A picture of Gustav Landauer taken during the Räterrepublik in Munich, which was sent to his daughters as a postcard
Image courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München/Bildarchiv, photographer Henrich Hoffmann
The concept for this book was born when its two editors met at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies in Hamburg during 2016/17, and more specifically out of our joint research on the last months of Landauer’s life in the Munich Räterepublik in 1918 and 1919.1 During our work, we developed the idea of commemorating the 100th anniversary of Landauer’s death by joining our respective domains of expertise, Sprachphilosophie (Libera Pisano) and Jewish political thought (Cedric Cohen-Skalli), in order to invite scholars to a conference entitled “The Skepsis and Antipolitics of Gustav Landauer.” A century after Landauer’s tragic death, in a time marked by a deep scepticism concerning the consequences of modern politics, but also more than a century after philosophy’s linguistic turn, we decided to devote this international conference to the complex articulation of skepsis and antipolitics in Landauer’s life, thought, and legacy. The conference was organised by the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa on 25 and 26 November 2019, and it was a great success. It brought together seventeen distinguished scholars from the US, Germany, Spain, the UK, Poland, and Israel, bound together by a shared enthusiasm for Landauer’s intellectual personality and the desire to expand and renew extant scholarship on his life and work.
The seventeen scholarly contributions that we are proud to present in this volume are organised into four broad categories: 1) Linguistic scepticism in Landauer’s literary and political anarchism; 2) Mysticism, Romanticism, and history in Landauer’s antipolitical stance; 3) Elective affinities: Landauer and his contemporaries; and 4) Landauer between the defence and renewal of Judaism. By combining history of philosophy, literary critique, cultural and intellectual history, theology, and Jewish and German studies, this volume reveals the richness of the notions of skepsis and antipolitics in the context of Landauer’s life, work, and intellectual entourage.
1 Linguistic Scepticism in Landauer’s Literary and Political Anarchism
The volume begins with a series of five studies devoted to the multi-faceted linguistic scepticism that forms the intellectual background of Landauer’s literary and antipolitical anarchism. The common denominator is the encounter between Landauer and Fritz Mauthner, which has not yet received much scholarly attention—a gap that these essays in the volume attempt to fill by illuminating various aspects of it. The first two essays by Libera Pisano and Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, entitled “The Desert and the Garden: Gustav Landauer’s Anarchistic Translation of Fritz Mauthner’s Sprachskepsis” and “Rufer in der Wüste: Some Remarks on Gustav Landauer’s Sceptical Theory of Revolution” respectively, illuminate the connection between Landauer’s anarchism and linguistic scepticism in a fascinating and forceful way. By analysing the role of metaphors in Skepsis und Mystik, Pisano demonstrates the similarities and differences between Mauthner and Landauer. Whereas the former focused his attention on showing the metaphorical and illusory value of language and human knowledge conveyed through words, the latter considered the act of doubting to be a path leading to a new anarchist idea of community. The second essay by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen uses an original analysis of the performative aspects of Landauer’s writings and speeches to show how his concept of utopia should be interpreted as a linguistic revolution that also emerges from his dialogue with modern thinkers such as Mauthner, Spinoza, Hegel, and Schelling.
This linguistic revolution is also the focus of the third essay in the volume by Elke Dubbels entitled “Linguistic Scepticism and the Poetics of Politics in Gustav Landauer.” By addressing the connection between Landauer’s writings and the Weltanschauungsliteratur of his time, Dubbels accurately interprets his anarchic project as a creative and artistic socialism in which community itself—especially in his final writings—is conceived as a guiding image.
The final two essays in this section focus on two distinct examples of linguistic scepticism in Landauer’s literary writings. In his essay entitled “The Buddha’s Laughter: Gustav Landauer and Linguistic Scepticism in Fritz Mauthner’s Novella Der letzte Tod des Gautama Buddha (1912),” Sebastian Musch offers a careful reading of Landauer’s reception of Mauthner’s novella, which provides an eloquent example of their shared Sprachkritik. In the concluding essay, entitled “Spectres of Landauer: Withdrawal and Revolution in an Anarchistic Reading of Hamlet,” Yarden Ben-Zur locates the heart of Landauer’s antipolitical conception of literature in the semantic field of the German word Ent-sagung, which can be translated as “resignation” or “retreat.” As evidence of this groundbreaking interpretation, Ben-Zur shows how Landauer’s anarchic idea of revolution can be embodied through his interpretations of Hamlet’s ghosts.
2 Mysticism, Romanticism, and History in Landauer’s Antipolitical Stance
The second section of the volume contains four essays that set out to elucidate Landauer’s concept of antipolitics in its historical and ethical dimensions, as well as in its mystical and Romantic sources of inspiration. In the stimulating essay “An Elucidation of Landauer’s Concept of Antipolitics,” Cedric Cohen-Skalli seeks to clarify Landauer’s concept of antipolitics, juxtaposing his key texts on this notion with central sources that constitute its philological background. Cohen-Skalli discusses Landauer’s creative translation and appropriation of Étienne de La Boétie’s thought, which contributed to a new psychological understanding of political modernity centred around the psycho-historical renunciation of more reciprocal human relationships in favour of the separation of political power from society and individuals.
In a thrilling contribution titled “Let Us See How We Can Become Gods! Theosis and Ana-Communalism in Gustav Landauer’s Mystical Writings,” Agata Bielik-Robson interprets Landauer’s mystical writings as a philosophical and theological justification of his anarchist antipolitics. She deploys a detailed analysis of Landauer’s interpretation of Meister Eckhart as a catalyst for an alternative understanding of the Judaeo-Christian theological tradition centred on a primordial creative godhead that encompasses the human subject. In view of Landauer’s unique antipolitical mysticism, Bielik-Robson points at the diffuse and mostly concealed nature of Landauer’s influence on Lukács, Bloch, Arendt, and Taubes, but also on Derrida and Celan.
In his Aufruf zum Sozialismus, Landauer defines socialism as the “creation of something in the future as if it had been eternally present.” In an outstanding essay titled “Jede Zeit ist inmitten der Ewigkeit: Gustav Landauer’s Progressive Conservatism,” Asher D. Biemann demonstrates how Landauer’s original synthesis of progress and conservation is rooted in his conservative concept of time, his commitment to the past, and his understanding of eternity.
In the insightful article entitled “Landauer Now,” which closes the second section of the volume, Samuel Hayim Brody builds on an analysis by the sociologist Richard Day according to which Landauer “anticipated poststructuralist theory in analyzing capitalism and the state form not as ‘things’ (structures), but as sets of relations between subjects (discourses).”2 Brody further demonstrates that Landauer’s work also prefigured much of contemporary postcolonial and decolonial thinking in its ability to shift between multiple temporalities.
3 Elective Affinities: Landauer and His Contemporaries
The third part of the book contains a series of unexpected dialogues between Landauer and some of his contemporaries. In her article entitled “‘We Have to Reject Ourselves’: Gustav Landauer and Simone Weil’s Politics of the Ascesis,” Cristina Basili offers a provocative and serious comparison between these two eccentric thinkers who transcended classical political categories. Without ignoring their differences, Basili highlights their shared radical conceptions in which a form of self-annihilation is the precondition for a renewal of humanity with mystical overtones.
The affinities between Landauer and another thinker with whom he was in constant exchange throughout his life are highlighted in the stimulating essay by Abraham Rubin entitled “The German-Jewish Legacy beyond Jewish Peoplehood: Margarete Susman on Gustav Landauer’s Anarchism and Its Afterlife.” Rubin examines how the issues of philosophy, culture, and religion that emerged in the correspondence between Landauer and Susman materialise in her mature philosophical writings, particularly in her original understanding of the nation-as-name as well as in her interpretation of the German-Jewish legacy.
Another interesting comparative reading between Landauer and a central figure in twentieth-century Judaism—namely, Leo Baeck—is proposed in the insightful article by Yaniv Feller entitled “Romantic Politics in the Thought of Gustav Landauer and Leo Baeck.” Taking into account the differences between these two authors, Feller’s essay is an attempt to create a stimulating dialogue between Landauer and Baeck in terms of their ideas of Romanticism, religious experience, and historical communities.
The relationship between Landauer and other Jewish religious anarchists is analysed in the final article of this section by Lilian Türk entitled “Scepticism, Seclusion, and the Self: Correspondences in Religious Anarchist Writings.” In her appealing study, Türk attempts to describe the intellectual similarities between three unconventional Jewish figures—Gustav Landauer, A. Almi, and Abba Gordin—by considering scepticism, antipolitics, and the deification of the self as common features of these three anarchic projects.
4 Landauer between the Defence and Renewal of Judaism
The last section of the volume focuses on Landauer’s complex attitude vis-à-vis Judaism that blends defence, critique, and national renaissance. The first essay by Ulrich Sieg, “Rebellion and the Power of Accident: Gustav Landauer’s Reflections on the Peculiarities of Jewish Identity,” innovatively examines Landauer’s wrestling with the Wilhelmine society’s indifference to cultural antisemitism. Sieg shows how Landauer developed a similar response to antisemitism and Jewish nationalism, choosing not to glorify his ancestry, but rather to overcome religious and ethnic differences through love and the power of sexuality in order to defuse Jewish identity and surmount Jewish endogamy. In contrast to Buber’s emphasis on Jewish identity, Landauer rejected any position “strongly emphasising one’s own nationality” as a “weakness.”
The second article in this section, “Landauer, Strindberg, and the Promise to Abraham” by Warren Zev Harvey, with a response by Yael Sela on the “Eternal Jew,” proposes a fascinating analytical survey of Landauer’s lecture series on Strindberg held in Berlin between 1916 and 1917. Harvey demonstrates that Landauer creatively discerned the character of the wandering Jew (der ewige Jude) and his link to the secret of human history in Strindberg’s account. In the response, Sela explains the ways in which the figures of Abraham and the Eternal Jew are fused together “in a generic manifestation of Abraham, who appears as a perpetual motif, a point of origin, and a source of inherent human (particularly Jewish) knowledge of the Eternal in various guises throughout history.”
An article by Sebastian Venske (né Kunze) entitled “Gustav Landauer’s Sceptical Approach to Martin Buber’s Three Speeches on Judaism” closes this fourth section and the entire volume. Venske brilliantly sheds light on Landauer’s reading of Buber’s Drei Reden, arguing that “Judentum und Sozialismus” (1912) is an abbreviated Landauerian version of Buber’s work. Yet a year later, Landauer wrote “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” (1913), in quite a different tone. Considering himself a Jew and a German, Landauer defended a complex idea of identity and so could not share Buber’s idea of unity—neither as an exclusive unity nor as the purification of oneself. For Landauer, the strength of the nascent nation that he was so eagerly anticipating lay in its ability to produce a unity in diversity, like the one he felt in himself.
Bibliography
Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Random House, 2020.
Cohen-Skalli, Cedric, and Libera Pisano. “Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy.” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 28 (2020): 184–227.
Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press, 2005.
Krastev, Ivan, and Stephen Holmes. The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy. New York: Pegasus Books, 2020.
Kunze, Sebastian. Gustav Landauer. Zwischen Anarchismus und Tradition. Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2020.
Landauer, Gustav. “Anarchism and Socialism.” In Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn, 70–74. Oakland: PM Press, 2010.
Landauer, Gustav. Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Siegbert Wolf. 15 vols. Lich: Edition AV, 2008–2019.
Landauer, Gustav. Briefe 1899–1919. Edited by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, in cooperation with Jürgen Stenzel and Inga Wiedemann. 7 vols. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2023.
Landauer, Gustav. Briefe und Tagebücher 1884–1900. Edited by Christoph Knüppel. 2 vols. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2017.
Landauer, Gustav. Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen. Edited by MartinBuber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1929.
Landauer, Gustav. Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik. Vol. 7 of Gustav Landauer, Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Siegbert Wolf. Lich: Edition AV, 2011.
Landauer, Gustav. “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Individuums.” In Gustav Landauer, Anarchismus. Vol. 2 of Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Siegbert Wolf, 45–63. Lich: Edition AV, 2009.
Lausberg, Michael. Landauers Philosophie des libertären Sozialismus. Münster: Unrast, 2018.
Leder, Tilman. Die Politik eines “Antipolitikers”: Eine politische Biographie Gustav Landauers. Edited by Siegbert Wolf. 2 vols. Lich: Edition AV, 2014.
Link-Salinger, Ruth. Gustav Landauer: Philosopher of Utopia. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977.
Lunn, Eugene. Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Maurer, Charles B. Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971.
Steininger, Rita. Gustav Landauer. Ein Kämpfer für Freiheit und Menschlichkeit. Munich: Volk Verlag, 2020.
For the results of this research, see Cedric Cohen-Skalli and Libera Pisano, “Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 28 (2020): 184–227.
Richard J.F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 16.