The writer Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) is one of the figures of political and literary life around the turn of the century whose importance for German-Jewish modernism has been largely neglected. Anarchist and reformer, writer and theatre critic, friend of Martin Buber and intellectual pioneer and mainstay of cultural Zionism, he left a body of work that has yet to be explored in all its variety and apparent contradictions. Hence the articles in this volume approach Landauer from a broad range of viewpoints. Some point up the early formative influences on Landauer and his particular predilections, his reading of Goethe and Spinoza, his first forays into literary activity; others trace hitherto neglected links between Landauer and psychoanalyst Karl Landauer, mathematician Felix Hausdorff and theologian Paul Tillich. Also subjected to analysis are the problems posed by the political message of Landauer as a revolutionary of the Munich Räterepublik and the utopian impact of his ideas on the Weimar years. Other contributions cast light on German-Jewish modernism in the context of the history of ideas, almost all of them converging in the extermination or banishment of its representatives by the Nazis.

(Source: Walter de Gruyter)