48 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
came Landauer’s lectures on Shakespeare, Shakespeare: Dargestellt in Vorträgen
(1920). That same year, Buber gave a short address to the world conference of the
Zionist socialist movement, Ha’poel Ha’tzair, eulogizing Landauer as “the hidden
leader.”^185 In 1921, he followed up with Der werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben
und Schrifttum, and in 1924 he published Beginnen: Aufsätze über Sozialismus.
In 1929, Buber brought out a two-volume edition of Landauer’s correspondence,
Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen. This edition contains only Landau-
er’s own letters, not responses, but Buber provides context and extensive com-
mentary on the letters. On the tenth anniversary of Landauer’s murder, Buber
published “Erinnerung an einen Tod” (Recollection of a Death). Then his urge to
commemorate his friend seems to have finally subsided, and he did not pick up
his pen to discuss Landauer for another ten years.^186
“Recollection of a Death” beautifully demonstrates Buber’s fidelity to Lan-
dauer’s definition of anarchism and revolution: not as class struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or between the masses and the state, but between
individuals and themselves, between groups and themselves, in a transhistorical
struggle to realize true community. Buber calls this polarity “the true front.” The
true front does not lie between one soldier and another. Rather, it runs through
the heart of each soldier, who struggles with doubt as to whether “what stands
opposite him is not at all inimical.”^187 Nor does the true front lie between the
revolutionary and his internal enemy, the government or the capitalist class. “The
revolutionary stands, according to the situation, in the tension between goal and
way, and within its responsibility, neither of which the soldier knows.... [T]he
revolutionary lives on the knife’s edge... here again the true front runs through
the center.”^188 If the revolutionary chooses means destructive of his ends, he ren-
ders those ends meaningless. This brings Buber back ten years, to his visit with
Landauer in Munich in February 1919:
I was with him, and several other revolutionary leaders in a hall of the Diet
building in Munich. The discussion was conducted for the most part between
me and a Spartacus leader, who later became well known in the second com-
munist revolutionary government in Munich that replaced the first, socialist
government of Landauer and his comrades. The man walked with clanking
spurs through the room; he had been a German officer in the war. I declined
to do what many apparently had expected of me—to talk of the moral prob-
lem; but I set forth what I thought about the relation between end and means.
I documented my view from historical and contemporary experience. The
Spartacus leader did not go into that matter. He, too, sought to document his
apology for the terror by examples. “Dzertshinsky,” he said, “the head of the
Cheka, could sign a hundred death sentences a day, but with an entirely clean
soul.” “That is, in fact, just the worst of all,” I answered. “This ‘clean’ soul you
do not allow any splashes of blood to fall on! It is not a question of ‘souls’ but of
responsibility.” My opponent regarded me with unperturbed superiority. Lan-
dauer, who sat next to me, laid his hand on mine. His whole arm trembled.^189