The True Front | 45strained in his arguments with Emanuel Hirsch, his nationalist colleague on the
theological faculty at Göttingen.^169 Thus, while Buber had felt free to praise the
German war effort, taking part in the revolution as an Austrian would have been
another story. This would not have been a concern to internationalist communist
revolutionaries (Rosa Luxemburg was Polish; Anton Pannekoek was Dutch), but
neither Buber nor Landauer would think along such lines in the wake of the war
and the collapse of the Second International.^170
Compared to the rest of Germany, Bavaria under Eisner had been relative-
ly stable.^171 Buber’s second visit to revolutionary Munich coincided with its last
week of stability; Eisner was assassinated the day he left—February 21, 1919. Upon
his return home, Buber wrote to his son-in-law of the “profoundly stirring week”
he had spent with the revolutionaries:
The deepest human problems of the revolution were discussed with the utmost
candor: in the very heart of events I posed questions and offered replies; and
there were nocturnal hours of apocalyptic gravity, during which silence spoke
eloquently in the midst of discussion, and the future became more distinct
than the present. And yet for all but a few it was nothing but mere bustle, and
face-to-face with them I sometimes felt like a Cassandra. As for Eisner, to be
with him was to peer into the tormented passions of a divided Jewish soul;
nemesis shone from his glittering surface; he was a marked man. Landauer,
by dint of the greatest spiritual effort, kept up his faith in him, and protected
him—a shield-bearer terribly moving in his selflessness. The whole thing, an
unspeakable Jewish tragedy.^172Buber understood, however, that Landauer could not share his view of the revolu-
tion as tragic: “To Landauer himself, who witnessed the assassination of Eisner
and who refused to take the opportunities to escape that were offered him, it was
more: the road into the future that could come only through self-sacrifice.”^173
The assassination of Eisner threw Bavaria into a chaotic power struggle between
the Landtag (the state parliament), the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and their
Council Congress; it was during this time that Landauer made what Buber be-
lieved to be the most serious of his mistakes.
Eisner was killed on his way to resign from the office of minister president
after a devastating electoral defeat for his party, the USPD. Landauer had be-
lieved the elections premature and unnecessary. He favored leaving power with
the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, delaying the re-formation of parliament for
as long as possible so that eventually all would come to see the wisdom of a per-
manent system of council democracy. He considered Eisner “by far the best of
everyone in power.”^174 But he also refused to take sides in many disputes because
he believed “all positions are equally wrong.”^175 He despaired of the revolutionar-
ies’ continuing faith in parliamentarism; he understood that the military and the
conservative elites wished to saddle a new, left-wing civilian government with