Ricerc@Sapienza

The figure of Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) is not only important to understand the German revolutionary political panorama after the First World War, but also to understand some basic characteristics of German culture, between anarchism, new communitarianism, collective spiritual vision and refusal of each convention. Starting from a commemorative episode recalled by his friend Martin Buber, the essay aims to explore the political and revolutionary issues of Landauer in the light of this perspective.

In Walter Benjamin. The Story of a Friendship (1975) Gershom Scholem recalls how he and Benjamin used to have intense discussions about politics and religion during and after the First World War which both spent in Switzerland. During a 1919 night-walk they talked about what they claimed to be ‘the most sensible response to politics’. Both agreed that it could be traced back to a notion of ‘theocratic anarchism’ − undoubtedly a highly ambiguous definition. The meaning of this paradoxical subsuming of anarchism, politics and theocracy doesn’t seem easy to grasp.