38 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
In the heyday of his “cultural Zionist” activism, Buber had briefly consid-
ered, along with Berthold Feiwel and Chaim Weizmann, starting a journal called
Der Jude, but that project did not come to fruition until more than ten years
later. In the first issue, in April 1916, Buber argued in an editorial entitled “Die
Losung” (The Watchword) that the war would unite even those Jews on oppo-
site sides of the battlefield in a transcendental community of feeling.^120 This was
Buber’s most public statement so far of views he had already expressed privately
as early as September 1914.^121 Although Buber’s support for the war exalted an
all-encompassing, quasi-mystical Erlebnis, rather than a nationalistic assertion
of Germany’s right to rule Europe, he remained just as tolerant of the carnage.^122
Both Landauer and Walter Benjamin refused to publish in Der Jude as long as
Buber supported the war.^123
Landauer’s fierce condemnation of his friend, in a letter of May 12, 1916, is
credited by Mendes-Flohr with effecting a “volte-face” in Buber’s career. This
position remains the consensus view of scholars.^124 The letter attacks not only
Buber’s “Watchword” essay but also the fourth of his “Speeches on Judaism,” en-
titled “Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum” (The Spirit of the Orient and Ju-
daism), which Landauer describes as “repugnant, border[ing] on incomprehensi-
bi l it y.”^125 Landauer accuses Buber of “aestheticism and formalism,” claiming that
he “had no right... to publicly take a stand on the political events of the present
day.” He prophesies that his friend will one day come to his senses: “In the future
you will not take part in the German war against the other peoples of Europe, nor
in the war of Europe against itself, as you do now in your profound confusion and
bewilderment.” Until then, Landauer could not work with Buber: “I do not want
to collaborate with you any further for the duration of the war.... [A] journal
that publishes... what the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, and the interests allied
with them want to hear, but does not publish the contrary, cannot be my journal.”
We have no response from Buber to this letter, but there is evidence that Buber
immediately traveled to see Landauer to discuss it.^126 In Buber’s first published
statements following this interchange, he no longer addresses the war’s transcen-
dental significance or its relationship to the Absolute. We find only a moral critic
who warns against excessive nationalism and patriotism.
Buber’s conduct during the war has embarrassed his acolytes; those who
know him from the popular I and Thou often seem to share Landauer’s shock
that the sage of “dialogue” could ever have been labeled the Kriegsbuber. Mau-
rice Friedman, for one, protests that Buber “was never a German superpatriot,
like Hermann Cohen,” that he never “signed any document supporting the Kai-
ser,” yet “he was neither a pacifist nor an anarchist like Gustav Landauer” and
was therefore “unable to maintain Landauer’s almost fanatic clarity of opposi-
t ion.”^127 Even Friedman, however, admits that “[Buber’s] own philosophy helped
to seduce him into an enthusiasm in which even his faithfulness to that philoso-
phy became questionable.”^128 Marking 1916 as a turning point in Buber’s career