In addition to these four authors, many other intellectuals can be considered as belonging to this current: Hans Kohn, Rudolf Kayser, Erich Unger, to name but a few. The young Erich Fromm of the years 1921–26 could also be added, but his published work after 1927 falls into the opposite pole of religious atheism and libertarian Marxism. This example demonstrates that within the messianic/revolutionary domain it was quite possible to move from one category to another: there were frontiers, but they were far from being hermetically sealed.
Martin Buber was probably the most important and representative author of religious socialism within German-Jewish culture. His rediscovery of the Hasidic legends (1906–8), and his famous lectures on Judaism at the Bar-Kochba Club of Prague (1909–11), brought about a profound renewal of modern Jewish spirituality. His political and religious ideas left their mark on an entire generation of Jewish intellectuals, from Prague to Vienna and from Budapest to Berlin. Buber’s image of Judaism was as different from assimilationist liberalism (and the Wissenschaft des Judentums) as it was from rabbinical orthodoxy: his was a romantic and mystical religiosity, permeated with social critique and a longing for community. Buber was a close friend of both Franz Rosenzweig (with whom he collaborated on a German translation of the Bible) and of the libertarian philosopher Gustav Landauer (who made him the executor of his will); Buber also played a role in the spiritual development of Gershom Scholem and of many other young Zionists associated with the Hapoel Hatzair movement. Few indeed were the German-speaking Jewish thinkers of that era who were not touched, at some point in their life, by Buber’s writings.
Raised by a grandfather who spoke Hebrew and was a follower of the Haskala, Buber moved away from the Jewish religion in his youth. As a student in Vienna, Leipzig and Berlin (where he studied under Simmel and Dilthey), he was attracted by neo-romantic movements and by the rebirth of religious spirituality. His first works were not on Jewish themes; they focused instead on Viennese writers (Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl); on Jakob Böhme (Wiener Rundschau, vol. v, no. 12, 1901); on ‘Kultur und Zivilisation’ (Kunstwart, vol. XIV, 1901). Buber soon became involved in the Zionist movement, but his ideas rapidly came into conflict with Theodor Herzl’s State-centred diplomacy and, around 1902, he withdrew from political activity and devoted himself to the study of religion. Typically for this entire generation, Buber was at first interested in Christian mysticism: his doctoral thesis, which he presented in 1904, was written on ‘The History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme’. It was not until later that Buber took an interest in Jewish mysticism: he wrote his first book on Hasidism (Die Geschichte des Rabbi Nachmann) in 1906.
Buber’s writings (until 1920 in particular) were permeated with references to German Romantic thought (Görres, Novalis, Hölderlin, Franz von Baader, among others). But he established particularly close ties to neo-romantic philosophy (Nietzsche) and sociology; not only because in his Die Gesellschaft collection he published the writings of Tönnies, Simmel and Sombart (from 1906 to 1912), but also because Buber’s concept of the interhuman (Zwischenmenschliche) was directly influenced by their concerns, most notably by their longing for a Gemeinschaft.
In 1900, Martin Buber joined Die neue Gemeinschaft [The New Community], a neo-romantic circle in Berlin where he met Gustav Landauer. He gave a lecture before the circle entitled ‘Alte und neue Gemeinschaft’ [The New and the Old Community], which, though unpublished until ten years after his death, contained the seeds of several of the key ideas that guided him throughout his life. Right from this first lecture, Buber’s originality is evident as one of the great renewers of communitarian thought in the twentieth century. In Buber’s opinion, it was neither possible nor desirable to return to the traditional community. Rather, he spoke of the struggle for a new community, not pre-social (like the one described by Tönnies) but post-social. The most crucial difference between the old and the new community organization was that the former was based upon blood relations (Blutverwandtschaft), while the latter was the outcome of elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaft) – in other words, it expressed a free choice. This community was not to be bound by religious, regional or national borders: to use Gustav Landauer’s cosmopolitan and mystical formulation, which Buber quoted, the community leaned towards ‘the oldest and most universal community: that of the human species and the cosmos’. In spite of the fact that he rejected all ‘retrogressive’ utopias, neo-romantic references to the traditional community remained alive in Buber’s mind: first, in his dream of deserting ‘the swarming of the cities’ in order to build the new world on the ‘powerful and virginal soil’ of the countryside, closer to nature and the land; and second, in the idea that the new community meant the return (Wiederkehren), albeit in a different form and on a higher level, of ‘the vital unity of primeval man’ (Lebenseinheit des Urmenschen) – shattered and torn by the serfdom of modern ‘society’ (Gesellschaft).1
Buber took up and developed these themes again in ‘Gemein-schaft’, an article published in 1919. Like Tönnies, to whom he directly referred, Buber contrasted the organic, natural community of the past with the modern, artificial and mechanical Gesellschaft. However, he did not advocate a restoration of the past: ‘Certainly we cannot turn back the clock on our mechanized society, but we can go beyond, towards a new organicity (einer neuen Organik).’ By that he meant a community that resulted not from primal growth but rather from conscious action (bewussten Wirkens) to establish the principle of community; the goal of such action would be to construct a socialist society through an alliance of autonomous communes (Gemeinden).2 Buber no longer believed that a return to the land was an alternative to modern industrial cities; in a lecture he gave in Zurich in 1923, he said:
We cannot leave the city to take refuge in the village. The village is still close to the primitive community. The city is the form that corresponds to differentiation. We can no longer turn back the clock on the city, we must overcome (überwinden) the city itself.
The solution would be a third form of communal life, as distinct from the rural village as it was from the big city, which could arise from a new organization of labour.3
It was in this context that Buber rediscovered the tradition of Hasidism as a Jewish mystical current equivalent to a Böhme or a Meister Eckhart, and as the religious manifestation of an organic community, united and welded by its spirituality and culture. As he wrote several years later, what gave Hasidism its particularity and its grandeur was not a doctrine but an attitude of life (Lebenshaltung), a mode of behaviour, that was ‘community-forming’ (gemeindebildend) in its very essence.4
According to Gershom Scholem, Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism was inspired by his ‘religious anarchism’ – that is, by his refusal to grant a place to restrictive commandments in the world of the living relationship between the I and the Thou.5 In fact, in his famous Ich und Du (1923), Buber used the paradigm of dialogue and encounter (Begegnung) to define the true relationship between man and man, and between man and God – a model as deeply subversive of the rigid and ritualistic forms of institutional religion (which Hasidism questioned) as it was of political and state institutions.
The success of Buber’s books on the masters of Hasidism (Baal Schem and Rabbi Nachmann) was due to the fact that they expressed the subterranean current of religious rebirth flowing within the Jewish intelligentsia of romantic cultural origins. Like