with his children, and especially with me, his beloved youngest daughter. In his letters he would remind me to get plenty of fresh air, not to neglect my arithmetic and French, of which he himself supplied readings and examples in his letters. That summer, the summer of 1918, Kurt Eisner’s children were with us in Krumbach. Father, who was then in Munich, sent us a telegram instructing us to take our valuables and go to Uncle Hugo in Merseburg, on Lake Constance.4 That was our last communication from him. Uncle Hugo (Father’s brother) owned a chain of department stores and had a big house there, at the village of Deisendorf above Merseburg. He picked us up in a horse and buggy and brought us to the house. There I had a traumatic experience which has remained with me all my 4 Kurt Eisner (1867-1919), German socialist who took part with Landauer and Mühsam in the Bavarian Revolution, became the first republican premier of Bavaria. He was assassinated on his way to present his resignation to the Bavarian parliament.



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life. Hugo’s wife was standing at the top of the stairs. “My God”, she said. “So much luggage! How long are you going to stay?” Even now I prefer to stay in a motel when visiting my son. Not long after that, Uncle Hugo gave us a task. He had an old vineyard on a hill that was full of stones. He gave us – myself, his children, and the Eisner children – the job of picking up the stones and carting them away. I still remember how much it hurt to go barefoot on the freshly cut grass. While we were doing this, Uncle Hugo called me aside and quietly told me that German soldiers in Munich had murdered my father. I stood there bewildered. After standing there for a few minutes, I returned to gather stones with the other children. I did not tell them anything. Only at noon, during lunch, did Uncle Hugo tell the other children about my father’s death. I suppressed my feelings. Later I found an abandoned corner in the woods where no one could see me, and there, hidden from everybody, I made two small graves [she begins to cry, then says, “Well, I didn’t suppress them completely, obviously.”], two mounds of earth such as I had seen in the Catholic cemetery in Hermsdorf. On the two graves I put flowers and made a cross from branches for each grave. No one knew anything of this. But for several days I stole away to my secret graves and placed fresh flowers there. That fall the Eisner children went back to their mother, and we three Landauer children went to our grandmother in Karlsruhe. Life for the first time became a little normal. Lotte went to the conservatory, met Dr. Max Kronstein, and married him. They had a daughter. Lotte became pregnant again and quite ill. A doctor in Karlsruhe operated on her gall bladder in her apartment, then he and Max Kron­ stein drank to the successful operation – from which she never woke up. That was around 1926. Gudula, who became a professional musician, survived Hitler and the Holocaust and came to New York after the war. She was killed by a bus on Central Park West in 1948. Philadelphia, 28 October 1976

Index Abulafia, Abraham 181, 182, 190 Arnold Himmelheber 8, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137 Aufruf zum Sozialismus vii, 59, 83, 95, 172, 175, 215 Avrich, Paul 7 Bab, Julius 116, 117, 199, 202, 210, 235 Bavarian Revolution 4, 8, 14, 17, 25, 58, 233 Benjamin, Walter 67, 69, 70, 89, 90, 173, 174, 189 Ben Maimon, Moses (Maimonides) 10, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183 Berndl, Ludwig 156, 192, 193, 199, 202 Bernstein, Eduard 47 Biale, David 82, 185, 186 Bildungskultur 8 Bismarck, Otto von 45, 46, 47, 48, 96 Bloch, Ernst 12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 67, 100, 173 Blüher, Hans 88 Böhme, Jakob 65 Bölsche, Wilhelm 107, 108 Britschgi-Schimmer, Ina vii, 11, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204 Brunner, Constantin 70, 173, 194, 195, 202, 208 Buber, Martin vii, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 28, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 56, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96, 100, 111, 123, 129, 130, 134, 173, 175, 176, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 226, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233 Carey, Henry Charles 51 Cohen, Hermann 4, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 34, 35, 77, 90, 173, 205, 215 Communism 85 Communists 4, 27, 78, 85 Cultural Socialism 2

Dadaism 153 Damaschke, Adolf 53 Dehmel, Richard 76, 110, 117, 118, 119, 202, 235 Der Dichter als Ankläger 207 Der gelbe Stein 121, 122, 132, 133 Der Kinderdieb 132 Der Sozialist vii, 76, 108, 109, 122, 158, 159, 197 Der Todesprediger 56, 121, 122, 132, 133, 151 Despoix, Philippe 8, 9, 121, 133 Diederichs, Eugen 94 Die Gesellschaft vii, 67, 211 Dreyfus Affair 69, 111, 207 Dühring, Eugen 48, 51, 208 Dumont-Lindemann, Louise 94, 95, 101, 102 Eastern European Jews and the German State 211 Eckhart, Meister vii, 10, 65, 71, 122, 164, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 189, 190, 196, 212, 215 Eisner, Kurt 4, 17, 25, 26, 37, 38, 55, 57, 59, 60, 78, 79, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 156, 157, 198, 203, 236, 237 Eltzbacher, Paul 109 Engels, Friedrich 67 Faas-Hardegger, Margarete 55, 194 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 76, 157, 215 Fischer, Kuno 155 Fontane, Theodor 151 French Revolution 53, 58, 92, 99, 101, 103, 122, 184 Freud, Sigmund 124, 128, 217 Friedländer, Benedict 51 George, Henry 51 Geschwister 9, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154 Glück 135 Gnosticism 18, 20

Index 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6, 69, 105, 127, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 152, 154, 157, 215, 219, 227 Günther, Christiane 6 Gutkind, Erich 75 Halevi, Judah 35 Hart Brothers 64, 111, 114, 115 Hasidic 71, 129, 130, 209, 228, 229 Hasidism 130, 208, 227, 228, 230 Hausberger, Brigitte 12, 233 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 21, 32, 215, 217, 219, 224 Hertzka, Theodor 51 Herzl, Theodor 69 Hilde Hennings 135 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 110, 118, 119, 124, 128, 134, 202 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 72, 88, 218, 219, 226, 231 “In Sachen Judentum” 207 Jewish Mysticism / Kabbalah 7, 43, 83, 90, 130, 186, 212, 230 Joël, Ernst 88, 89 Judaism (Liberal) 11, 23, 33, 34, 205 Judaism (Orthodox) 33, 70 Judaism (Reform) 23 Kafka, Franz 27, 99 Kain 139 Kantianism 4, 21, 24, 25, 164 Kant, Immanuel 24, 95, 159, 209 Kautsky, Karl 47 Kohn, Hans 65, 71 Kronstein, Max 193, 199, 206, 237 Kropotkin, Peter 84, 194, 216, 235 Lachmann, Hedwig 56, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 161, 195, 196, 199, 202, 209, 210, 211, 233 Landauer, Gustav (Works by) 2, 8, 9, 10, 48, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 67, 69, 73, 74, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 95, 109, 112, 121, 122, 128, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 152,

 239



153, 154, 156, 158, 162, 164, 165, 166, 172, 173, 175, 183, 188, 190, 196, 197, 206, 207, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 227, 228, 229 Lange, Rudolf 49, 50 Lasker-Schüler, Else 65 Lazare, Bernard 69, 205 Lebendig tot 122, 132, 133 Lebenskunst 122, 132, 136 Lehmann, Siegfried 74, 90, 210 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 146, 152, 206 Leviné, Eugen 17 Liebknecht, Karl 100 Lindau, Hans 192 Lipp, Dr. Franze 95 Lunn, Eugene 77 Luther, Martin 145, 146, 147, 183 Mach, Ernst 160 Macht und Mächte vii, 121, 122 Mannheim, Karl 67, 69, 99 Marxism 2, 21, 51, 62, 68, 78, 84, 85, 172, 184, 229 Marx, Karl 42, 80, 99, 216 Matzigkeit, Michael 6 Mauthner, Fritz vii, 8, 9, 56, 65, 76, 79, 83, 88, 95, 122, 125, 136, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 165, 172, 173, 183, 192, 194, 195, 202, 208, 215, 218 Mayer, Gustav 199, 201, 203 Mehring, Franz 108 Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften vii, 122 Messianism 14, 23, 28, 35, 36, 43, 87, 97, 181, 222 Michels, Robert 51 Mombert, Alfred 110, 118, 119, 120, 202 Most, Johannes 47 Mühsam, Erich 17, 55, 65, 78, 112, 113, 194, 205, 209, 235 Neue Gemeinschaft vii, 52, 64, 66, 107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 48, 54, 124, 127, 162, 165 Ommerborn, Max 159

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Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 84 Przywara, Erich 27 Räterepublik 4, 10, 59, 79 Rechenschaft 216, 229 Reclus, Elisée 84 Reinsdorf, August 47 Revolutionary Workers Council 4 Richert, Heinrich 21 Rosenzweig, Franz 6, 13, 14, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 64, 220, 229 Schaeder, Grete 77, 204 Schelling, Friedrich von 230 Schlenther, Paul 136 Schmitz, Oskar 28 Scholem, Gershom 7, 8, 10, 32, 33, 34, 36, 41, 42, 67, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190 Scholem, Werner 84, 85, 86, 135 Schönberg, Arnold 118 Schopenhauer, Arthur 117, 122, 152, 156, 159, 160 Second Revolution 4 Seligmann, Rafael 90, 165 Shakespeare, William vii, 6, 8, 10, 61, 96, 103, 121, 126, 141, 142, 143, 147, 152, 155, 157, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 197, 211, 219, 220 Shedletzky, Itta 13, 85 Simon, Ernst 11, 12, 34, 197, 213 Simon, Uriel 7 Skepsis und Mystik 9, 10, 83, 122, 132, 133, 151, 152, 153, 173, 175, 215 Social Democratic Party 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 83, 84, 85, 98, 201

Social Democrats 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 59, 60, 68, 78, 84, 85, 98 Socialism 1, 5, 57, 59, 68, 73, 75, 78, 83, 89, 90, 156, 172, 173, 183, 197, 198, 210, 211, 215, 224 Socialist League 49, 50, 211, 220, 222, 223, 225 Spinoza, Baruch 9, 10, 69, 90, 131, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 180, 183, 212, 215 Spohr, Wilhelm 113 Stern, Jakob 157, 158 Stirner, Max 48, 159 Strauss, Ludwig 37, 79 Susman, Margarete 95, 100, 202 Toller, Ernst 17, 95, 98, 99, 193 Tolstoy, Leo 48, 50, 216, 220 Tönnies, Ferdinand 66, 115 Tsur, Muki 85 Tyrius, Maximus 3 Von Gerlach, Helmut 71 Von Kleist, Heinrich 88, 142, 143, 147, 154 “Vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren” 156 Weber, Max 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 64, 70, 74 Weidner, Albert 109, 111, 113 Weimar Republic 37, 144 Whitman, Walt 57, 122, 216, 221 Wille, Bruno 107, 108 Wolf, Ida 132, 136, 138, 146, 206 Zionism 1, 2, 10, 12, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 127, 130, 172, 173, 174, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 204, 209, 210, 211, 212, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227

Contributors Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann: Professor of Modern German Literature, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. Anthony David: Freelance writer and scholar, Jerusalem. Hanna Delf von Wolzogen: Director of the Theodor Fontane Archive, Potsdam. Brigitte Hausberger (1906-1985): Daughter of Gustav Landauer. Philippe Despoix: Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Montreal. Corinna R. Kaiser: Director of the Postgraduate Training Program of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. Ulrich Linse: Professor emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Applied Sciences, Munich. Michael Löwy: Emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris. Anya Mali: Researcher, National Institute for Testing and Evaluation, Jerusalem. Paul Mendes-Flohr: Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, Divinity School, University of Chicago; Professor emeritus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yossef Schwartz: Director of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. Chaim Seeligmann (1912-2009): German-born Israeli educator and historian, Senior Researcher at Yad Tabenkin and founding member of Kibbutz Givat Brenner. Ernst A. Simon (1899-1988): German-born Professor of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Martin Treml: Senior Research Faculty, Center for Cultural and Literary Studies, Berlin. Wolf von Wolzogen: Director emeritus of Education and Public Affairs, Historical Museum, Frankfurt.