The True Front | 47Landauer’s daughter Lotte on May 4 that read: “Father not in danger.” Eventually,
Buber wrote an extended eulogy for Landauer in the journal Masken, of which
Landauer had been slated to become editor before the breakout of revolution. The
conclusion of this eulogy has been quoted elsewhere, but it is worth reproducing:
Gustav Landauer had lived as a prophet of the coming human community and
fell as its blood-witness. He went upon the path, of which Maximus Tyrius—
whose words Landauer used as the motto of his book, Die Revolution—said:
Here is the way of the Passion, which you call a disaster, and which you
judge according to those who have passed upon it; I, however, deem it salva-
tion, since I judge it according to the result of what is still to come.
In a church at Brescia I saw a mural whose entire surface was covered with
crucified individuals. The field of crosses stretched until the horizon, hanging
from each, men of varied physiques and faces. Then it struck me that this was
the true image of Jesus Christ. On one of the crosses I see Gustav Landauer
hanging.^182The passage can easily be taken as the highest praise; Buber calls his friend a
prophet, a martyr, and a face of Christ. And that may be the way Buber intended
the text. But this passage has another, more ambiguous connotation. The image
of myriad crucifixions stretching to the horizon is most commonly associated not
with Jesus, who was crucified with only two others, but with Spartacus, whose
defeated rebels lined the Appian Way.^183 The figure of Spartacus had already been
adopted by two martyrs of 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whom
Landauer had eulogized despite political differences with them. Spartacus was
in the air; conservative and even social-democratic forces frequently referred to
the entire radical left as Bolshevist and Spartacist. Perhaps Buber, eulogizing his
friend and mentor, whom he saw as an honest revolutionary who took a wrong
turn, could not help but evoke all these crucifixions together: Landauer, like Lux-
emburg and Liebknecht, was killed by the counterrevolution; Jesus, like Sparta-
cus and his army, was crucified by Rome. The true revolution suffers the same
fate as the false—until that day when all the failures of the past will be gathered
up and redeemed.
Conclusion: In Memoriam
In 1923, the Munich Anarchosyndikalistische Vereinigung (Anarcho-Syndicalist
Association) erected an obelisk at Landauer’s grave. Ten years later, shortly af-
ter the Nazi ascension, the obelisk was destroyed. Buber aimed to raise a liter-
ary monument to Landauer, which would be more enduring.^184 Throughout the
1920s, Buber vigilantly consecrated the memory of his friend. As executor of Lan-
dauer’s literary estate, Buber often had instructions provided for his editing of
Landauer’s unfinished projects, but he also made his own creative decisions. First