226 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
- Gustav Landauer, “Goethe’s Politik”, in Der Werdende Mensch,
Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber (Weimar:
Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1921), 142, my translation. - Gustav Landauer, “Twenty Five Years later, on the Jubilee of
Wilhelm II”, in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader,
ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 64. Landauer contin-
ues, “This is why I was (without knowing the word at the time) an
anarchist before I was a socialist, one of the few who had not taken
a detour via social democracy.” - Die Jungen (Young Ones) opposed the SPD, which had trans-
formed into a mass party, setting the tone in national socialist politics.
They criticised its bureaucratic and centralised authority, its passivity
and tactical reformism. Instead, Die Jungen proposed a libertarian
alternative to state politics. Banned from the opposition they formed
the Verein unabhängiger Sozialisten, which subsequently campaigned
in favour of anti-parliamentarism and anarchism. See, for example,
Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community (Santa Barbara: University of
California Press, 1973), 55ff. - ibid, 80ff.
- Hochheim, Eckhart, and Gustav Landauer, Meister Eckhart’s
Mystische Schriften: In Unsere Sprache Übertragen von Gustav
Landauer, ed. Gustav Landauer (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1991). - Joachim Willems explores the extent to which Landauer relies
on the ideas of Meister Eckhar in Religiöser Gehalt des Anarchismus
und anarchistischer Gehalt der Religion, die jüdisch-christich-athe-
istische Mystik Gustav Landauers zwischen Meister Eckhart und
Martin Buber (Albeck: Verlag Ulmer Manuskripte, 2001). - During the November Revolution after WWI members of the
Independent SPD (USPD) under leadership of Landauer’s friend
Kurt Eisner overthrew the Bavarian monarchy in 1918 and declared
Bavaria the first German state to become a republic. The USPD es-
tablished thousands of councils across Bavaria through which groups
with various interests, such as workers, peasants, soldiers or students,
self-governed. - Charles Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of
Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), 180.