a tribute to gustav landauer

7/28/2019 A Tribute to Gustav Landauer

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On my mind

Henry Schwarzchild

I invested a good many years of my life fighting for

racial justice. I have been told convincingly th at I am

a racist by definition.

My regard fo r the dignity of people has always m ade

me reject any form of condescension toward women.

I have been cogently informed that I am a sexist, not-

withstanding.

My personal experience with totalitarianism has

strongly inclined me toward activist libertarian and

radical politics. I am widely and persuasively depicted

as an establishmentarian counterrevolutionary.

The two of us, my wife and I, have procreated two

children - mere replacem ents. The statisticians and

population analysts convict me of overpopulating the

earth and contributing to the imminent exhaustion

of its resources.

From my earliest years, I have had an intense concern

for and involvement in the well being of the yishuv

and of the State of Israel. I am denounced, and un-

derstandably so, as an enemy of the Jewish state and

an agent of the P.L.O.

By the influence of my parents' passionate commit-

ments, I have always considered myself a socialist. I

have been accused, with much justice, of being an

elitist bourgeois.

Though I have ever held willing consent t o be a pred-

icate of agreeable sex, I am revealed to be a co-con-

spirator in the rape of every woman in history, from

the Sabines to JoAnn Little.

Together with my wife and the mortgage bank, I own

less than a quarter of an acre of land, on which I do

not eradicate the crab grass or poison streams or

spray arsenate of lead on the apple tree or pollute the

air with clouds of charcoal fumes. Yet I am held

guilty of being a destroyer of the natura l environm ent.

I weigh about 140 pounds, eat moderately (being nei-ther gourmet nor gourmand), and do not complain

about left-overs. I have been made t o feel responsible

for the starvation of millions in Africa and Asia.

I have always wanted to choose my enemies. It now

sometimes seems that I can choose nothing else. It is

all quite melancholy, and I feel the resentment grow-

ing stronger in me. If the world insists upon defining

me, I may submit. There is a real danger that, some

fine day, I would be hung for a wolf as soon as for a

sheep.Draft epitaph: He did what he could. Gra ffito : He

couldn ' t . A Jew, malgre lui.

A tribute to gustav landauer

Irving Levitas

Amidst all the contemporary discussion of the role of

authentic Jews in the contempora ry w orld, relatively

litt le attentio n has been paid to those Jews who re-

jected institutional Judaism for a Judaism that was to

play a significant part in their participation in socio-

political affairs. Certainly any examination of the

Jewish situation from the French Revolution onwardsshould provide adequate reason for a more thorough

study of Jews of this category, ranging from Heine

through Brandeis. In a certain sense, most, if not all

of these Jews saw the w orld through "the lenses

Spinoza ground," and their admiration for the Jew of

Amsterdam was oft-expressed.

Among those who were so motivated, the name of

Gustav Landauer stands very prom inently. Born in

1870 in Germ any, he was to be murdered by the Ger-

man Social Democrats under Noske in 1919, in

Munich, with proto-Nazi assistance. Were it not for

the effo rts of Martin Buber, whose relationship with

LandaUer was very close, and who wrote a chapter on

Landauer in his book, Paths to Utopia, devoting

many years to collecting and editing Landauer's

works, we would know litt le of the thought of this

Anarchist-Socialist who was to steadfastly proclaim

his Jewish identity throug hout his life.

Committed to jewish identity and peopleho od

A fervent anti-Marxist, he was to proclaim that if

social changes were to occur, they would have to

emanate fr om the individual himself, not from any

"class-struggle," or political reforms, the latter being

more seductive than palliative and corrective. With his

emphasis on the necessity of individual change as

being prior to any form of cooperative action to

abolish the state, he was to call on his Jewish tradi-tion frequently to explain his actions.

This atti tude was best reflected in his correspon-

dence, edited by B uber, in which he constantly refer-

red to his identity as a Je w. A close frie nd of

Landauer's was Constantin Brunner, who had pub-

lished articles by Eugen Duhring, an opponent of

Marx. But he was also an anti-Semite of sorts, and

Landauer once said to him, "I have not the slightest

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intention of ever, even for a day, forgett ing the joy I

take in being a Jew . But m y Jewishness bids me des-pise the Jews o f the stock-exchange (borsenjuden)

who exist . . . " In this mood, Landauer was to dis-

sociate himself farther fro m Marx, who identif ied

al l Jews as borsenjuden; to Landauer, the Jewish

prophetic spiri t demanded the excoriation of such

Jews to preserve the Jewish volk.

And in the use of this term, Landauer was to further

i l lustrate his identi ty as a Jew . Using Herder 's defini-

t ion of a volk as a group possessing a unique language,

culture and spirit (Geist), Landauer was to dissociate

\ himself from those Jew s who had discarded their Jew-

ish identity in order to participate in some vague

"humanitarian" movements. Thus, in response to

Julius Bab's statement that he was a German, andonly incidentally, by accident, of Jewish ancestry,

Landauer asserted that the Jews were a dist inct volk,

with a culture already expressed in the Psalms, the

Book of Es ther, Spinoza, and Bube r. In a lengthy dis-

cussion on this same theme with Fri tz Mauthner,

anothe r very close friend, he was to be more

emphatic. Mauthner, the author of an influential

study of language, had derided Landau er for his pro-

fession of Jewish id enti ty, claiming tha t as far as he,

Mau thner, was concern ed, there just hap pened to be

some "d uc t" in his brain marked. "Jew ish." La ndauer

responded by saying, "First , I am a human being,

then I am a Jew, then I am a German, then a South-

German, and, finally, an 'I ' . "

His socialism stressed human relations over class

All of these arguments were in the conte xt of

Landau er 's own anarchist ideology, which, as indi-

cated before, rested on the premise that only through

a rectif ication of the individual 's own att i tude to the

statej could such a society com e into being. Although

he was to observe that radical terrorism was the reac-

t ion of the Sta te 's own use of terror against the

radical movements, he was opposed to terrorism and

felt that only through the sett ing up of small

communes within the state would the state collapse.

"The state is a cond it ion ," he said, "a certain rela-

t ionship between human beings, a mode of human

behavior; we destroy (the State) by contracting o ther

relationships, by behaving differently." (liegirmen,

ed. by Buber, p. 53)

When he went to Munich at the request of Kurt

Lisner to help establish a Dem ocratic R epublic in

1919, he was to break with the government because

of the influence of the Communists in that govern-

ment, and their glorif ication of Lenin's "Dictator-

ship of the Proletariat ." With Ernst Toller , the author

of the prophetic Massmensch, he was to oppose thedeath penalty for enemies, an attitude that occa-

sioned the wrath of the Communists in Bavaria.

Individualistic socialism an d m essianic judaism

In the only time he used the word "religion" posi-

tively, he was to say, "Socialism is the attempt to

lead man's comm on life to a bond of common spiri t

of freedom, that is, to religion." And it must be re-

membered that , contrary to popular assumption, his

socialism was anti-Marxist, more in line with that of

Hermann C ohen, who had, with Neo-Kantian em pha-

sis, indicated that socialism was to be a product of

man's growing consciousness and will. It was a social-

ism of voluntary individuals cooperating together for

a society w ithout a " Sta te." This voluntarism w asthe hallmark of Landauer's Anarchism-Socialism, for

he felt that any other m ethod of social organization,

especially if brought about from above, would lead,

not only to human degradation, but to a debasement

of the idea itself.

Buber was to note th at L andauer was one who was a

martyr to the idea of huma nity, of which he was the

prophet, a statement which Landauer reciprocated by

observing-that Buber was "the apostle of Judaism be-

fore humanity." But the fact that both men were so

closely allied which is far too often neglected in dis-

cussions of Buber, indicates to the student of Land-

auer something abo ut the role of the Jew . Both menrealized that the fulfillment of the Messianic hope,

th e raison d'etre of Jewish life, rested on the Jew in-

dividually transforming himself as a messenger of that

era, accepting his responsibility as a Jew to help bring

to fruit ion the dreams of the prophets and the hope

of the world.

. . . but others say . . .

The fam ily restr icts the potential of women

The article by Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, (Sh'ma 5/99) ,

does not necessarily meet the test of reality.

For example, the woman's f l ight from the home is

characterized as a flight from the ideal of the nuclear

fam ily. It Is my opin ion th at rathe r than dissatisfac-

tion with the nuclear family per se, it is the tradition-

al restrictive role in that family that the woman

would like to change, not the destruction of the nu-

clear family itself. In addition, Ms. Fuchs-Kreimer

tells us that "the family has been the place where hu-

mane values were salvaged and nurtured, where pecu-

7



liarities and uniqueness could thrive." How is it pos-

sible for the potential, for the uniqueness of each wo-

man to thrive if possibilities for her growth are seen

only in terms of a caretaker role, if certain areas are

denied her because of her sex? Can an institution that

has had as its structure a child-like dependence on the

part of one of its adult members be characterized as a

place where "humane values were salvaged and nur-

tured?"

Unlike the author I do not believe it is possible to

have "everything." In order for the Jewish wom an to

have the kind of life Ms. Fuch-Kreimer says she w ants,

difficult choices, even compromises, have to be made.

Phyllis Lieberman

West Caldwell, N.J.

Feminism increases risks along with options

In response to my article on feminism ( Sh'ma 5/99) ,

Ms. Reifman argues that "One doesn't have to reject

the family to look for alternative avemues for self-ful-

fillment". I certainly hope not! My point w as simply

that one cannot compare the restricted lives of our

sisters in the past to some ideal in which one is and

does everything. Life is a selection am ong possibilities.

When I stated that I would "have everything-success,

babies, a PhD, FREEDOM," I was being ironic. I am

not so smug or self-righteous. I agree completely with

Ms. Reifman that we may find a new synthesis thatwill be more satisfying than the old. But the "self ful-

fillment she mentions in the quotation above and the

"satisfying" synthesis are grandiose goals - luxuries of

our position as upper middle-class moderns. Of course

we must strive for more than our ancestors, but we

risk achieving less. We risk discovering our choices

were wrong, we tr ied to do too much, not enough,

the wrong combination. This does not mean we

musn' t t ry. We must accept the burden of being mod-

ern.

"The promise of feminism remains". I agree. The

multiplication of options is always a good thing, for i t

permits more freedom of choice. But we must st i l l

find the center of our lives. Feminism may increase

the options; i t cannot take away the necessity of

choice.

Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer

New Haven, Connecticut

THE ARTICLE by Rick Blum, "Finding a door, seek-

ing a treasure," which appeared in Sh 'ma 5 /97 , orig-

inally appeared in Hakotz magazine, Volume 3:1,

Spring, 1975. Hakotz is the Jewish student literary

magazine of Syracuse University. We regret not hav-

ing acknow ledged the earlier publication.

MOSHE MEISELMAN teaches Talmud at Yeshivas

Brisk in Chicago.

LEVI YEHUDAH KELMAN is a rabbinical student

at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

L E O N A R D K R A V I T Z teaches Medieval Jewish

Philosophy and Midrash at HUC-J1R in New York.

IRVING LEVITAS is scholar-in-residenc e at Temp le

Emanu-El, Yonkers, N. Y.

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a tribute to gustav landauer

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