The True Front | 53momentary, and fleeting too.” Landauer, “Separation to Community,” 105. Contrast with Bu-
ber, who focuses on “this Erlebnis” that interrupts our loneliness, so that “like a nuptial festival
we were freed from all restraints and found the ineffable meaning of life”; he dwells on “the
hours of consecration—in the crystallization of an instant, in a short festive communion—[in
which] we met in a feeling of co-essentiality, of blissful, blessed fusion with all things in time
and space.” Flohr and Susser, “Alte und Neue Gemeinschaft,” 46–47, 53.
- Landauer, “Separation to Community,” 107.
- Ibid., 104–105.
- Buber, “Judaism and the Jews,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York:
Schocken Books, 1995), 15; Buber, “Renewal of Judaism,” in in On Judaism, ed. Nahum N.
Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 44, 49. - According to Rocker, “Gustav Landauer was without doubt the greatest mind among
all of Germany’s libertarian socialists; it was in a certain sense his curse that, of all places, he
had to live and work in Germany. The majority of the era’s German anarchists understood him
even less than others did; most of them had no idea what a precious gift he was.” Rocker, The
London Years (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), cited in Kuhn and Wolf, introduction to Revo-
lution and Other Writings, 26. Landauer published an article on Kropotkin, a Russian prince
who forsook his lands and title when he became an anarchist, “Fürst Peter Kropotkin,” in 1900,
and translated three of his books. - Included in Macht und Mächte were Arnold Himmelheber and L e b e n d i g To t, Nietzs-
chean narrative experiments that Landauer had written in prison in 1894. - Buber, “Gustav Landauer,” Die Zeit 39.506 (June 11, 1904), 127–128. (This is the weekly
Die Zeit edited by Isidore Singer, Hermann Bahr, and Heinrich Kanner, not the daily newspa-
per Die Zeit). Cf. Martin Buber Werkausgabe Band 2.1, Mythos und Mystik: Frühe religionswis-
senschaftliche Schriften, ed. David Groiser (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 2013), 102–107. - Notably, the two essays on anarchism Buber mentions are from Zukunft, not Der Sozial-
ist. It is unclear whether Buber was a reader of Der Sozialist at that time, although he definitely
subscribed to the revived version of the journal after 1909; FMD 177n189. - The references to “the two articles” are, unfortunately, vague; they allow for the pos-
sibility that Buber only knows of two articles by Landauer on anarchism, as well as for the
possibility that he is simply referring to the two that appeared in Zukunft. - “Anarchie ist in Wahrheit eine Grundstimmung jedes Menschen.” This phrase, with its
continuation “who wishes to form from within himself a new being,” is cited as evidence for
reading the essay as an adoption by Buber of anarchism as a metaphysical, aesthetic stance;
FMD 110. Although Buber clearly aestheticizes Landauer, he would have to willfully ignore
or misread the rest of Landauer’s essay to achieve a complete depoliticization, and indeed,
he links Landauer’s novels to his “brave, reckless, and significant activity in public life.” In
the very essay Buber praises, Landauer stresses, “One would misunderstand me deeply if one
believed that I preach quietism or resignation, or that I demand the renunciation of action or
social engagement.” Landauer, “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism,” 88–89. - In his discussion of Skepsis und Mystik, Buber again cites “Separation to Community”
regarding the blood community as linked to innermost being. - Buber, “Gustav Landauer,” 128.
- The emergence from seclusion is a trope found frequently in the scholarship. Landauer’s
is said to have occurred in 1907–1908, with the publication of Die Revolution and the founding
of the Sozialist Bund; Buber’s in 1909 with the first of the “Speeches on Judaism” to the Bar Ko-
chba Society of Prague. However, the years of Buber’s editorship of Die Gesellschaft, 1906–1912,
overlap with both the “seclusion” and the “renewed activity.” - FMD 25.