30 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Gemeinschaft, on the topic “Alte und Neue Gemeinschaft” (Old and New Com-
munity).^66 Here Buber claims, in the vein of what Mendes-Flohr has called his
“ Erlebnis-mysticism,” that there are fleeting, ecstatic moments in which we experi-
ence the unity of everything, and that our goal should be to extend such moments
to encompass the existential particulars of the day-to-day.^67 Landauer, however,
had not dwelled on the experience of unity as much as on the recognition of it.
Buber’s interpretation (he in fact identifies the Erlebnis of which he speaks with
Landauer’s words) thus represents his own interest in intense, heightened experi-
ence.^68 Buber waxed rhapsodic, proclaiming that “our community does not want
revolution; it is revolution.” If the subject of this battle cry is the Neue Gemein-
schaft, which Buber would soon follow Landauer in deserting, it must be read as
the naïve enthusiasm of youth. If, however, we take note of the idea of revolution
as a present state of being rather than an anticipated future event, we find the
core of a commitment that would endure throughout the years. It is unlikely, at
any rate, that Buber interpreted Landauer’s retreat from the public political scene
as an endorsement of quietism, given his own subsequent Zionist activism and
Landauer’s “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism.” More likely, he took Landauer to
be referring to a kind of nonpolitical, cultural activism, through the ringing call:
“Let us create our communal life, let us form centers of a new kind of being, let us
free ourselves from the commonness of our contemporaries!”^69
Given that the form of Buber’s cultural activism in 1900–1903 was Zionism,
and that he returned to Zionism at the end of the decade in his “Speeches on
Judaism,” it is worth inspecting another passage of “Through Separation to Com-
munity,” one we find echoed in those speeches:
The more firmly an individual stands on its own ground, the deeper it retreats
into itself... the more it will find itself united with the past, with what it origi-
nally is. What man originally is, what his most intimate and hidden is, what
his inviolable own is, is the large community of the living in himself, his blood
and his kin. Blood is thicker than water; the community, as which the indi-
vidual finds itself, is more powerful and more noble and more ancient than the
weak influences of state and society. Our most individual is our most univer-
sal. The more deeply I go into myself, the more I become part of the world.^70Despite his invocation of blood, however, Landauer nowhere mentions the nation
as the exemplar of the community he means, let alone the race. Although Lan-
dauer does mean that one bears one’s ancestry and social customs within oneself
as a powerful influence, this sense does not carry with it any kind of hierarchy of
ancestries; there is no pseudoscientific racialism here and no injunction against
unnatural mixing of heritages. Landauer has not departed from anarchism to
embrace völkisch racialism; he has attempted to deepen his anarchism by rooting
it in a richer conception of subjectivity. Buber, however, meeting Landauer at a
moment of transition from active politics to philosophical contemplation, may