Siegbert Wolf

"The real place for realization is the community".
The intellectual relationship between Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber

The deep personal and intellectual friendship between Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and Martin Buber (1878-1965) and their "antipolitical" cooperation over many years (Neue Gemeinschaft, Sozialistischer Bund, Forte-Kreis etc.) has an extraordinary importance in libertarian utopia. In the international libertarian movement we find many Jewish women and men as libertarian activists. In the German speaking area Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber belong to this Jewish-libertarian group. In the centre of their social-philosophical thinking and practice stood the individual and the relations between the individuals.
Landauer's influence on Buber was referred to his communitarian anarchism, which Buber carried further with his philosophy of dialogue and with his Hebraic Humanism which meant a radical cultural regeneration of Judaism above all in Palestine. This also includes an approach between Jews and Arabs (Binationality). On the other side Landauer was influenced by Buber to an intensive exposition with his Judaism. His confession to Judaism was founded in the community traditions on Judaism and accented the intimate liaison between Judaism and libertarian socialism. This included Landauer's rejection of the zionist movement also as his critics on the assimilation of Judaism in Western Europe. Looking at Judaism and his traditions of charity, justice and community it is possible to know Landauer's libertarian utopia.
Landauer and Buber both agreed in their rejection of a national Jewish state in Palestine. Buber sympathized with a cultural zionism which aimed at a renewal of the whole Judaism, on the overcoming of the growing distance between the Jewish communities in Western and Eastern Europe, and the strengthening of the feelings of solidarity of all Jewish people. Not in the diaspora but only in Palestine within the Kibbutz-movement Buber saw an intellectual Jewish center.
Buber's concept of the development of a selfconfident Judaism with his task to regenerate all human beings found consent by Landauer who sympathized with the Kibbutz-movement too. The Jewish settlement-movement in Palestine both Landauer an Buber interpreted as a community which was very similar to Landauer's anarchy. After Landauer's brutal murder in 1919 Buber carried on his anarchism and declared Landauer to the secret spiritus rector of the Jewish settlement movement in Palestine.
With their practical projects to revolutionate society Landauer and Buber got a very important role in utopian thinking in 20th century.