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Title: Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)
Author: James Horrox
Language: en
Topics: Gustav Landauer
Source: Retrieved on 2 January 2011 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/landauer/landauerbioHorrox.html

James Horrox

Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)

Although acknowledged by those who have encountered his ideas as one of

the finest minds ever to have come out of the anarchist movement, Gustav

Landauer remains relatively unknown outside the German- and

Hebrew-speaking world. Precious little of his voluminous corpus of work

is presently available in English, and despite a minor resurgence in

interest in his ideas during the early 1970s Landauer is known today

primarily for his involvement in the Bavarian revolution of 1918–19, or

in connection with one or more of the many illustrious individuals with

whom he was in close touch throughout his life, rather than for his own

inimitable philosophy.

Landauer’s was a Romantic, non-doctrinaire anarchism which, although

rooted in the ideas of Proudhon and Kropotkin, went unashamedly against

the grain of the anarchist orthodoxy of late 19^(th) and early 20^(th)

century Europe. Central to his thinking is a fundamental comprehension

that the capitalist state by its very nature is not something that can

be “smashed” — rather, as he famously declared in 1910, it is “a

condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human

behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving

differently” [1]. Rejecting the historical materialists’ reification of

the state and society he argued that in reality “we are the State and

continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that

form a real community”. He maintained that although externally imposed

the state lives within each and every human being, and can only

perpetuate itself as long as human beings exist in this ‘statual’

relationship which makes its coercive order necessary; following

thinkers like Étienne de la Boétie he therefore insisted that all it

takes is for human beings step out of this relationship, this

artificially-created social construct of reality, and the state is

rendered obsolete, it disintegrates.

Landauer’s middle-class origins, his uncompromising pacifism and disdain

for the sterile dogmatism and reductive rationalist arguments of many of

the dominant theories of his day meant that he spent most of his life

ostracised by the bulk of the mainstream European workers’ movement.

Nevertheless, the philosophy he put forward points to a level of insight

into human psychology and the nature of social relationships uncommon

among anarchists of his time and many, particularly the more

intellectual factions within the European Left, recognised that the

populist-Romantic strain underpinning his ideas actually brought his

unique brand of anarchism closer to accounting for the complexity of the

human being than theories which reduce the manifold intricacies of human

existence to the simplistic rigidity of two battling classes. Thus the

ethical-idealism for which he received a good deal of flak from many of

his contemporaries also earned him a sizable army of admirers, including

some of the most highly esteemed literary and philosophical figures of

his day, and he has continued to find a small but dedicated group of

followers in every generation since his death.

Born in Karlsruhe in South-West Germany on April 7 1870 into a

middle-class, assimilated Jewish family, Landauer began his lifelong

battle with authority early on in his education at Karlsruhe’s

Gymnasium. Although he excelled academically from a young age it soon

became clear that he was never going to be a ‘model student’; he found

formal schooling tedious and constrictive and his burgeoning obsession

with independence and personal autonomy led to frequent conflict with

authority figures throughout his formative years. As well as invoking

the wrath of teachers and the school authorities on numerous occasions,

Landauer’s stubbornness and predilection for vocal dissent laid the

groundwork for a relationship of mutual antagonism with his father which

would continue until the latter’s death in 1900, and his refusal to

yield to parental intentions that he study the sciences in preparation

for a career in dentistry eventually resulted in a transfer to the

town’s more classically orientated Bismarck Gymnasium where he spent the

final two years of his pre-university schooling. This move allowed him

to pursue the passion for music, theatre and the arts developed during

his early childhood, [2] but even so the bulk of his education would

continue to take place outside the classroom (the gymnasium, he later

wrote, was above all “a tremendous theft of my time, my freedom, my

dreams, my own explorations and my search for action” [3]) where he

delved ever deeper into literature, music and especially theatre. By his

late teens he had discovered Wagner, developed a love of romantic and

mystical literature and become fluent enough in French and English to

translate literary works from these languages into German.

On completion of his Gymnasium studies Landauer moved on to the

universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Strasbourg where he pursued

courses in German philosophy, history and culture. By this point his

political orientation was already being shaped by socialist and

libertarian ideas, and his university education saw him identifying

heavily with figures like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Tolstoy and

Strindberg. He developed a great respect for the classics and was

fascinated in particular by the works of the German Romantic period,

producing lengthy and detailed critiques of authors such as Tieck,

Novalis and Brentano already tinctured with an admiration and depth of

understanding way beyond his years. But the one figure who dominated his

thinking at that time was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thunderous

intellectual assaults on the moral and cultural values upon which modern

Germany was being built were part of a rising tide of opposition to the

autocracy of the Bismarckian Reich causing outrage amongst the

establishment, but finding a great deal of sympathy among left-leaning

German writers of Landauer’s generation. By the 1870s Marxism had

established a foothold in the German Left, but by the time Landauer was

at university many young radicals were beginning to ask serious

questions as to whether a Marxist program really did hold the key to the

meaningful social change it promised; with the Second International

looking increasingly unable to maintain the solidarity it had exhibited

during its early years and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)

attempting to impose its rigid Marxist agenda across the European labour

movement, Landauer’s burgeoning neo-romantic outlook was one which would

be taken up by many of his contemporaries. Disillusioned with the

direction being taken by the SPD during the late 80s and early 90s many,

particularly the more intellectual factions within the German Left,

began to turn to philosophers like Nietzsche and Stirner, shunning

party-political approaches altogether in favour of various types of

anarchism. [4]

Abandoning university in 1891 Landauer left Strasbourg and returned to

the more auspicious social milieu of Berlin where he quickly found

himself drawn into just such a group. Berlin at that time was a city in

the midst of considerable social and political upheaval and it is easy

to see how Landauer’s intellectual and artistic sensibilities would have

made it easy for him to be caught up in the revolutionary mood of the

city’s left-wing literati; the libertarian worldview he espoused was one

shared by many of the artists, writers and intellectuals who flocked to

the city during the 1880s, and although barely 21 he found that his

virulent anti-establishment streak and commanding knowledge of the arts

meant that it wasn’t long before he was associating with and being taken

seriously by prominent figures in the city’s literary and theatrical

community. This swift acceptance by Berlin’s cultural elite has been

attributed in part to a close acquaintance, evidently initiated during

his first stay in the city in the late 1880s, with the philosopher Fritz

Mauthner, [5] under whose influence Landauer quickly became active in a

group of young radicals known as the Berliner Jungen. The Jungen was an

organisation of anti-authoritarian students whose opposition to the

bureaucratic procedures of the SPD had recently earned them expulsion

from the party, and it was through them that Landauer received his first

taste of political activism under the tutelage of the likes of Benedikt

Friedländer, who introduced him to the ideas of Proudhon, Kropotkin and

the libertarian socialist Eugen Dühring.

In 1881 his activities with the Jungen led to his becoming involved in

the Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theatre), a socialist theatrical

institution established by Bruno Wille for the education of Berlin’s

working class. With Berlin the undisputed theatrical capital of Europe

at that time, Wille’s project aimed to make available to the workers the

social insights of dramatists like Ibsen and Hauptmann whose

politically-charged plays had previously been denied to a working class

audience by the exorbitant membership fees of the city’s more

well-established theatrical institutions. In the Freie Volksbühne idea

Landauer evidently found a perfect vehicle for his dedication to both

art and social reform, and when political differences split the theatre

in 1892 he was among several Independent Socialists and other literati

including Wilhelm Bölsche and Ernest von Wolzogen who set about founding

a rival institution, the Neue Freie Volksbühne (New Free People’s

Theatre), with which he would be heavily involved until his death in

1919. It was at an early meeting of the Neue Freie Volksbühne in October

1892 that Landauer met Grete Leuschner, a needle-trade worker in

Berlin’s clothing industry, with whom he promptly fell in love. In less

than two months the couple were married.

The years 1892–93 saw Landauer coming to terms not only with the SPD’s

authoritarian methodology, but with the Marxist ideology which by now

had become the hegemonic force throughout the European Socialist

movement. Shortly after his arrival in Berlin he had written several

articles for the SPD’s newspaper Die neue Zeit, but within the Jungen

Landauer began to develop an ardent opposition to Marxism and throughout

1892 found himself increasingly drawn to the more explicitly anarchist

wing of the group, his anti-Marxist sentiments solidifying into a

fully-fledged anarchist position by the end of the year. In August 1892

Landauer’s first article appeared in Der Sozialist (The Socialist), a

weekly newspaper established the previous year as the voice of left-wing

opposition to the SPD by an offshoot of the Jungen known as the Union of

Independent Socialists. [6] Landauer worked on numerous projects with

the Independents during the autumn and winter of 1892–93, and by

February 1893 he had taken over the editorship of their paper. It wasn’t

long before the likes of Errico Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin and Johann

Most were hailing it as the best of several German-language anarchist

journals in circulation at the time. His work with Der Sozialist soon

made Landauer something of a figurehead among the young radicals of

fin-de-siècle Berlin, and in August 1893 he was chosen to represent the

Jungen at the Second International congress in Zurich. Here he planned

to deliver a speech on the state of German socialism, attacking the SPD

for their treatment of the opposition in 1891 and reprimanding the party

for their expulsion of the Jungen representatives. The 1893 meeting

would in fact be the first in a series of high-profile incidents which

would catapult Landauer to notoriety in the European Labour movement,

but possibly not for the reasons Landauer had hoped.

Partly because of the damage sustained by the First International as a

result of the famous confrontation between Marx and Bakunin, the Second

was highly suspicious of the anarchists, and when Landauer and fellow

Jungen member Wilhelm Werner arrived at the Zurich Tonhalle on August

9^(th) 1893 their demands for admission to the congress were met with

outright hostility from SPD leader August Bebel. Having been at the

forefront of formal attempts to exclude the anarchist factions at the

Second International’s Brussels congress in 1891, Bebel dismissed

Landauer’s reasoning that as anarchists were fundamentally part of the

socialist movement they had every right to be admitted, with a terse and

soon-to-be familiar insistence that advocates of socialism must “use

political rights and the legislative machinery...in order to enhance the

interests of the proletariat and win political power”. [7] Despite

unexpected support for Landauer from the British trade-union delegation

Bebel managed to get a motion carried to bar the anarchists from the

congress, limiting admission solely to groups prepared to accept the

legitimacy of parliamentary channels and democratic structures in the

pursuit of socialist objectives. Landauer and Werner were violently

manhandled from the conference hall, their expulsion followed the next

day by that of fifteen other attendees in a heavy-handed display of

bigotry that prompted outrage from many of the other delegates. In a

show of solidarity the Italian Socialist Amilcare Cipriani resigned his

mandate declaring “I go with those you have banished; with the victims

of your intolerance and brutality”. [8]

Intolerance and brutality would become defining features of the SPD’s

attitude to dissenting voices throughout the 1890s, and Rudolf Rocker

later commented that had Landauer known then the direction that the SPD

would take over the course of the next two decades, he wouldn’t have

wanted to be included in their meeting anyway. Furious, apart from

anything else, at the fact that the Social Democrats had not even

afforded them the dignity of leaving the conference under their own

steam but physically pushed and shoved them out of the hall it was from

experiences such as the Zurich debacle that Landauer developed his

lifelong disgust for German Social Democracy, a stance given its

earliest expression in his first novel Der Todesprediger (The Preacher

of Death) which was published in 1893. Although Landauer would later

distance himself from the novel, Der Todesprediger has been seen as

probably the earliest manifestation of the characteristic blend of

“vitalistic Nietzschean individualism and socialist communalism” [9]

which would underpin his later work, attempting a reconciliation of

individual self-determination and community integration which soon came

to characterise his philosophy.

Der Todesprediger’s impact was slight, and Landauer set about

articulating his opposition to the dictatorial style of the

SPD-dominated German Left over the course of innumerable articles in Der

Sozialist, during which he evolved a detailed, anti-authoritarian

critique of Second International Marxism that would send ripples across

the European socialist movement. As the writer and drama critic Julius

Bab said of Landauer shortly after his death in 1919, “he hated all

party politics, he hated the parliamentary Opposition no less than the

Conservatives, because for him their politics, all politics, did not

stand for freedom but meant only a deeper entanglement in the net of the

all-consuming power of the State”. [10] Accordingly his articles

repeatedly dismissed the reformists as utterly impotent in the

attainment of socialism, the hostility towards those trying to effect

social change through parliamentary mechanisms expressed in these early

contributions to Der Sozialist placing him at odds as much with the

mainstream socialist movement as with Germany’s established elites.

In January 1895 Der Sozialist was temporarily forced to close due to a

police campaign against it involving the arbitrary confiscation of

manuscripts and the financial donations on which the newspaper and its

progenitors depended. Finding himself without an income Landauer applied

to the medical faculty at Freiburg University in an attempt to secure

permanent financial stability, but his application was denied because of

a two-month prison term he had served at the end of 1893 for his

involvement with Der Sozialist. As editor of Der Sozialist it was he who

was held personally responsible by the German government for what it

decided amounted to the paper’s advocacy of civil disobedience, and as a

result Landauer would find himself in and out of prison throughout the

1890s for various supposedly libellous writings against authorities of

the Wilhelminian Reich. Although Bismarck’s resignation in 1890 had

officially seen the demise of Germany’s notorious anti-socialist laws

the political persecution of left-wing opposition was still commonplace

within the country, and for someone of Landauer’s profile imprisonment

was not so much a risk as a guarantee. The seventeen months spent in

prison during 1893, 1896 and 1899 gave him time to press on with his

studies, and it was during his incarceration that he wrote his second

novel, Lebendig Tot (Dead Alive), a work which, like Der Todesprediger,

contains early signs of many themes which would later find fuller

expression in his tractarian writings. He would also use his prison time

to edit Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions

to a Critique of Language) and translate the sermons of the 13^(th)

century mystic Meister Eckhart into modern German.

After his rejection from Freiburg Landauer decided that journalism was

the way forward for him after all, and accepted the editorship of a

newspaper in Bregenz, Austria. He began his editorial duties there in

April 1895 but his involvement with the paper did not last long, for by

August that year Der Sozialist was up and running again and Landauer was

back in Berlin. With the Fourth International Workers’ congress

scheduled to take place in London in August 1896, the anarchists were

eager to have as much support as possible from the people for their

renewed attempt to be accepted by the Second International, and to this

end late 1895 and early ‘96 saw Landauer and his colleagues at Der

Sozialist stepping up the production and distribution of anarchist

propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, when delegate tickets for the congress were sent to the

SPD Newspaper Vorwarts for distribution in Germany, the paper’s editor,

Whilhelm Liebknecht, refused to provide any for the anarchists.

Nevertheless, when August came around many of Europe’s leading

anarchists were present among the 750 delegates at Queen’s Hall in

London in order to seek admission to the congress, and before the

conference got underway they attended a special meeting at which they

received a warm welcome from their English hosts, the Independent Labour

Party’s Keir Hardie and Tom Mann. While Hardie and Mann may have been

sympathetic to the anarchists’ position it came as little surprise to

anyone that the SPD once again attempted to ban the anarchists outright.

This time however, German chairman Paul Singer was prevented from

steamrollering the conference as Bebel had in Zurich by Hardie, who

informed him that “people didn’t conduct meetings like that in England”.

[11] Hardie insisted that both sides must be given a hearing before the

vote was taken, so Landauer was given the opportunity to present his

case. This he did in no uncertain terms, and in his speech, published as

a pamphlet by London’s Freedom Press later that year, he condemned the

SPD’s dictatorial behaviour and appealed to the conference delegates to

allow the anarchist case to be heard.

“I, as a German revolutionist and anarchist,” he declared, “consider it

my duty today, as three years ago in Zurich, to tear off this painted

mask and solemnly declare that the apparent splendour of the labour

movement in Germany is but skin-deep, whilst in reality the number of

those who fully and conscientiously go in for a total regeneration of

human society, who struggle to realise a free socialist society, is

infinitely smaller than the number of Social Democratic voters...The

laws (at the elaboration of which the Social Democratic deputies work

with great assiduity in parliament and in the various committees) merely

strengthen the State and the power of the police — the German, Prussian,

monarchist and capitalist state of today — and it becomes more and more

a question whether our Social Democracy thinks that some mere finishing

touches applied to our centralised, tutelary, ceaselessly interfering

police state, are all that is necessary to transform the German Empire

into the famous State of the future”. [12]

Landauer repeated his previous defence of the anarchist cause, arguing

that as anarchists were as much a part of the socialist movement as any

other faction they had every right to be included in the congress: “What

we fight”, he declared, “is State socialism, levelling from above,

bureaucracy; what we advocate is free association and union, the absence

of authority, mind freed from all fetters, independence and well-being

for all. Before all others it is we who preach tolerance for all —

whether we think their opinions right or wrong — we do not wish to crush

them by force or otherwise. In the same way we claim tolerance towards

us, and where revolutionary socialists, where working men of all

countries meet, we want to be among them and to say what we have got to

say....If our ideas are wrong, let those who know better teach us

better.” [13] He was rewarded for his efforts by again being physically

ejected from the conference hall along with several other prominent

anarchists including Kropotkin, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis and Errico

Malatesta who had arrived in London armed with mandates from trade

unions in Spain, France and Italy. This was to be the last time the

anarchists sought admission to the meetings of the Socialist

International, and shortly after the London Congress Landauer denounced

Wilhelm Liebknecht, the idolised leader and co-founder of the SPD as a

“seven times political rogue” [14] in front of 6,000 of Liebknecht’s

followers at the Berlin Feenpalast.

The revamped Sozialist which emerged after the 1895 hiatus continued to

provide an outlet for Landauer’s hostility towards the SPD’s

authoritarianism, but the paper’s new incarnation saw attacks on the

parliamentary socialists taking a back seat as Landauer concentrated

instead on putting forward an alternative vision of socialism. For

Landauer, as for the rest of the anarchists, parliamentarianism served

no purpose other than to further the interests of the bourgeoisie, but

at a time when some still saw violence or ‘propaganda by the deed’ as

the natural alternative to reformism Landauer’s anarchism took an

altogether different approach. Post-1895, Der Sozialist would become

primarily a vehicle for Landauer’s ideas pertaining to the creation of

producer-consumer cooperatives as a beginning of an anarcho-socialist

society, [15] a program which was given its first full explication in a

pamphlet published towards the end of 1895 entitled Ein Weg zur

Befreiung der Arbeiterklasse, (A Way to Freedom for the Working Class).

Here Landauer condensed the sentiments contained in his Der Sozialist

articles into the first concrete proposal of an idea which would form

the basis of his life’s work. Redefining the vocabulary of anarchism he

described the libertarian alternative as the restructuring of society

from below, the self-emancipation of the workers rather than a call to

acts of terrorism or the violent destruction of capitalism and the

state; the phrase ‘direct action’ came to mean the setting up of

peaceful cooperatives and passive resistance to the state rather than

armed rebellion. ‘General strike’ ceased being merely a bargaining

mechanism; for it to be of any real use to the socialist cause, he

insisted, it must mean not the temporary cessation of work in capitalist

enterprise, but the permanent withdrawal from capitalism altogether and

the continuation of work outside of it as workers put together their own

self-sufficient co-operative ventures under self-management and for

their own benefit. He thus called for workers — all workers, from

peasant to intellectual — to opt out of the state-capitalist system by

forming their own voluntary rural and urban communes. Socialism, he

argued, true socialism, would come about neither through parliamentary

mechanisms, nor by resorting to acts of violence, but by means of

‘building the new society within the shell of the old’ as workers

dropped out of the present system and constructed their own cooperative

enterprises as enclaves of libertarianism as an alternative to the

existing society. As these societies grew they would act as an example,

an inspiration and a model for other socialist militants to follow,

siphoning workers out of the state-capitalist system and eventually

reaching a critical mass after which they would be the prevalent form of

organisation, and the state-capitalist order would become the

alternative society.

As the 1890s drew to a close the increasingly theoretical direction from

which Der Sozialist had acquired its reputation as a journal of

unrivalled intellectual quality began to prevent the paper from reaching

out to a working class audience, limiting its potency in its original

role as an agitational publication. Some of the working-class members of

its staff began to complain that the paper was losing its effectiveness

as an instrument of anarchist propaganda, and from 1897 the day-to-day

running of Der Sozialist became punctuated by fights and disagreements

between staff members concerning the literary style and choice of

material for publication. With much criticism starting to focus on

Landauer as too high-brow and middle-class he made attempts to alter the

newspaper’s approach; ultimately his efforts were too little too late,

and dwindling readership finally forced Der Sozialist to cease

publication again in 1899.

Although like many of the young intellectuals in Berlin at the time

Landauer’s dire financial situation for most of his life put him on the

same economic footing as the mass of the workers, his middle-class

origins meant a certain degree of isolation from the struggles of the

working-class socialist movement, and it was partly because of this

perception of him as ‘too middle-class’ that he never fully integrated

into the mainstream anarchist circles of the day. This obviously meant

that his contribution to anarchism came from the point of view of an

outsider, but to an extent this isolation was a position Landauer

enjoyed — he was a free spirit and it was alien to his nature to join

large, potentially stifling organisations or become simply another rank

and file member of anything that looked like a homogenous political

movement. After his early experiences of anarchist activism with the

Jungen and Der Sozialist, the circles in which he moved increasingly

became those of the middle-class idealists, poets, artists and writers.

In 1897 Landauer and Grete separated and Landauer moved to the Berlin

suburb of Friedrichshagen, famous stamping-ground of many of the city’s

bohemian literary groups and birthplace of German literary naturalism

and the Volksbühne movement. Landauer himself was still heavily involved

in avant-garde theatre, continuing to write plays and serving

intermittently on the literary and artistic committee of the Neue Freie

Volksbühne. As far as novel-writing was concerned, despite his early

forays into the medium he came to the conclusion early on that such

endeavours were not the way for him to achieve the meaningful and

large-scale social change he sought. Nevertheless he remained in close

touch with writers of the expressionist movement, particularly Georg

Kaiser and Ernst Toller, and in 1900 joined the bohemian group Neue

Gemeinschaft, (New Community) set up by Heinrich and Julius Hart as a

vehicle for a mystical, metaphysical revitalisation of society.

Although he had never exhibited much respect for their writings,

Landauer initially greeted the Hart brothers’ venture with a certain

degree of enthusiasm, not because of the philosophical theorems and

mystical rhetoric of the brothers but because “he believed he had found

in their practical program the basis for a highly fruitful, exemplary

social structure”. [16] He delivered numerous lectures to the group and

his essay Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft (Through Separation to

Community) appeared in one of their pamphlets. But Landauer’s

involvement with Neue Gemeinschaft was to be short-lived and it wasn’t

long before he was slating the Hart brothers for what he felt to be the

total absence of substance beneath the mystical, pseudo-religiosity

which surrounded their group. Although he lasted less than a year with

the organisation it was by no means an unproductive experience, for it

was through them that he first met Julius Bab, as well as developing

close friendships with the likes of Erich Mühsam and the esteemed Jewish

ideologue Martin Buber.

Landauer’s meeting with Buber was to be of profound significance to the

development of his thinking, to the extent that his subsequent work

should in many ways be viewed within the context of a deep-seated

connection with Judaism with which it was Buber above all who enabled

him to reconnect. Landauer had had little exposure to the Jewish faith

during the early part of his life and prior to 1908 there are very few

references to Judaism to be found in any of his writings or letters.

This was to change when he first came into contact with Buber’s work,

particularly The Legend of the Baal-Schem (1908) in which he discovered

a new conception of Jewish spirituality with which he quickly expressed

a clear affinity. Although a committed atheist and firmly opposed to

churches and denominations, unlike most anarchists Landauer had long

placed great emphasis on the positive aspects of religion; prior to his

meeting Buber however his focus had been on Christianity, in which he

saw potential to be a unifying force capable of transcending artificial

socio-political constructs, of going “beyond the boundaries of states

and languages” [17] to unite individuals into a true spiritual

community. Like many Jewish Libertarians of his day he was fascinated by

the figure of Jesus, and he embraced the prophetic belief in the coming

of a messianic age of peace, equality and justice, albeit one which

would be brought into being exclusively by human endeavour. [18] The

Hasidic legends to which Buber introduced Landauer appeared to Landauer

to fulfil this vision of an egalitarian society, and in a 1908 review of

Buber’s The Legend of the Baal-Schem he shows the first signs of this

change in direction, noting how “Judaism is not an external accident,

but a lasting internal quality, and identification with it unites a

number of individuals within a Gemeinschaft (community). In this way, a

common ground is established between the person writing this article and

the author of the book”. [19] For Landauer the Hasidic legends

represented “the collective work of a volk signifying ‘living growth,

the future within the present, the spirit within history, the whole

within the individual...The liberating and unifying God within

imprisoned and lacerated man; the heavenly within the earthly’”. [20]

Buber would also be instrumental in introducing Landauer’s ideas to

Europe’s socialist Jewish youth groups. Again, Landauer had had little

or no connection to political Zionism during the early part of his

career, but his ideas would prove immensely popular among the youth

groups of the radical Zionist Left and through Buber he would deliver

many lectures to these organisations over the next two decades.

It was also at a meeting of Neue Gemeinschaft that Landauer met his

future wife, the acclaimed poet and translator Hedwig Lachmann. In the

face of mounting persecution from the German authorities the couple

moved to England in September 1901 with financial backing from

Mauthner’s cousin Auguste Hauschner, [21] and after spending some time

in London they took up residence a short distance away in Bromley, Kent,

which was also at that time the home of Peter Kropotkin. Landauer and

Kropotkin had met previously at the 1896 conference of the Socialist

International — both had been among the anarchists to address a protest

meeting held after their expulsion from the conference — but although

Landauer had long expressed an affinity with many of Kropotkin’s ideas

the two did not get on well in person. [22] In his biographical sketch

of Landauer, Max Nettlau rather diplomatically comments that the two

thinkers “came to no mutual understanding”, [23] a perhaps intentionally

evasive way of conveying the fact that, in reality, Landauer found

Kropotkin aloof and was disappointed to discover that the man he had for

so long admired conducted himself in a manner consistent with his

princely origins. The esteem in which Landauer held the Russian’s

writings however remained undiminished and, according to his daughter

Brigitte, throughout his life referred to Kropotkin as “my great

friend”. [24]

Nevertheless, the turn of the century did herald something of a change

in direction in the development of Landauer’s thought. If the 1890s were

for him a period of youthful rebellion, his agitational activities with

the Jungen earning him widespread notoriety as a rabble-rouser, the

start of the new century marked the beginning of what we might call the

‘mature’ period of his life during which he would cement his status as

an original and important political philosopher. Throughout the final

decade of the 19^(th) century his politics had been dominated by the

revolutionary anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin but his philosophy

would from the early 1900s take a different direction; while he remained

a staunch disciple of Kropotkin it was arguably less for the militant

and revolutionary aspects of his work than for his ethical approach, his

theory of mutual aid and his emphasis on decentralised cooperative

production, [25] and as we have seen, despite having long professed a

love for Bakunin’s work his ideas were already starting to take serious

issue with certain key elements of the latter’s often fiery brand of

anarchism. By contrast, the early years of the 20^(th) century saw him

focusing far more on the pacifist anarchism of Tolstoy and particularly

the ideas of Proudhon. His emphasis became increasingly on the necessity

of peaceful social revolution and on the centrality of libertarian

education in the process of social change, an area in which he drew

heavily on the ideas of the Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer,

progenitor of the Modern Schools movement.

So Landauer’s anarchism remained very much at odds with the philosophy

of violence still espoused by many anarchists, and it is probably in

part because of this that he was fairly isolated from anarchist

activities during his time in England. His article Anarchische Gedanken

über Anarchismus (Anarchic thoughts on Anarchism), written shortly after

his arrival in the country and published in Zukunft in October that

year, denounced the anarchist violence that had punctuated the previous

decade and reiterated his longstanding argument that a violent approach

merely emulated the methods used by political parties. “There can only

be a more human future” he insisted, “if there is a more humane

present”, and as such anarchism demanded methods consistent with the

new, non-violent anarchistic society-to-be. As for those bent on the

violent destruction of the existing order, “they have accustomed

themselves to living with concepts, no longer with men. There are two

fixed, separate classes for them, who stand opposed to each other as

enemies; they don’t kill men, but the concept of exploiters,

oppressors... From force one can expect nothing, neither the force of

the ruling class today nor that of the so-called revolutionaries who

would perhaps attempt... through dictatorial decrees to command a

socialist society, out of nothing, into existence”. [26] For anarchists

schooled in Bakunin and Malatesta this message would surely have been a

difficult one to digest, and it would not be pushing the bounds of

possibility to assume that Landauer’s uncompromising pacifism may have

contributed to his failure to see eye to eye with Kropotkin, who

remained ambiguous throughout his career as to the desirability of

violent means in the pursuit of anarchism.

Landauer’s sojourn in England ended in June 1902, and on their return to

Germany he and Hedwig settled in Hermsdorf near Berlin; their first

daughter, Gudula, was born in late 1902 and the following year Landauer

finally obtained a divorce from Grete which enabled him and Hedwig to

marry. Around this time he began working for Axel Junker Nachfolger

booksellers and publishers, who published his volume on Meister Eckhart

as well as several of his other works including the second edition of

Der Todesprediger in 1903. That year also saw the publication of

Landauer’s first major philosophical work, Skepsis und Mystik

(Scepticism and Mysticism), in which his indebtedness to Eckhart’s

mysticism and the atheistic language criticism of Mauthner is given its

first full explication. Skepsis und Mystik was followed by a slew of

literary studies, as well as German translations of works such as

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Fields, Factories and Workshops and The Great

French Revolution, Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary

Servitude, salient portions of Proudhon’s War and Peace, and General

Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, in addition to

countless other political and literary works including a collection of

Bakunin’s writings (co-edited with Nettlau), and his own groundbreaking

and still highly-regarded translations of and treatises on Shakespeare.

Landauer’s work as a translator during the early part of the new century

was often in collaboration with Hedwig, whose own accomplishments in

this field had already earned her international recognition; together

the two produced the first German translations of Oscar Wilde’s The

Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the essays

of George Bernard Shaw and the poems of Walt Whitman, all of which can

be seen to embody ideas which would surface in Landauer’s own works. His

affinity with Whitman in particular would be one which would clearly

impact on his ideas and there is little doubt that Landauer saw much of

the American poet in himself; in one of his several essays on Whitman

Landauer compared him to Proudhon, commenting that the two men combined

“conservative and revolutionary mentalities, individualism and

socialism”, [27] an accolade which, as Buber pointed out, might well be

applied to Landauer’s own worldview.

That this first decade of the twentieth century was one of maturation in

Landauer’s philosophy is attested by the publication, towards its end,

of his three most important political treatises which would catapult him

to even greater prominence both within Germany and among anarchists

across Europe. In January 1907 his article Volk und Land: Dreissig

Sozialistiche Thesen (People and Land: Thirty Socialist Theses) was

published in Die Zukunft in Berlin; the following year saw the

publication of Die Revolution (The Revolution), and perhaps his most

famous work Aufruf zum Sozialismus (A Call to Socialism — or For

Socialism) was published in 1911.

Expanding and consolidating the ideas put forward in A Way to Freedom

for the Working Class and his articles in Der Sozialist, between them

these three tracts represent the fullest explication of Landauer’s

analysis of the state-capitalist system, the social structures which

should replace it and the process by which he envisaged these structures

coming into being. Following de la Boétie, dropping out of bureaucratic,

centralised society became Landauer’s main message and in many ways the

lynchpin of his philosophy, his vision of the post-capitalist order

blending the federalist principles of Kropotkin and Proudhon into a neat

new approach to anarchism which would generate a great deal of interest

from many European socialist groups. Reprising and expanding his many

attacks on the ideological hegemony of Marxism, describing it as “the

plague of our times and the curse of the socialist movement”, [28] he

put forward an alternative vision of socialism, a stateless society

based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, “a society of

equalitarian exchange based on regional communities, rural communities

which combine agriculture and industry”. [29]

But Landauer was never content simply to wax lyrical about a possible

anarchist future society, and earned the admiration of his

contemporaries for his willingness to back his words up with practical

action. Throughout his life recognition of the urgency in the immediate

realisation of the new forms of society of which he spoke, independent

of a democratically-induced change in the structure of the state, led

him to take part in numerous projects in which he saw the potential

seeds of this new social structure. His abortive dalliance with Neue

Gemeinschaft was one such attempt, and in 1903 he participated in

meetings of the union of Deutsche Gartenstadt Gesellschaft (German

Garden City Association). This was an organisation based on a romantic,

anti-urban spirit involving a shift from the city to the country a la

the Garden City movement of Geddes and Howard and the Arts and Crafts

movement of Ruskin and Morris in England, and also involved many of his

contemporaries from the Friedrichshagen poet circle, including Bernhard

and Paul Kampffmeyer and the Hart brothers. But perhaps the most

important of his own attempts at the practical realisation of

libertarian alternatives came in 1908 when he was among the founders of

the Sozialistische Bund (Socialist Bund). The publication of his Thirty

Socialist Theses in 1907 inspired many of Berlin’s anarchists and

independent socialists to bring about the establishment of an

organisation to put into practice the ideas contained in it, and in May

1908 Landauer was invited to give a talk to these groups at a public

assembly in Berlin. His lecture generated a great deal of enthusiasm

(and would subsequently form the basis of Aufruf zum Sozialismus in

which he included his outline for the organisation, Twelve Articles of

the Socialist Bund) and resulted in the formation of numerous groups

keen to actualise his proposals. The Bund, on which Landauer spent most

of his time during 1908 and 1909, was to represent a practical

libertarian alternative to the SPD, a federated framework of cooperative

structures disconnected, as far as possible, from the state-capitalist

system, into which striking workers would be drawn and in which the

basis of a future socialist society constructed. 1908–09 saw the

publication of his Flugblätter (Leaflets) of the Socialist Bund, and by

the time For Socialism was published in 1911 the organisation had twenty

groups operating in Berlin, Zurich and various other cities across

Germany and Switzerland, and one in Paris.

In 1909 Landauer revived Der Sozialist with the specific objectives of

furthering the cause of the Bund and, with the spectre of war looming

ever larger over Europe, of promoting his pacifistic agenda. Landauer

was by now a familiar face in German artistic and cultural circles, and

it is often forgotten that as well as editing (and, at this point, being

virtually the sole writer for) Der Sozialist, he was also a prolific

contributor to some fifty or sixty small journals through which he

attracted legions of dedicated readers to add to his already sizable

following. His reputation as an essayist and theatre critic as well as

his participation in numerous other activities in Berlin’s cultural and

political milieu led to his also becoming a prominent figure on the

city’s lecture circuit and throughout his career he delivered many

lectures in the middle-class ‘salons’ of Berlin. His time as a visiting

lecturer saw him delivering frequent talks both on social problems and

on literature, discussing writers like Shakespeare, Kropotkin and

Tolstoy.

But while Landauer was by all accounts an inspiring speaker his

opposition to war and admission of German aggression began to elicit no

small amount of contempt from many of his compatriots. Even his friend

Buber was initially in favour of war until Landauer managed to bring him

around to his own philosophy of non-violence, but this was a subject on

which Landauer refused to be moved, and as the prospect of war grew

increasingly real the pacifism which had long provided the unshakable

basis of his philosophy became an ever more prominent feature of his

lectures. In the elections of 1912 the SPD became the single largest

party in the Reichstag, and the following year they voted unanimously

for the Rearmament Bill; with war looking increasingly likely, and with

the SPD looking increasingly complicit in it, in 1914 Landauer and Buber

made attempts to organise an anti-war conference, but their efforts were

cut short by the outbreak of hostilities. As if to vindicate the

concerns Landauer had voiced as to the dangers of the SPD’s form of

“socialism” and the faux-revolutionary posturing of many within the

German Left, on August 4^(th) 1914 the Socialists voted unanimously for

the government’s war credits.

When war broke out, the usually fiery Landauer became “uncannily quiet

and calm”, [30] apparently resigned to the reality that no one

individual had a chance against the sheer magnitude of the powers

involved in the conflict. This period saw him concentrating primarily on

literature, writing plays and studies of Shakespeare, Holderlin, Goethe

and Strindberg, but he nevertheless continued to promote his

revolutionary agenda in Der Sozialist. Military censorship now meant

that not only was the paper severely restricted as to what it could

publish, but that Landauer’s already precarious position became even

more dangerous with the war giving the authorities an excuse to place

ever more stringent restrictions on the proliferation of his writings;

with increased surveillance making him one of the most carefully-watched

men in the country, his wartime writings are characterised by more

subtle language than his previous revolutionary, and occasionally

libellous proselytising. In an article entitled Der europäische Kreig

(The European War) in August 1914 for example, Landauer called for

communities to set up soup kitchens for the homeless and hungry and to

take common action to provide clothing and shelter for those affected by

the hostilities. In a letter of February 6^(th) the following year he

suggested growing food on lawns and street borders, a project which he

knew would necessarily require community effort. Not only would such

activities help provide relief for the plight forced upon many by the

war, but their implied importance lay in the fact that they would

provide a school where people could be introduced to the benefits of

common effort. [31]

Der Sozialist was eventually forced to close for the final time the

following year however, neither through diminishing readership nor

governmental persecution this time but due to the printer, who had

contributed greatly to the paper in terms of time and effort, being

conscripted into the army.

For all his condemnation of the hostilities, Landauer began to see in

the trenches of the First World War the early signs of a newfound

communality and the emergence of a revolutionary spirit of the kind he

had long deemed indispensable in a successful transition to socialism.

That these young people who had been sent by their government into a

pointless and brutal conflict were experiencing first hand the violence

of the state and the dangers inherent in the present system intimated to

Landauer that this generation was one with a more developed

understanding of politics and social relationships than its

predecessors. As the conflict wore on, widespread dissatisfaction with

present conditions, anger at the regime and a desire to create something

new began to ferment among a generation of German youth, and Landauer

observed that the generation now bearing the brunt of the tragic

situation to which the state-capitalist social structure had led were

growing together into a solid group that could feasibly be the basis for

a new society.[32] In such trends he found cause for optimism that the

revolution for which he had worked so hard for so long might actually be

coming, and sooner rather than later.

In 1917, in dire financial straits, Landauer and Hedwig left Berlin and

moved to the small Swabian town of Krumbach, Hedwig’s hometown. The

Russian revolution in October 1917 fortified his optimism for imminent

social change and Landauer hunkered down in Krumbach in preparation for

the uprising that he by now believed to be inevitable. It wasn’t long

however before personal tragedy would disrupt his newfound sanguinity;

in the winter of 1917 Hedwig contracted pneumonia, and died on Feburary

21^(st) the following year. Her death shook Landauer deeply, and

according to his friends her loss was something from which he would

never fully recover.

Events of 1918 proved Landauer’s wartime predictions well-founded

however, as revolutionary activity swept across the country and the

forces of socialism began to reshape Germany’s political landscape with

mass strikes against the war in early 1918 turning into full-scale

uprisings in towns and cities across the country. In late October naval

mutinies broke out in Kiel, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed,

and Landauer’s writings, particularly For Socialism, experienced a rapid

upsurge in popularity. On November 7^(th), soldiers and workers in

southern Germany deposed the government and the Independent Socialist

Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a “free state”, a declaration which marked

the end of the monarchy of the Wittelsbach dynasty which had ruled the

province for over 700 years. Eisner became Minister-President of

Bavaria, and in November 1918 summoned Landauer to Munich to assist in

the revolution. Eisner was a man for whom Landauer had a great deal of

respect and as such he was more than happy to assist in the new

administration. Landauer never served in Eisner’s cabinet, as has

sometimes been asserted, but alongside fellow-anarchist Erich Mühsam and

playwright Ernst Toller he was central in the new government’s efforts

to organise councils of workers, farmers and other professions to launch

the kind of federalist society he had been advocating for so long,

serving for a time with Mühsam in the Revolutionary Workers’ Council and

also in the Central Workers’ Council of Bavaria. Although painfully

aware of the irony in having become entangled in what essentially

amounted to party-politics in its messiest and most unpleasant form,

Landauer used his influence to push hard for a decentralised system of

councils, cooperatives and communities based on autonomy and

self-management, opposing calls for a parliamentary government and the

radical Marxists’ demands for a proletarian dictatorship which would see

industry and agriculture placed under state control (“I would hate it”,

he wrote, “and would fight against it as if it was the plague” [33]).

Instead, Landauer insisted that the councils should include all members

of the community, and called for “the ‘abolition of the proletariat’ as

a distinct class”. [34]

In the event, elections were held in February 1919 and Eisner’s

Independent Social Democrats were defeated. On February 21^(st), as he

was making his way to the Parliament building to announce his

resignation Eisner was assassinated in Munich by an extreme right-wing

fanatic. During the final weeks of Eisner’s life he and Landauer had

locked horns over ever more acute political differences, but the eulogy

Landauer delivered at his friend’s funeral on February 26^(th) was

nevertheless a speech that Julius Bab would later describe as “burning

with indignation and with love”; [35] Eisner’s murder followed close

behind those of Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg,

both of whom had been arrested and shot by counter-revolutionary forces

in Berlin on January 15^(th) in the midst of the Spartacist Uprising,

their deaths part of a growing spate of violence right across the

country.

Eisner was replaced by the Social Democrat Johannes Hoffmann, who

immediately began negotiations with the SPD government in Berlin.

Hoffman’s collusion with the SPD did not sit comfortably with the

workers, and Mühsam proposed to the Munich Workers’ and Soldiers

Councils that they proclaim a socialist republic. His proposal was

adopted by 234 votes to 70, and on April 7^(th) 1919, Landauer’s

forty-ninth birthday, a Council Republic was proclaimed in Munich.

Hoffmann’s government fled to Bamberg and Landauer was appointed

Minister of Culture and Education in the first Bavarian Council

government, an appropriate position considering his admiration for

Ferrer and the emphasis he had long placed on the importance of

libertarian education. Although his tenure would be brief, it was time

enough for him to draw up plans for the comprehensive overhaul of the

German school system, making free education available to all ages and

reputedly placing the poetry of Walt Whitman on the syllabus of every

schoolchild. These plans were never implemented however, for within a

week of his appointment the Communists had seized power and installed a

military Soviet government under the leadership of Eugene Leviné, a

hard-line Communist described by some as ‘the German Lenin’, who was

quick to dispense with Landauer’s services. Although Landauer initially

offered his support to the Communists, (which they rejected anyway), he

withdrew his offer when it became clear that they intended to adopt the

authoritarian methods of the Bolsheviks. He had been deeply critical of

Lenin’s activities in Russia, and in a chilling prediction in 1918 had

warned that the Bolsheviks were “working for a military regime which

will be more horrible than anything the world has ever seen”. [36]

In the final days of April the Bavarian Soviet was overthrown by

counterrevolutionary troops. The SPD’s minister of Defence in Berlin,

Gustav Noske, sent soldiers from the right-wing Freikorps militia into

Munich to restore order, and the following days would see Freikorps

thugs, notorious for their hostility towards socialists, trade

unionists, democrats and Jews, slaughtering over a thousand people

across the city. As counter-revolutionary troops cracked down on

insurgencies throughout the country it became increasingly clear to

Landauer that his own days were numbered, but although despondent he

resisted pleas from his friends to flee to the safety of neighbouring

Switzerland. On May 1^(st) 1919 he was arrested by troops from the

counterrevolutionary White Guard and thrown into jail in the nearby town

of Starnberg. The next morning he was transferred to Stadelheim Prison.

An eyewitness later described to Ernst Toller the events of May 2^(nd):

“Amid shouts of “Landauer! Landauer!” an escort of Bavarian and

Württemberger Infantry brought him out into the passage outside the door

of the examination room. An officer struck him in the face, the men

shouted: “Dirty Bolshie! Let’s finish him off!” and a rain of blows from

rifle-butts drove him out into the yard. He said to the soldiers round

him: “I’ve not betrayed you. You don’t know yourselves how terribly

you’ve been betrayed”. Freiherr von Gagern went up to him with a heavy

truncheon until he sank in a heap on the ground. He struggled up again

and tried to speak, but one of them shot him through the head. He was

still breathing, and the fellow said: “That blasted carrion has nine

lives; he can’t even die like a gentleman.” Then a sergeant in the life

guards shouted out: “pull off his coat!” They pulled it off, and laid

him on his stomach; “Stand back there and we’ll finish him off

properly!” one of them called and shot him in the back. Landauer still

moved convulsively, so they trampled on him till he was dead; then

stripped the body and threw it into the wash-house”. [37]

Another witness later told Toller that Landauer’s last words to his

attackers were “Kill me then! To think that you are human!” [38]

Landauer’s body was buried in a mass grave from which his daughter

Charlotte secured its release on May 19^(th) that year, but it was not

until May 1923 that the urn containing his remains was interred in

Munich’s Waldfriedhof. In 1925, with financial backing from Georg

Kaiser, a monument was erected by the Anarchist-Syndicalist Union of

Munich but it was later torn down by the Nazis, who dug up his remains

in 1933 and sent them to the Jewish community in Munich. He was finally

laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery on Ungererstrasse.

It is unfortunate, not to say ironic, that Gustav Landauer will forever

be associated with a short-lived and ultimately abortive provincial

revolution in Southern Germany, that a man who had throughout his life

and works championed non-violence and the spiritual rejuvenation of

humanity ended up in the company of the powerful, embroiled in a

struggle for power and entangled in a violent and largely fruitless

insurrection of the kind that he had so long condemned. The irony was

not lost on him, and according to those closest to him the final days of

his life were spent in abject despondency; his refusal to leave Munich

even after it became clear that the only thing that awaited him there

was certain death has even led some historians to conclude that his

murder may in reality have been little more than assisted suicide. But

while the revolution for which Landauer had worked for so long never

happened in Germany during his lifetime, the one with which his name is

now associated being about as far removed from his own anarchistic

vision as could be imagined, Landauer was not without his influence. To

see what could be his most enduring political legacy however one must

look further afield than his native Germany, for while the Socialist

Bund and the revolution in Bavaria occupied much of his time and effort

during the final days of his life another, perhaps more important

experiment was unfolding across the countryside of Palestine.

As noted earlier, the impact of Landauer’s philosophy was keenly felt

among the Socialist Jewish youth groups of early 20^(th) Century Europe,

and along with thinkers like Bernard Lazare, Chaim Arlosoroff, Aaron

David Gordon and Martin Buber his ideas would be important in giving

early Socialist Zionism the anarchistic dimensions pivotal in the

process of the Jewish settlement of Palestine during the early part of

the twentieth century. Landauer and his Call to Socialism particularly

would have a profound influence on a generation of radicalised Jewish

youth who, imbued with the revolutionary spirit of goings-on in Germany

and Russia in 1917 and 1918, headed to Palestine as part of the Third

Aliya. It was these groups, notably Hashomer Hatzair and Hapoel Hatzair

who were instrumental in the industrialisation of the early,

small-conceived agricultural kvutzot set up by the Second Aliya pioneers

into the network of agro-industrial gemeinschaft communities we would

now recognise as the kibbutz movement.

With no state structures in place in the country, many of these groups

saw Palestine as an opportunity to create a new kind of society, to nip

capitalism in the bud before it established a foothold and instead

create a stateless society built on a federated network of free,

anarchistic communities. It is clear that many looked to Landauer for

inspiration and in March 1919 he was in correspondence with the

Socialist Zionist leader Nachum Goldman, who invited him to speak at a

special conference of Zionist representatives set up specifically to

clarify the position of European socialist groups in relation to the

situation in Palestine. In this correspondence Goldman seeks Landauer’s

advice regarding, among other things, the industrialisation of the

existing settlements, economic and political decentralisation and the

relationship between the Jewish settlers and the country’s native Arab

population. It has been suggested that the Third Aliya groups looked to

Landauer’s plans not only for inspiration, but as nothing short of a

blueprint for cooperative settlement. While the German Bund quickly

disintegrated the kibbutzim would go from strength to strength, taking

on a central role in society and developing into a flourishing network

of communal, agro-industrial communities whose internal political,

economic and social structures to this day bear a striking similarity to

those about which Landauer had been writing. [39] But although probably

the most well-known, the kibbutzim are not the only communities that can

count Landauer among their ideological forefathers; his ideas became

part of a counter-culture which swept across Europe after the First

World War, and have since been adopted by a number of communal

movements, Germany’s Bruderhof and Integrierte Gemeinde for example, and

more recently the self-professed ‘anarcho-socialist’ groups of Ma’agal

Hakvutzot.

As well as being canonised by Buber in Paths in Utopia and hailed by

Rudolf Rocker as a “spiritual giant” [40] Landauer and his ideas were

important to many other individual thinkers including Silvio Gesell,

Eberhard Arnold, Ernst Bloch, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Hermann

Hesse, Arnold Zweig and countless others. According to Paul Avrich,

Gustav Landauer was “at once an individualist and a socialist, a

Romantic and a mystic, a militant and an advocate of passive

resistance....He was also the most influential German anarchist

intellectual of the twentieth century”. [41]

Bibliography

Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America

(Princeton, 1995).

Avrich, Paul, “Gustav Landauer”, The Match!, December 1974. pp.10–12.

Bab, Julius. “Gustav Landauer: Commemorative Speech Given by Julius Bab

at the People’s Hall in Berlin on the 25^(th) of May, 1919”, 22. (All

references from Bab’s Commemorative Speech are taken from an unpublished

translation made available to me by Dr. Michael Tyldesley of Manchester

Metropolitan University, to whom I extend my sincere gratitude).

Buber, Martin, Paths in Utopia, (New York: Syracuse University Press.

1996)

Gambone, Larry, “For Community: The Communitarian Anarchism of Gustav

Landauer”, The Anarchy Archives, (

dwardmac.pitzer.edu

, January 24^(th) 2007).

Landauer, Gustav. For Socialism, Russell Berman and Tim Luke, eds., (St.

Louis: Telos Press, 1978).

“Landauer, Gustav. 1870–1919”, Libcom.org, (

libcom.org

. February 10^(th) 2007).

Löwy, Michael, Redemption and Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in

Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, (London: The Athlone

Press, 1992).

Lunn, Eugene. Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav

Landauer, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

Maurer, Charles, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav

Landauer, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971).

Most, Johann. “Our Class Memory, On the Beast of Property”, Libcom.org,

(

libcom.org

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Nettlau, Max. A Short History of Anarchism, (London: Freedom Press,

2000).

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[1] Landauer in Buber, Martin, Paths in Utopia, (New York: Syracuse

University Press. 1996), 46.

[2] Lunn, Eugene. Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav

Landauer, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 21.

[3] Landauer in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 22.

[4] Maurer, Charles, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of

Gustav Landauer, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971) 26.

[5] Maurer, Call to Revolution, 27.

[6] Until the spring of 1893 when the non-anarchist faction within the

Independents parted company with the group, the paper contained both

purely antiauthoritarian and more orthodox Marxist articles. According

to Lunn, the first year of the paper’s existence saw the likes of Bruno

Wille, Benedikt Friedländer and Wilhelm Werner arguing the anarchist

case, with Max Schippel, Karl Wildberger and Paul Kampffmeyer continuing

to toe the Marxist line. Although opinion remained somewhat divided as

to the proper alternative to the SPD Landauer’s assumption of editorial

duties effectively marked the beginning of an explicitly anarchist

direction for the paper.

[7] Bebel, in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 85.

[8] Amilcare Cipriani in Ward, Colin. “Gustav Landauer”, Anarchy, (Vol.5

No. 1, January 1965), 245.

[9] Berman, Russell and Luke, Tim. Introduction to English Edition of

Landauer, Gustav, For Socialism (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), 3.

[10] Bab, Julius. “Gustav Landauer: Commemorative Speech Given by Julius

Bab at the People’s Hall in Berlin on the 25^(th) of May, 1919”, 22.

[11] Ward, “Gustav Landauer”, 245.

[12] Landauer in Ward, “Gustav Landauer”, 245.

[13] Landauer in Ward, “Gustav Landauer”, 245–246.

[14] Bab, “Gustav Landauer”, 22.

[15] Lunn, Prophet of Community, 95

[16] Julius Bab in Maurer, Call to Revolution, 45.

[17] Löwy, Michael, Redemption and Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in

Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, (London: The Athlone

Press, 1992), 133

[18] “Landauer, Gustav. 1870–1919”, Libcom.org, (

libcom.org

. February 10^(th) 2007).

[19] Landauer in Löwy, Redemption and Utopia, 134.

[20] Landauer in Löwy, Redemption and Utopia, 134.

[21] Maurer, Call to Revolution, 51. Landauer was beset with financial

difficulties throughout his life; his father Hermann effectively

disowned him early on, (for Hermann, Landauer was a walking catalogue of

disappointment — Hermann had opposed his son’s study of literature, his

dropping out of university, his marriage to Grete, adoption of radical

ideas and was incensed by his arrests for anarchist activities). With

financial support from his father not forthcoming, from 1892 Landauer

was supported for a number of years by his cousin Hugo, a watchmaker,

who sympathised with many of Landauer’s ideas. Landauer felt himself to

be primarily a writer and wanted above all to have the opportunity to

write; Mauthner spent a good deal of time trying to find some means of

financial support so that his friend might have that opportunity and

Auguste Hauschner helped Landauer financially from as early as 1896 —

the two finally met in 1900 and developed a close friendship.

[22] Landauer’s relationship with Rudolf Rocker was a similarly odd one.

Although the two shared much in terms of ideology and lived in close

proximity to one another during Landauer’s time in England they never

became close friends, for reasons that none of Landauer’s biographers

has seen fit to explain. Rocker nevertheless repeatedly spoke highly of

Landauer’s ideas and after Landauer’s death succeeded him as the editor

of Kropotkin’s works in German.

[23] Nettlau, Max. A Short History of Anarchism, (London: Freedom Press,

2000), 221.

[24] Brigitte Hausberger in Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral

History of Anarchism in America (Princeton, 1995), 35.

[25] Avrich, “Gustav Landauer”, 11.

[26] Landauer in Gambone, Larry, “For Community: The Communitarian

Anarchism of Gustav Landauer”, The Anarchy Archives, (

dwardmac.pitzer.edu

, January 24^(th) 2007).

[27] Landauer in Löwy, Redemption and Utopia, 131.

[28] Landauer, For Socialism, 32.

[29] Landauer in Avrich, “Gustav Landauer”, 11.

[30] Bab, “Gustav Landauer”. 24.

[31] Maurer, Call to Revolution, 134.

[32] Maurer, Call to Revolution, 134.

[33] Landauer in Most, Johann. “Our Class Memory, On the Beast of

Property”, Libcom.org, (

libcom.org

, January 24^(th) 2007)

[34] Lunn, Prophet of Community, 301.

[35] Bab, “Gustav Landauer” 26.

[36] Landauer in Avrich, Paul, “Gustav Landauer”, The Match!, December

1974. 10.

[37] Quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 338.

[38] Quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 339.

[39] The operative word here being “internal” — what Landauer would have

had to say about the role that the kibbutz would play in the Israeli

State is a very different matter.

[40] Rocker in Avrich “Gustav Landauer”, 11.

[41] Avrich, “Gustav Landauer”, 11.