The True Front | 27the Neue Gemeinschaft as “a community of knowledge and life.”^47 The group held
public lectures and discussions, published a journal called Das Reich der Erfül-
lung (The Kingdom of Fulfillment), and planned the purchase of land for com-
munal settlement, all in the name of a mystical worldview in which suffering is
caused primarily by the illusion of individuation (the separateness of phenom-
ena).^48 Landauer was intrigued by these ideas and returned to the Neue Gemein-
schaft after his release from prison in 1900, when he gave a lecture there that was
to underlie much of his future thought. This may even have been the occasion
of his first meeting with Buber. Before dealing with the contents of this lecture,
however, we turn to Buber’s youthful experiences up to the turn of the century.
Between Politics and Mysticism: Buber and Landauer, 1900–1907
Born in 1878 in Vienna, Buber lived from age three to fourteen at the house of his
grandfather, Solomon Buber, a great scholar of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlight-
enment, in Lemberg/Lviv (in Galicia, today Ukraine). In 1897, after four more
years in Lemberg at the farm of his father, Carl, Buber enrolled at the University
of Vienna and came into contact with the “superficial salon culture of bourgeoi-
sie who despised everything Jewish from the bottom of their hearts” and who
defined Kultur for affluent Viennese youth.^49 He was educated in both of these
worlds, speaking German at home, Polish at school, and Yiddish and Hebrew
at synagogue. He could read Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Dutch, and also speak
English and French.^50 In his adolescence he was drawn to the poetry of Schiller
and the philosophy of Kant, although Nietzsche was by far the most powerful
influence on him at this time; when he was seventeen he embarked on a transla-
tion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish.^51 After spending the fall semester of
1897 in Vienna, he continued his education at the universities of Leipzig (winter
1897–spring 1899), Zurich (fall 1899), and Berlin (winter 1899–1900). In 1900, a few
months after the death of Nietzsche, Buber wrote an essay that shows how thor-
oughly he then considered himself Nietzsche’s disciple (although he later char-
acterized himself as having struggled against this influence). According to this
essay, Nietzsche “uncovered the feeble lies of our values and our truths... from
dead cultures he wrested elements for new formation. In the confused and bar-
ren turmoil of the present, he collected the authentic and the productive.” Here
Nietzsche is read in the light of Birth of Tragedy, offering a project for reviving a
desiccated present through the return to sources of ancient cultural power. Bu-
ber’s discussion of Nietzsche marks a beginning point for his lifelong fascination
with the idea of the unclassifiable:
Is he a philosopher? He did not create a unified edifice of thought. Is he an art-
ist? He did not create any objects. Is he a psychologist? His deepest knowledge
deals with the future of the soul. Is he a poet? Only if we think of poets as they
once existed: “Visionaries who tell us what might be,” who give us “a foretaste