call to revolution and mystical anarchism

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Call to Revolution, the Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer. by Charles B. Maurer

Review by: Guy SternMLN, Vol. 88, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1973), pp. 636-638Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2907393 .

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636 M L NCharles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution, the Mystical Anarchism of GustavLandauer. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971) 218 pp. $9.50.TODAY'S advocates of communal living, continuous education for theworking-man, ethnic identity without chauvinism, and anarchism withoutbloodshed will find an often overlooked precursor in Gustav Landauer(1870-1919), a German "anarcho-socialist," political philosopher,occasional writer of fiction, and reluctant ten-day cabinet minister duringthe Bavarian revolution in 1919. For these and other reasons CharlesB. Maurer's book, the first one to make Landauer's life and thoughtknown, in extenso, to the English-speaking world, is both timely and"relevant." It is also an exceptionally clear intellectual biography ofan author who, by his own concession, was speaking above the headsof the crowd he wished to influence and whose diverse and scatteredwritings, ranging from essays on social revolution and pacifism toliterary criticism and theater reviews, appeared to contemporaries to beemanating from "six people in one." Maurer accomplishes whatLandauer never took the time to undertake: he shows how Landauer,no matter how wide his reach or how protean his attitudes, neverwavered from his own epistemology and from his efforts of bringingabout an envisioned loosely structured society which his basic philosophysuggested to him.Maurer's method is admirably suited to his task. He emphasizes theintellectual development of his subject more than the outer biography,though the vicissitudes and catastrophies of Landauer's insecure andforeshortened life are not neglected. Maurer acquaints us with Lan-dauer's constant poverty and dependence on Maecenas, when his incomefrom freelance writing proved inadequate, with his unconventionalhousehold in which, for a time, two women shared his life, with hisnear-isolation after the untimely death of his wife, with his bouts withthe police and the censor, and finally with his martyrdom in StadelheimPrison at the hands of a military unit turned lynch-mob. But whatreceives far greater attention (and wisely so) is, first, the evolution ofhis philosophy and then its logical application to his championship of avariety of causes among which his striving for the destruction of theinstitutionalized state, by peaceful means, and the building of asocialistic society of cooperating individuals were preemiment.In Chapter iii this method shows up in its most paradigmatic form.Here Maurer treats Landauer's encounter with the writings of hislong-time friend Fritz Mauthner and the consequences of this encounter.It begins with an extensive excursion on Mauthner's most importantwork, Sprachkritik. Mauthner was led, by his epistemological scepticism,to the recognition that the sense data we receive from our "Zufalls-sinne" transmit a false reality to us and that words or concepts, even our

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M L N 637own consciousness, are invalid tools for grasping the world around us.He ultimately came to the conclusion that the answer to this inadequacyof human perception is a life of action: " Only through action do weunderstand the world of reality...." Building on Mauthner's scepticismand his advocacy of a vita activa, Landauer "took refuge in the onebit of knowledge he could not deny-his own existence-and used thisas the starting point for his new vision of the world. This was hisunique contribution: a synthesis of the metaphysical impasse Mauthner'slanguage theory had created and the social theory Proudhon, Kropotkin,and others had worked out before him.... The sum of these values wasGeist, which could exert its influence upon human life... only if therewas a [socialist] society susceptible to it..." Between the third chapterand the admirable summation of the last one (from which the abovequotation is taken) Maurer traces the effect of these insights uponLandauer's life-long struggle with the orthodox Marxists, the defendersof the institutionalized state, the war-mongers, and the political, notsocial post-war revolutionaries. Maurer recognizes Landauer's appliedphilosophy even in his treatments of literary greats, such as Shakespeare,Goethe, and Whitman. For Landauer reasoned that artists, working withtheir own symbols, act as interpreters of the distorted sense data andhence are better guides than the scientists, among others, to a truerconcept of reality.The success of a history of ideas such as the present one rests in goodpart on the historian's ability to retain a proper perspective on hisaudience and subject. Measured by both standards Call to Revolutiondeserves high praise. Even an occasional flaw-Maurer may underestimatehis audience when he sets a rather elementary historical stage for hissubject's entrance during the Second Empire-is redeemed by hismasterful, concise, and highly necessary unravelling of the complexsequel of events during the faction-ridden Bavarian revolution. And asto retaining perspective on his subject Maurer makes no extravagantclaims for Landauer: " His impact was small, but the nobility of hisintentions and the philosophic grandeur of his dreams for a better worlddeserve to be remembered," he writes. In fact, if anything, Maurer mayerr here on the side of understatement when he claims that the lastfifty years have all but obscured his writings and personality. Beyondthe "accounts of modern German cultural history" in which Landauerfrequently appears (and to which Maurer draws attention), he is alsomentioned in standard reference works and surfaces in several recentautobiographies, such as those by Kurt Hiller and the late FranzSchoenberner. Historical studies, for example those by George L. Mosse,Sol Liptzin, and Margarete Susman accord him more than passingmention. Laudauer's relationship to Judaism emerges from frequentreferences in the Yearbooks of the Leo-Baeck Institute, which also published



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638 M L NPaul Breines' full-length article on him in 1967. In 1970, the centenaryof his birth, some belated tributes appeared in the journal Emuna andvarious German newspapers. Lastly-and most importantly-in 1969 aselection of his writings appeared in the Hegner Verlag, Cologne, editedby Heinz-Joachim Heydorn under the title Zwang und Befreiung,together with a bibliography and a most serviceable introduction bythe editor. A year earlier Heydorn had republished and introducedLandauer's Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Maurer does not mention the abovecommentaries and republications, but do they not indicate thatLandauer's submerged importance may some day surface more fully?If any single work can help accomplish this end, it is Maurer'smonograph. Written originally as a dissertation at Northwestern'sGerman Department, it also serves to reemphasize a point often made andoften forgotten: that the essayist, at least if he is of the stature of aLandauer, is a legitimate object for reseacch by our profession. (HelmutRehder implied as much in a recent article on the essay in theLessing-Yearbook and Ludwig Rohner in his introduction to hisanthology Deutsche Essays.) While Landauer did write prose fiction ofsome merit (a philosophical novel and some shorter narratives)-allexplicated by Maurer-his forte was the essay. It is commendable thatErich Heller suggested the topic. Perhaps-and this may be a merecavil-the close relationship between essayists and the writers of belles-lettres could have been further illuminated by a more extensivetreatment of Landauer's impact on the literary figures of his time.Maurer does include the effect of Landaur's writings on Richard Dehmel,Ernst Toller, Martin Buber (who edited much of it for publication afterLandauer's death), and on Georg Kaiser (who may well owe hisenvisioned communes in Gas I to Landauer). Maurer also cites anappreciation by Hermann Hesse and the fictionalization of Laudauer inTankred Dorst's Toller. But, I suspect, there are other facts yet to beunearthed. Alfred Doblin, for example, wrote a curiously allegoricalobituary to Laudauer; when Ernst Toller and Margarete Turnowsky-Pinner were writing an appeal for peace as spokesmen for a student groupat Heidelberg, they borrowed freely from Landauer's Aufruf zum Sozia-lismus. It would, therefore, be a valuable contribution if Mr. Maurerwould follow his book with an article on "Landauer und die Dichter. "In making this suggestion this reviewer is, of course, providing additionaltestimony about the keen interest this most excellent book has aroused.

The Universityof Cincinnati GUY STERN


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