Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew

250 Pages·2014·2.81 MB·English

by  Paul Mendes-Flohr

Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew

Gustav Landauer:
Anarchist and Jew
Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Anya Mali
in collaboration with Hanna Delf von Wolzogen
ISBN 978-3-11-037395-0
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036859-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039560-0
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Contents
Abbreviations  vii
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Introduction  1
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Messianic Radicals: Gustav Landauer and Other German-Jewish
Revolutionaries  14
Ulrich Linse
‘Poetic Anarchism’ versus ‘Party Anarchism’: Gustav Landauer and the
Anarchist Movement in Wilhelmian Germany  45
Michael Löwy
Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber  64
Martin Treml
Between Utopia and Redemption: Gustav Landauer’s Influence on
Gershom Scholem  82
Anthony David
Gustav Landauer’s Tragic Theater  92
Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann
Gustav Landauer and the Literary Trends of his Time  107
Philippe Despoix
Toward a German-Jewish Construct: Landauer’s Arnold Himmelheber  121
Corinna R. Kaiser
Gustav Landauer’s Early Novella Geschwister: Dying to Communicate  132
Hanna Delf von Wolzogen
Gustav Landauer’s Reading of Spinoza  155
Yossef Schwartz
Gustav Landauer and Gerhard Scholem: Anarchy and Utopia  172
vi   Contents
Wolf von Wolzogen
Ina Britschgi-Schimmer: Co-Editor of Gustav Landauer’s Letters  191
Chaim Seeligmann
Gustav Landauer and his Judaism  205
Ernst Simon
Der werdende Mensch und der werdende Jude: Gustav Landauer’s Development
as a Human Being and Jew  213
Brigitte Hausberger
My Father, Gustav Landauer  233
Index  238
Contributors  241
Abbreviations
GLAA Gustav Landauer Nachlass, International Institute for Social
History, Amsterdam, No.
GLAJ Gustav Landauer Nachlass, The National Library of Israel,
Jerusalem, Varia, No.
Lebensgang I/II Gustav Landauer, Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, ed. Martin
Buber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, 2 vols., (Frankfurt/Main:
Rütten & Loening, 1929).
Mauthner Briefe Gustav Landauer–Fritz Mauthner: Briefwechsel 1890-1919, ed.
Hanna Delf, (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994).
Aufruf 1911/1919 Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, (Berlin: Socialist
Bund, 1911; 2nd ed. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1919).
Beginnen Beginnen: Aufsätze über Sozialismus, ed. Martin Buber, (Köln:
Marcan-Block, 1924).
Meister Eckhart 1903/1920 Gustav Landauer, trans., Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften.
In unsere Sprache übertragen, (1903; 2nd ed., Berlin: K.
Schnabel, 1920).
Revolution Die Revolution, vol. 13, Die Gesellschaft. Sammlung sozial-
psychologischer Monographien, ed. Martin Buber, (Frankfurt/
Main: Rütten & Loening, 1907; new ed., Berlin: K. Kramer,
1974).
Der Sozialist Der Sozialist, Berlin: 1891-1899; Der Sozialist. Organ des
Sozialistischen Bundes, ed. Gustav Landauer, (Bern/Berlin:
1909-1915; repr. Vaduz, 1980).
Shakespeare I/II, 1920/1923 Shakespeare. Dargestellt in Vorträgen, (1920), 2nd ed.
(Potsdam: Rütten & Loening, 1948).
Skepsis 1903/1923/1978 Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners
Sprachkritik, (Berlin: Marcan-Block, 1903; 2nd ed., Köln:
Marcan-Block, 1923; repr. Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1978).
WM 1921 Gustav Landauer, Der werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben
und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber, (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1921).
WA III Gustav Landauer, Dichter, Ketzer, Außenseiter: Schriften zu
Literatur, Philosophie, Judentum, ed. Hanna Delf, vol. III of
Gustav Landauer, Werkausgabe, (Berlin: Akademie, 1996).
Macht und Mächte Gustav Landauer, Macht und Mächte: Novellen, (Berlin: Egon
Fleischel, 1903; 2nd ed. Köln: Marcan-Block, 1923).
Gespräch Gustav Landauer im Gespräch: Symposium zum 125.
Geburtstag, Conditio Judaica 18, ed. H. Delf and G.
Mattenklott, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997).
Sensation “… die beste Sensation ist die Ewige … ” Gustav Landauer
– Leben, Werk und Wirkung, (Düsseldorf: Theatermuseum,
Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, 1995).
NG Die Neue Gemeinschaft: Ein Orden vom wahren Leben.
Vorträgen und Ansprachen, part 2, Das Reich der Erfüllung,
ed. Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1901).

Paul Mendes-Flohr
Introduction
Idealist war ich immer, Idealist bin ich und
das will ich bleiben. Amen … . Güte, grosse,
unendliche Güte thut uns noth, und die will
heute so warm aus mir hinausströmen in alle
Welt.
Gustav Landauer1
In February 1912, the forty-two-year-old Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) addressed
a group of young socialist Zionists in Berlin. His topic was pointedly entitled
“Judaism and Socialism.” Acknowledging his bond to his fellow Jews, he reflected
on the “Jewish renaissance,” the awakening sense of Jewishness among erstwhile
assimilated Jews. The renewal of a Jewish consciousness, he suggested, is born
“first and foremost” of a new appreciation that Jewishness is “an indomitable
fact, a natural characteristic that there is something that by nature bonds Jews to
one another. One is a Jew, even if one does not know it or wish to confess it.” The
socialist anarchist Landauer further observed that this reawakened conscious-
ness obliged the Jews to face fateful decisions, and hence the need for leaders
beholden to a spiritual vision: “For when a nation stands once again at a turning
point when it should initially become what it could and what its inner possibil-
ity demands of it, then the poets, then the prophets are needed.” These leaders,
Landauer held, should emerge from the ranks of Jewish socialists, who would
ally the re-born nation with a cause greater than itself – the command to create
a compassionate and just social order. Some socialists will understandably seek
to shape the “national community as the basis of the new society. Hence, many
Jewish socialists will decide that what is initially needed is a [new] Jewish com-
munity.” But, Landauer continues, for other Jewish socialists “the Galut, exile
as an inner disposition of isolation and longing, will be the utmost calling that
bonds them to Judaism and to socialism. For these [lonely] individuals Judaism
and socialism will be the same; they will know that Judaism and socialism have
1 “An idealist I always was; an idealist I am and I will remain so. Amen … . Goodness, abundant,
endless goodness is what we need most; and goodness will warmly flow from me throughout
the world.” The epigraph is taken from G. Landauer, “Aus meinem Gefängnis-Tagebuch,” Der
sozialistische Akademiker I (1895), nos. 13-18, 319. Cited in Ruth Link-Salinger, Gustav Landauer.
Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1977), 47, n. 103.
2   Paul Mendes-Flohr
charged them to demand [human] solidarity and justice.”2 A year later Landauer
had the occasion to elaborate this gracious and elegant explanation of why he
could not align himself with Zionism. In an essay provocatively entitled, “Are
these Heretical Thoughts?”– frequently cited in the present volume – he asserts
that “the Jews can only be redeemed with [all of] humanity, and that the two are
one and the same: to pursue persistently the messiah in [national] banishment
and dispersion, and to be the messiah of the nations.”3 In the same breath, he
gently rebukes the Zionists for posing a false dilemma of having either to be true
to one’s Jewish identity and cultural memory or to embrace world culture and
court the inevitable scandal of assimilation. The embrace of world culture, he
defiantly affirmed, need not vitiate one’s Judaism. On the contrary, Judaism and
other cultural affiliations may dwell parallel to one another in mutual enrich-
ment. The modern Jew is a complex amalgam of many cultures, and the demand
for a “simplification” of his or her cultural identity and loyalty is both insipid and
invidious. Similarly, Landauer regarded himself to be both a socialist – or rather
an anarchist – and a Jew. He saw no contradiction between these commitments,
nor even a necessary tension between them.
This volume of essays explores various aspects of Landauer’s parallel fidel-
ities as a Jew and as an anarchist. He fashioned his anarchism as a form of Kul-
tursozialismus, with a view to enlisting culture – theater, music, literature – to
nurture the values and attitudes necessary for the “realization” of socialism. This
conception of the political function of culture goes back to the German romantics
who assigned to aesthetic education the exalted task of transforming a society’s
moral and spiritual sensibilities. Hence, Landauer’s critique of Marxism, which
he faulted for placing what he regarded to be a false emphasis on the objective
forces of political economy. True socialism, he argued, would emerge only through
the moral and spiritual regeneration of human beings; it cannot be imposed from
above either by governmental fiat or by the decree of a revolutionary vanguard:
“Revolution is not what revolutionaries think it to be.”4 There is nothing inevi-
table about socialism, no inner dialectical logic guiding history. A revolutionary
change of the moral fabric of human relations in all spheres of life – economic,
social and interpersonal – is indeed the exigent need, but it will only come about
with the maturing of the “will to revolution,” with the resolute decision to break
with history, to fold back the sad millennial record of social injustice, and begin
2 Landauer, “Judentum und Sozialismus,” Selbstwehr (7 February 1912); also in Die Arbeit. Organ
der Zionistischen Volkssozialistischen Partei (June 1920). Reprinted in WA III, 160f.
3 “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” in Vom Judentum, published by the Jüdischer Studentenverein,
Bar Kochba (Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1913), 250-57; also in WA III, 170-74.
4 Letter to Fritz Mauthner, 5 October, 1907. Lebensgang I, 172.