The True Front | 39thus seems justified, inasmuch as he directed his literary executor to prohibit
the publication of anything written prior to that date (if not already published
before his death).^129 Of the writings from this period that were later republished,
many omitted the very passages Landauer had condemned.^130 Arthur Cohen has
opined, “It is surprising, given the intensity of their friendship and the presum-
able breadth of their intellectual itinerary, that Landauer and Buber had not,
until the outbreak of war, articulated their disagreement over the question of
violence and pacifism, German imperialism and German humanism.”^131 Perhaps,
but we should not overlook Landauer’s possible reasons for believing that he and
Buber agreed: namely, Buber’s endorsement in 1904 of Landauer’s statement in
“Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism” that “one never comes through violence to
non-violence.” Thus Buber’s war politics did not merely express a hitherto latent
attitude; they belied his previous praise of his friend’s work. He was presumably
embarrassed and ashamed of himself.^132
Buber’s new philosophical direction in the wake of his turnabout also en-
tailed the appropriation, or reappropriation, as the case may be, of some of Lan-
dauer’s ideas. As we have seen, in Buber’s various appreciations of Landauer, some
element was always lacking. This is consistent with the “Erlebnis-mysticism” that
Mendes-Flohr describes. In his 1901 lecture, Buber focused more than Landauer
on intensity of experience as the locus of mystical unity. In the 1904 essay, he sug-
gested that Landauer could not be a complete anarchist until he was a complete
artist. Buber’s closeness to Landauer from 1900 to 1916 was far from complete;
there was a significant difference in their understandings of the relationship be-
tween aesthetics and mysticism on the one hand and politics on the other. After
1916, however, this gap began to narrow. Buber did not adopt all of Landauer’s
positions; they would continue to differ, for example, on the nature of the re-
lationship between their German and Jewish identities, and eventually on the
matter of Landauer’s role in the Bavarian Council Republic. However, this latter
disagreement stemmed not from Buber’s resistance to Landauer’s basic Weltan-
schauung but from his conviction that Landauer was the one who had become
untrue to his own principles.
From Kulturpolitik to Der Heilige Weg: A Theopolitical Turn
at Reich’s End?
In the summer of 1916, Buber engaged in a heated debate with Hermann Cohen
over Zionism.^133 Cohen argued that “it is only through the state, by virtue of a
pure act of political morality, that the nation is constituted.” Buber replied that,
for him, “just as the state in general is not the determining goal of mankind,
so the ‘Jewish state’ is not the determining goal for the Jews.”^134 For all its pas-
sion, the debate is not a true meeting of the minds. One wishes that Buber had
better appreciated Cohen’s method of idealization, in which “the ideal of the