Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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Buber’s deep grief over the loss of Landauer and over the brutality of his murder precipitated his second period of withdrawal from May 1919 to early 1922. Landauer’s brutal murder meant not only the loss of a friend and mentor in whom Buber had confided over the course of their twenty-year friendship; it was also a trauma that deeply impacted Buber because of his capacity to “imagine the real.”95 Stricken with grief, Buber turned inward. Three years later, he had produced I and Thou.

Friedman makes clear that I and Thou was forged in the white heat of Buber’s response to Landauer’s death: “We cannot understand the road to I and Thou adequately without examining the . . . terrible events of [the war] period. The most important of these, not just for I and Thou but, one suspects, for the whole of Buber’s life to come, was the murder of Gustav Landauer.”96 Buber’s grief in response to this loss threw him into a period of creative withdrawal like that outlined by Toynbee and delineated by Ellenberger.

The events of 1918 and 1919 which led to Landauer’s demise were stark. Germany was in political chaos after being defeated in the war. The new revolutionary republic of Bavaria that arose at the end of the war was made very unstable by the in-fighting of political factions on the left, the socialists and the communists, who were vying for control. In November 1918, Landauer went to Munich to serve as an official in the new revolutionary republic. At Landauer’s behest Buber went to Munich for a week the following February. There he participated in intense deliberations among the leftist factions in their struggle over the control of Bavaria.97 Landauer served as a minister of state for a week that April. When the regime he served was then overthrown by the Communists, concerned friends across Germany arranged a safe exit from Bavaria for him, but at the last minute he refused to leave.

By May 7, Buber had not heard from Landauer. He wrote to their friend Fritz Mauthner expressing his deep concern about the lack of news from Landauer. At that point Buber had run out of hope. He and Paula stood ready to go to Meersberg to tend to Landauer’s children if that would be helpful. He ended his letter by expressing his agitation over Landauer’s perilous situation: “During these days and nights I myself have been wandering through sheol.”98 Buber’s use of “Sheol,” the biblical term for the realm of the dead, captures the intensity of his distress at the mere thought of a mishap to his friend Landauer.

It was later disclosed that when the German army swept in on May 1 and retook Bavaria, Landauer had been imprisoned and then brutally bludgeoned to death by right-wing troopers the next day in the prison courtyard.99 He was forty-nine years old.

      For many years Buber was silent about the brutal murder of his friend and the weight of grief that he bore in response to it. Friedman stresses the intense impact this loss had on Buber:

Buber’s response to the news of Landauer’s death was probably, next to his ‘conversion’ and the early separation from his mother, the most important single event in his life. Yet this is one “autobiographical fragment” that Buber could not write. [Even forty years later] in 1960 he was still too close to this event to be able to write about it.100

Yet, there were moments in the long years after Landauer’s death when Buber let his guard down. These moments suggest the immense power of this loss and its impact on Buber’s life. Near the end of his life, he confided to Grete Schaeder the deep meaning of this loss for him: “I experienced his death as my own,” revealing that this loss had a lifelong impact.101

      In the spontaneity of a dialogue with Carl Rogers at the University of Michigan in 1957, Buber linked his loss of Landauer to the deepening of his sensitivities in interpersonal encounter. Rogers asked Buber, “How have you lived so deeply in interpersonal relationships and gained such an understanding of the human individual?” Buber responded:

In 1918 I felt . . . that I had been strongly influenced by . . . the First World War . . . because I could not resist what went on, and I was compelled . . . to live it. . . . You may call this imagining the real. . . . This imagining [reached its climax in] a certain episode in May 1919 when a friend of mine, a great friend, a great man, was killed by the antirevolutionary soldiers in a very barbaric way, and now again once more—and this was the last time—I was compelled to imagine just this killing, but not in a [visual] way alone, but . . . with my body. And this was the decisive moment, after which, after some days and nights in this state, I felt, ‘Oh, something has been done to me.’ And from then on, meetings with people, particularly with young people, became . . . different. [From then] on, I had to give something more than just my inclination to exchange thoughts and feelings . . . . I had to give the fruit of an experience.102

Here Buber links the brutality of the war with that of Landauer’s murder. He makes clear that the impact of this violence was visceral—Buber “had to feel in his own body every blow that Landauer suffered in that courtyard where he was beaten to death.”103 He relates this experience to his concept of “imagining the real,” which he elsewhere defined as “the capacity to hold before one’s soul . . . what another man is at this very moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and not as detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a living process in this man.”104 The image of a major loss as a “deep wounding” was more than a mere metaphor for Buber. Clearly the shock was something he had to live with for quite some time. The immediate kinetic impact of this active imagining of the violence inflicted on his closest friend led to a deepening of Buber’s outlook. This experience of mortality intensified his sense of the deep urgency of each interpersonal encounter and of the great responsibility to address the other in terms of his meeting with destiny. This long-term effect is the product of Buber’s work of mourning, distilled during his years of withdrawal following the murder.

Buber spoke at Landauer’s memorial service shortly after the murder.105 Later that year he gave a talk in Frankfurt called “Landauer and the Revolution” that concludes with an image of Landauer as crucified: “In a church in Brescia I saw a mural whose whole surface was covered with crucified men. The field of crosses stretched to the horizon, and on all of them hung men of all different shapes and faces. There it seemed to me was the true form of Jesus Christ. On one of those crosses I see Gustav Landauer hanging.”106 Buber is most likely referring to the painting entitled I Martiri dell’Ararat in the San Giovanni Evangelista Church that he may have encountered during his year-long sojourn in Italy in 1907–1908. Here his memory of the image of his friend overlaid this work of art. He fuses Landauer with Jesus, whom Buber regarded primarily as a prototypical Jew. Both Jesus and Landauer had been brutally killed for putting their values into action. When Buber spoke at the funeral of Landauer’s daughter Charlotte, eight years later (in 1927), he referred to Landauer’s murder. To him it was an image of the modern era as a low point in history. He connected her life to the “barely graspable meaning of Gustav Landauer’s death. . . . a death in which the monstrous, sheerly apocalyptic horror, the inhumanity of our time has been delineated and portrayed.”107 Buber’s intense characterization of Landauer’s death as a symptom of the spiritual abasement of modernity, expressed here in a heartfelt aside, adds depth to his critique of modernity, a major element of the central section of I and Thou.

Buber later summed up the overall impact of his twenty years of friendship with Landauer in this imperative drawn from Landauer: “Thou shalt not hold thyself back” [Du sollst dich nicht vorenthalten].108 Just as Landauer had not held himself back as a political activist, so Buber learned not to hold himself back in giving voice to his dialogical vision.

The utopian vision Buber and Landauer shared, and which evolved over the course of their friendship, found expression in “The Holy Way,” an essay Buber wrote in 1918. He dedicated it to Landauer’s memory when it was published after his death in 1919. He identified the audience for it in its subtitle: “A Word to the Jews and to the Nations.” Here Buber writes that the task of Jews is to overcome the most fateful assimilation: “the assimilation to the Occidental dualism that sanctions the splitting of man’s being into two realms, . . . the truth of the spirit and the reality of life.”109 The goal of this overcoming is “the СКАЧАТЬ