26 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
also entails the rejection of class war on Marxist lines, the rejection of the idea of
a vanguard political party, and the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
“Whoever believes it is in order to demand the imposition of ‘his Truth’ along
with the violent suppression of those with a divergent belief, may wish to wander
down that road. The anarchists will walk down theirs.”^43 And in 1901, in the essay
“Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism,” he went on to accuse those radicals who saw
themselves as the purest revolutionaries of being no better than the states they
opposed:
The anarchist politics of assassination only stems from the intention of a small
group among them that wants to follow the example of the big political par-
ties. What drives them is vanity—a craving for recognition. What they are
trying to say is: “We are also doing politics. We are not idle. We are a force to
be reckoned with!”
These anarchists are not anarchic enough for me. They still act like a politi-
cal party. Their politics are akin to simple-minded reform politics.^44Landauer invoked Tolstoy in support of his claim that “any kind of violence is
dictatorial... a goal can only be reached if it is already reflected in its means.” The
claim that violence was needed to bring freedom to the world, Landauer argued,
proved the dictatorial tendencies of its advocates: “This is yet another crucial
fallacy: that one can—or must—bring anarchism to the world; that anarchy is
an affair of all of humanity; that there will indeed be a day of judgment followed
by a millennial era. Those who want ‘to bring freedom to the world’—which will
always be their idea of freedom—are tyrants, not anarchists.”^45
Although Landauer was far from alone among anarchists in his criticism of
propaganda by the deed, it distanced him from the movement, insofar as praise
of it disgusted him. Landauer thought that Der Sozialist had a pedagogical func-
tion of encouraging workers to think for themselves. He therefore published ar-
ticles on theoretical-philosophical questions, eschewing the clear question-and-
answer format of the propaganda broadsheet. In May 1897, a rival paper, Neues
Leben, was established, which soon drew away at least half of Landauer’s read-
ership as well as much of his funding. The slow death of Der Sozialist over the
course of 1898 discouraged and demoralized Landauer, and it coincided with an
economic upswing that meant a general decline in labor agitation, thus making
activism more difficult. By the time he was jailed in 1899 for the Ziethen affair,
he was ready to spend time away from active engagement in politics, and to re-
new his focus on aesthetic and philosophical questions. This phase of his career,
which scholars often refer to as his period of “isolation” or “withdrawal,” lasted
nearly ten years.^46
It was at this point that Landauer attended the first meeting of the Neue
Gemeinschaft, a Berlin group led by the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart. The
Hart brothers, inspired by Nietzsche’s Dionysian exaltation of becoming, billed