The True Front

Buber and Landauer on Anarchism

and Revolution

Me? I’m the king of the twentieth century. I’m the boogeyman. The villain...

The black sheep of the family.

—V to Evey, V for Vendetta

These anarchists are not anarchic enough for me.

—Gustav Landauer, “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism”

Introduction: Anarchism by Any Other Name

Martin Buber and Gustav Landauer met in Berlin circa 1900 at a gathering of
the  Neue Gemeinschaft (New Community), a mystical society that Landauer
would shortly quit. The two men maintained a mutually beneficial intellectual
and personal relationship for many years, often seeing each other nearly daily.
They had a falling out during the Great War, when Landauer pilloried Buber’s
naïve exaltation of the supposedly noble spirit of sacrifice prevailing in Europe.
This criticism led to an about-face in which Buber reexamined his previous phil-
osophical commitments, beginning the process that would eventually lead to the
publication of Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923. Before that happened, however,
Landauer was murdered in May 1919 by the Freikorps (Free Corps) paramilitary
troops sent from Berlin to put down the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic,
and Buber honored his memory as the literary executor of his estate.
This narrative of friendship, told most definitively by Paul Mendes-Flohr,
has been adopted by nearly every scholar since.^1 Ordinarily, however, this story is
invoked to say something about the origins of Buber’s dialogic philosophy. Here,
I attend more to the political implications of Buber’s friendship with Landauer
than to the gradual changes in his philosophical vocabulary, and I ask different
questions: What does it mean that Buber spent nearly two decades as the close
confidante of perhaps the most important German anarchist of the century?
How should we understand the fact that, with the exception of Buber’s interest
in Palestine as a site for the realization of their shared ideals, and in the “Jewish

1