The True Front | 31not have recognized the particular relationship that Landauer saw between his
mysticism and his anarchism. In his attempt to apply Landauer’s insights in the
speeches on Judaism, he would skirt the line of racialism, as in his outlandish
claims that the Jew’s motor functions differ from those of the Gentile, or that the
Jew experiences time more keenly than space.^71 This suggests that as late as 1916,
when the second Drei Reden were published as Vom Geist des Judentums, Bu-
ber failed to appreciate significant elements of Landauer’s thought, and he would
continue to do so until their clash over the Great War.
Buber left Berlin for Leipzig in 1901 with a missionary zeal for social action,
which he realized during highly productive yet tempestuous years of service to
official Zionism. He attended the Fifth and Sixth Zionist Congresses, first as a
favored protégé of Herzl and then as an ideological opponent. Landauer, mean-
while, left for England with Hedwig Lachmann, moving first to London, where
he came to know Rudolf Rocker, and then to Bromley, where he was a neighbor
of Peter Kropotkin.^72 Although he was withdrawn from activism, 1903 was a ban-
ner year for Landauer’s profile as a writer: his renderings of Eckhart were finally
published, as was Macht und Mächte, a collection of novellas; finally, and most im-
portant, he released Skepsis und Mystik, which included “Through Separation to
Community,” largely unchanged, as the first section.^73 In 1904, the same year that
he withdrew from high-profile Zionist activity following Herzl’s death, Buber sub-
mitted his dissertation on the problem of individuation in Nicholas of Cusa and
Jakob Böhme, prepared to move to Florence to begin his research on Hasidism,
and wrote a review of Landauer’s recent work for the Vienna journal Die Zeit.^74
In this essay, entitled “Gustav Landauer,” Buber reveals a wide knowledge of
Landauer’s work. It is nearly a literary biography; it opens with an epigraph taken
from Landauer’s Eckhart translation, followed by a comparison of two articles on
anarchism published six years apart in Zukunft, before moving on to cover Skep-
sis und Mystik, then working its way back to Landauer’s Nietzschean novellas:
Der Todesprediger (Preacher of Death), Arnold Himmelheber, and Lebendig Tot
(Living Dead).^75 Buber accords Landauer his highest praise: he sees him as devel-
oping, growing both as an artist and as a thinker. In particular, he claims that the
two articles on anarchism, one from 1895 and one from 1901, reveal “one of the
most beautiful documents of human self-liberation.”^76 The earlier essay taught a
dogma, anarchism, which, though held by many to be the purest expression of
freedom, and taught by Landauer in as undogmatic a way as possible, remained
dogma. The later essay achieves what Buber considers a magnificent psychologi-
cal insight: that even the desire to bring freedom to others can indicate a despotic
personality, especially if one intends to employ “free violence” as a means. Buber
is highly impressed with Landauer’s claim that such a person “is a despot, not
an anarchist,” and inspired by his vision of a new society in the midst of the old.
Paraphrasing Landauer, Buber claims that “anarchy is in truth a basic disposition
of every man.”^77