28 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
of future virtues.” Is he the founder of a new Gemeinschaft? Many rise up in
his name, but they do not unite, for each... owes him not thanks for general
knowledge of a kind that can unite people, but the release of his own inner-
most powers.^52This idealization of Nietzsche as a founder who sought only to empower would
resonate in much of Buber’s later work, from his theory of pedagogy to his theo-
politics.
Scholars have justifiably considered much of Buber’s early work, from his
anthologies of Hasidic tales to his youthful Zionist poetry, as a species of Kul-
turpolitik or Kulturkritik.^53 Kultur had an exalted sense in fin-de-siècle thought,
at which the English word “culture” only gestures; Kulturpolitik viewed Kultur
as the primary medium of political and social change. To be sure, Buber had a
youthful interest in Lassalle, and some connections to Polish socialist student
groups (his uncle Rafael Buber was a prominent Polish socialist). His early inter-
est in Zionism was more active; in August 1899 he traveled from Leipzig, where
he had founded the first Zionist student chapter, to attend the Third Zionist Con-
gress in Basel, where he spoke as a member of the Agitations Committee.^54 But
his Kulturpolitik meant that he saw both socialism and Zionism as in need of
elevation by cultural elites, a Nietzschean Geistesaristokratie (aristocracy of the
spirit).^55 These movements could not remain “merely” political but had to aim at
achieving cultural renaissance.^56 In 1901, at age twenty-three, Buber brought this
attitude to the position of editor at Theodor Herzl’s Zionist newspaper D ie Welt,
and to his leadership in the “cultural Zionist” Democratic Fraction at the Fifth
Zionist Congress, which stood with Ahad Ha’am against Herzl’s purely “politi-
cal” Zionism.^57
When the twenty-two-year-old Buber had heard the thirty-year-old Landau-
er speak at the Neue Gemeinschaft in June 1900, the younger man was a middle-
class student Nietzschean and the older man in the early stages of a transition,
embracing the opportunity to address a new audience. Landauer’s lecture was
entitled “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft” (Through Separation to Com-
munity), and it was soon published in Das Reich der Erfüllung. Although Lan-
dauer left the Neue Gemeinschaft less than a year later, perceiving that neither
its endless conversations about mystical unity nor its tentative establishment of a
small commune (really a shared kitchen) would lead to meaningful social action,
he did not disavow this work; it was substantially incorporated in 1903 into his
first major philosophical statement, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss
an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Skepticism and Mysticism: Essays following Mauth-
ner’s Critique of Language).^58 Because Skepsis und Mystik also includes a critique
of Julius Hart’s mysticism from the standpoint of politics and ethics, we can infer
that Landauer did not see his own mysticism as subject to a similar critique.^59