44 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
In 1907, Landauer had quoted the poet Gottfried Keller: “Freedom’s last vic-
tory will be bloodless.”^163 It is thus hard to imagine him turning down the plea of
Eisner, who proclaimed an independent Bavarian republic, ending seven centu-
ries of rule by the Wittelsbach monarchy without firing a shot. Landauer under-
stood that Bavaria, a conservative state, lacked necessary conditions for lasting
social revolution. At the beginning of the revolution he wrote that “the very dif-
ficult and almost discouraging situation demands that I do not push from behind
but pull from the front.”^164 Later, less than a month before his death, he said: “If
I’ll have a few weeks, I hope I can achieve something; however, it is very likely
that it will only be a few days, and then all this will have been but a dream.”^165
Perhaps he was enticed, in part, by the prospect of participating in freedom’s
last victory. Buber, by contrast, felt that Jewish revolutionaries, driven to realize
true community, must fail repeatedly if they neglect to realize that “the upheaval
too takes place within the life of a nationality, that even the revolution is deeply
linked to a tradition.”^166 The Jewish revolutionary will cease to fail only when “he
realizes his truth on his own soil and with his own nationality.” Furthermore,
during this period, Buber assessed both the German and the Russian revolutions
in accordance with Landauer’s teaching:
[The revolution today is] no consummation but a beginning. On the surfaces
of political life, rubble is cleared away; immeasurable stores remain in the
depths of social life. Legal realignments have given rise to emergency actions;
these will not transform the internal fabric of human life in common. Such
a transformation cannot ever be enacted or decreed by institutions, but only
through an inner germinating, gradually spreading rejuvenation of the cell
tissue.Nonetheless, Buber wrote, “Standing on their ground, not wanting that any good
come to us as a by-product, not as beneficiaries, but rather as fellow-fighters and
fellow-bearers, we salute the revolution.”^167
Buber’s view of the German Revolution, though Landauerian in principle,
may have also stemmed from his greater connection to the Jewish community.
In general, German Jews reacted to the revolutionary upheavals in the same way
as the more progressive elements among their bourgeois Christian countrymen:
weathering the political storm, hoping that the Republic would win out over ef-
forts at radicalization, anticipating a return to normality. They feared the ris-
ing wave of antisemitism bolstered by the perception that the revolution had too
many Jewish leaders; they considered men like Eisner and Landauer “tactless”
for ignoring the effects of their actions on other Jews.^168 Finally, also relevant
is the fact that Buber in 1919 was still an Austrian citizen; he gained his Ger-
man citizenship only in 1921. In the nationalistically charged atmosphere of the
time, many foreigners avoided expressing opinions that deviated from the main-
stream. Karl Barth, for example, reported that as a Swiss national he felt con-