The True Front | 37and worked over the following few years to prevent such a war from becoming
reality.^112
The Clarifying Fire: World War I
Although Buber and Landauer maintained their strong friendship during the
years leading up to World War I, this may have been the period when their work
diverged most broadly. While Landauer organized and agitated, Buber continued
to publish his mystical texts, including Ekstatische Confessionen (Ecstatic Confes-
sions, 1909), a collection of reports from mystics across the world’s traditions,
as well as two anthologies of Chinese texts in translation. He worked on his set
of mystical dialogues, Daniel (1913), and his edition of the Finnish epic Kalevala
(1914). Landauer did, however, write an appreciation of Buber in 1913 for an is-
sue of Neue Blätter dedicated to him, in which he declared him “the apostle of
Judaism to humanity.”^113 Shortly thereafter, they finally collaborated on a politi-
cal project (Buber belonged to the Sozialist Bund, but there is little evidence that
he exerted himself greatly on its behalf), when they worked together to prevent
the breakout of the war.^114 The so-called Forte-Kreis, which met in Potsdam in
June 1914, attempted to enlist intellectuals from across Europe in an interna-
tional statement in favor of peace.^115 However, some Forte-Kreis members proved
recalcitrant in their nationalism, and others preferred epistolary exchanges to
in-person meetings. Buber and Landauer cosigned a letter in November 1914 de-
manding a meeting of the whole group, but Buber’s heart was perhaps not in the
endeavor, as he had already expressed his enthusiasm for the new spirit he felt the
war to be awakening in Europe and among Europe’s Jews.^116
Buber’s succumbing to Kriegserlebnis, a kind of intense enthusiasm for war,
disgusted Landauer and strained their relationship.^117 The Kriegserlebnis swept
Germany, and consistent antimilitarism was rare—so rare that the few who con-
tinued to oppose the war were often shocked at how isolated they had become
from their former friends and associates. Karl Liebknecht, for example, broke
from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), cofounded by his own father, over its
support for the war in 1917; in response to it he created first the Independent
Social-Democratic Party (USPD), then the Spartacist League and the German
Communist Party (KPD).^118 Meanwhile, far from the halls of party politics,
Karl Barth, a Swiss Reformed theologian, was dismayed by the lockstep support
on the part of his German mentors in liberal theology for the war and blamed
nineteenth-century theology for their political failures.^119 His Epistle to the Ro-
mans (1918) launched the revolution of “crisis theology” in response. This Chris-
tian story has a Jewish parallel, in Gershom Scholem’s rage against Hermann Co-
hen’s Germanic patriotism. And when Martin Buber began to write in support
of the war, and Landauer called him the Kriegsbuber (War-Buber), he too found
himself named a traitor.