Introduction | 5the Communist Party of the time sneeringly called the “Bavarian Coffeehouse
Republic.”^17 This is symptomatic of how anarchism and theopolitics are inter-
twined, since both question the borders of the political. The shadow of the failed
revolution fell on the new German polity that emerged after the world war: intel-
lectual life was obsessed with the nature and limits of politics. But the revolution
itself was hidden by that very shadow.
Historical and Intellectual Contexts of Theopolitics
The Weimar Republic survived for barely fourteen years. When scholars refer
to “Weimar” cultural, intellectual, religious, or political trends, they are talk-
ing about a “Weimar moment” in the lives of people who also lived during the
Wilhelmine and Nazi periods.^18 The focus on Weimar today is driven by intense
interest in the way religion, politics, philosophy, and law played out amid an
emergent modernity and a doomed democracy, with special attention to political
theology in all its varied connotations. Many of the remarkable Central Euro-
pean figures of the time continue to sustain cottage industries in various human-
istic fields, from philosophy and theology to cultural studies, from sociology to
legal and political theory.^19
Buber, however, has not usually been given a prominent place in the most
recent discussions of the Weimar problematic.^20 Perhaps Buber’s age and fame
during the Weimar period (he was forty in 1918) create a perception that he was
really a last-generation Wilhelmine thinker, like Hermann Cohen and Max We-
ber. There were certainly some at the time who already saw Buber as an authority
against whom to rebel.^21 However, Buber’s best-known work, I and Thou, was
published in 1923 and is generally agreed to have signaled the “dialogical turn”
that inaugurated his “mature” status as a thinker.^22 Furthermore, Buber’s reli-
gious writing from this period forward has more in common with his friend
Rosenzweig and even with Protestant crisis theology (launched by Karl Barth’s
1918 Epistle to the Romans) than with any theology of the nineteenth century.^23
Perhaps, then, what accounts for Buber’s absence from current discussions is the
apparent distance of I and Thou from what Leo Strauss calls “the theologico-
political predicament.”^24 Buber seems to belong to a different, more apolitical
discussion, known from the 1950s through the 1970s as religious existentialism.
The waning of this trend dimmed Buber’s star, and he settled into the niche he
occupies today: an important figure in Jewish ethics, whose works on Hasidism
spurred the renewal of Jewish youth movements in Europe in the early twentieth
century, who is still read in Protestant seminaries and liberal rabbinical schools
as an exemplar of modern Jewish thought outside the strictures of halakha, and
as a voice of conscience in Israeli politics. I intend to place Buber into the con-
text of Weimar political theology. This approach entails a different view of his