Prophet of Community Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) Prophet of Community The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer by EUGENE LUNN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON I973 University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1973 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN : 0-520-02207-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-186105 Designed by Dave Pauly Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments I should like to acknowledge the help I have received in the preparation of this book. I owe a debt to the excellent staff of the International Institute of Social History, Am­ sterdam, especially to Mr. Rudolf de Jong, for assistance in locating materials and for permission to read the manu­ scripts contained in the Landauer Archives. I would also like to thank Professor Gerald Feldman of the University of California, Berkeley, for the thoughtful advice he offered while this study was in thesis form. At a later stage my work benefited from readings by Professors Robert A. Kann of Rutgers University and Peter Loewenberg of the Univer­ sity of California, Los Angeles. It it a particular pleasure to acknowledge the invaluable guidance I have received from Professor Carl E. Schorske, teacher and friend, currently of the History Department at Princeton University, whose searching and thorough critique of my work included nu­ merous helpful suggestions, especially with regard to ques­ tions of method. Finally, my wife Myra provided the moral support that again and again renewed the energies needed to complete, and twice revise, the manuscript. With her help I managed to sustain a lively interest in my subject over a number of years by preventing it from taking over our lives. ' r 1 M 'j :ŕ : !¡ i‘ Contents INTRODUCTION 3 1. THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST 17 Adolescent Romanticism: Völkisch and Nietzschean Elements 18 Berlin and Socialism 35 The Berliner Jungen: The Education of an Anarchist 49 2. CHANGING PERSPECTIVES 75 The Appeal of Anarchism 75 Resistance to Social Democracy and Anarchist Terrorism 81 A New Theory and a New Tactic 89 Idealist, Romantic, and Völkisch Perspectives 101 Isolation and Withdrawal 118 3. THE CONSOLATIONS OF MYSTICISM 124 Sources of Mystical Belief: Philosophic and Personal Experience 127 The Emergence of a Völkisch Socialist 138 Isolation and Mystical Belief: Landauer’s Skepsis und, Mystik 150 4. THE ROMANTIC AS SOCIALIST 172 A Philosophy of History 173 The Socialist Bund 190 Landauer and Marxism 200 CONTENTS Anarchosocialist Society 213 The Origins of the State and the Question of Tactics 223 5. THE SOCIALIST AS ROMANTIC 232 World War I: The Response of a Libertarian Romantic 233 Community, Nation, and Humanity 257 The Literature of the Volk 280 6. REVO LU TIO N IN BA V A R IA 291 Landauer and Munich’s November: A Democracy of Councils? 292 The Advance of Parliamentarism and the Response of the Radicals 305 Thermidor Deferred: Eisner’s Assassination and the Council Republics 317 Thermidor with a Vengeance: Landauer’s Failure and Martyrdom 336 c o n c l u s i o n 343 APPENDIX 349 NOTES 3 5 I BIBLIOGRAPHY 405 INDEX 4 27 -X- Prophet of Community This passion for bureaucratization, such as we have heard expressed here, is enough to drive one to despair. It is . as though we knowingly and willingly were supposed to become men who need “ order” and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if this order shakes for a moment and helpless when they are torn from their exclusive adaptation to this order. That the world knows nothing more than such men of order—we are in any case caught up in this development, and the central question is not how we further and accelerate it but what we have to set against this machinery, in order to preserve a remnant of humanity from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this exclusive rule of bureaucratic life ideals. — m a x w e b e r , Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik It is the fate of our time, with its characteristic rationalization, intellectualization, and above all, disenchantment of the world, that precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have disappeared from public life, either into the shadow realm of mysdcal life or into the brotherliness of direct relationships between individuals. It is not accidental that our highest art is intimate rather than monumental, nor is it chance that today, only within the smallest circles of community, from man to man, in pianissimo does that Something pulsate which earlier, as prophetic pneuma, went through the great communities like a fire storm and fused them together. — m a x w e b e r , Wissenschaft als Beruf Introduction In May 1919—in the brutal aftermath of the postwar Ger­ man Revolution—a tall, thin, bearded intellectual was beaten to death outside Munich by White troops of the Reichswehr and the Freikorps. The man, Gustav Landauer, was one of three well-known German-Jewish libertarian socialists who had participated in the revolution and been murdered in the reaction to it; Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner were the others. Each of them was a powerful critic of capitalism, militarism, and bureaucratic authority. All three were impassioned prophets who fought for an ethi­ cally and socially liberated humanity.1 None of them achieved even an approximation of their goals. Instead, their murders seem in retrospect to have ominously foreshad­ owed the string of political assassinations in the 1920s and the still heavier darkness of Auschwitz. Of the three figures, Landauer was the least known in 1919, and this is even more true today. German political historians are acquainted with him as a minor leader of the Bavarian Revolution of 1918-19, and some literary his­ torians know of his critical works on poetry and drama. He is best known, however, to students of the history and theory of anarchism. Landauer was, in fact, the most im­ portant German anarchist publicist and intellectual since Max Stirner. It is partly for this reason that he has begun to attract scholarly attention in the past decade.2 As one German reviewer noted in 1969, “ The reemergence of anarchism has coincided with the shaking of all authorities in the West and the East. The rise of an antiauthori- - 3 “ INTRODUCTION tarian student movement and the oppressive growth of the state have lent color once again to the faded writings of Landauer.” 8 The anarchist issue suggests, however, only one side of a much richer activity. Landauer was a man of many talents and interests. To grasp his historical importance, which is a central aim of this book, one must begin by noting the fascinating range of his intellectual and political life in Wil- helmian Germany. A highly regarded literary critic, Lan­ dauer published incisive studies of Hölderlin, Whitman, and Shakespeare, as well as of many other figures of world literature. During and after World War I he was in close contact with a number of major writers of the expressionist movement, particularly the dramatists Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser, upon whom he exerted considerable influ­ ence. Yet Landauer’s literary work was closely allied with his philosophical studies and his political activity. With his close friend, the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, he developed a species of philosophic mysticism which drew upon the German idealist tradition going back to Meister Eckhart. As a socialist Landauer had begun his political career in the 1890s by doing battle with the official Marxist movement in Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD). As editor of a Berlin anarchist paper Der Sozialist, Landauer developed an antiauthoritarian and idealist cri­ tique of Marxism whose positive aspect was the call for a replacement of the state with a decentralized society or­ ganized from below. Later, before World War I, he was to utilize the libertarian socialist theories of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Tolstoi in working out his anarchist no­ tions. Yet from the beginning of his political life in the 1890s he attacked private ownership of the means of pro­ duction, together with a rejection of all centralized and - 4 - INTRODUCTION bureaucratic authority. Unlike the more visible anarchists of his day, however, he totally opposed both violent revo­ lution and individual acts of terrorism, suggesting instead that the state would be destroyed only by building liber­ tarian communities that would gradually release men and women from their childlike dependence upon authority. The heart of Landauer’s social thought, as well as the central thread running through much of his lifework, was the attempt to render authority superfluous and unneces­ sary through the building of radically democratic, partici­ patory communities. The full force of his passionate, some­ times frantic, ethical idealism was directed toward this goal. Landauer was a prophet of Gemeinschaft, the German con­ cept whose heavily emotive, almost libidinal, content is in­ adequately rendered by “ community,” the closest English equivalent. In his notion of community, libertarian social­ ism imperceptibly fused with one of the most influential and historically important strains of modern German social thought. Landauer turned not only against bureaucratic authority but also against industrial urbanism. By 1900, and coinciding with a surge of neoromantic sentiment among German middle-class youth, he had begun to argue for communitarian colonies on the land in which the entire German Volk would reconstitute itself as a nation of peasants and craftsmen. Following from this, Landauer’s mystical philosophy revealed in the depths of each seem­ ingly isolated individual a rich and thriving participation in Gemeinschaft and Volk. For him the libertarian issue was conceived in terms of the famous romantic distinction of “organic” community against atomized, urban society, of Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft.