The Anticosmic Lyricism of Gustav Landauer
It is the intricate fate of some writers—and even more so, of poets who carry the burden of vision—to be perpetually exiled from the center of literary discourse. One such exilic blaze in the palimpsest of 20th-century letters is Gustav Landauer, a German-Jewish intellectual, theorist of anarchism, translator of William Shakespeare and mystical metaphysician. Born in Karlsruhe in 1870, Landauer met his tragic end during the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, beaten to death by counter-revolutionaries in the courtyard of Stadelheim Prison. That his final breath was spilled into soil but not into literature is partly our crime.
A leading figure in the cultural-anarchist circles of fin-de-siècle Germany, Landauer’s life was as fervent as his pen. He believed in Volk—but not volkism, in Spirit—but not religion. As co-founder of the “Socialist League” (Sozialistischer Bund), he pointed toward a socialism grounded in communal solidarity, informed by mysticism and an ancient Hebraic yearning for justice. His contemporaries called him unpractical, vague; but perhaps it is the spiritual impractical among us who haul the future like a shepherd aching from prophecy.
His best writings reside not only in his essays—such as “Revolution” (1907) and “Skepticism and Mysticism” (1903)—but in his letters, fevered and honest, where aphorism and conviction dance in inseparable waltzes. “Der Staat ist ein Zustand, eine bestimmte Beziehung zwischen Menschen, eine Art menschlichen Verhaltens; wir zerstören ihn, indem wir andere Beziehungen eingehen, indem wir uns anders zueinander verhalten”—“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by behaving differently toward one another”[1].
This, in essence, is Landauer’s philosophy: that we undo systems not by storming their gates, but by transmuting our interrelations into something sacred. He smelled forge-smoke in the dialectics of Marxism and sought instead a revolution that began and ended in song, in ritual, in the wild biosphere of soul.
Despite penning an entire translation of Shakespeare’s works into German with deeply poetic annotations, Landauer is hardly remembered in Anglophone literary worlds. Yet we can trace his thought shimmering crossroads with other mystics of language and being: Novalis, William Blake, Simone Weil.
In “Skepsis und Mystik,” Landauer envisioned skepticism and mysticism not as oppositions, but as aspects of one internal necessity: the weighing of truth by silence, and silence by truth. “Du sollst nicht glauben—sondern erkennen […] Und dies Erkennen ist Offenbarung, ist Mystik” (“You shall not believe—but know […] And this knowing is revelation, is mysticism.”)[2].
What does he mean by knowing that is revelation? Is it merely the gnostic throwing open of curtain-hidden truths, or is it something softer—more intimate? There is no aestheticism in Landauer’s voice; rather, a solemnity that eats like firewood through the mind.
A telling moment lies in his correspondence with Martin Buber, whose own journey toward dialogical philosophy was shaped partly by Landauer’s optimism and ontological intimacy. Buber records that it was Landauer who first hinted to him that “spirit” was not an abstraction, but the relationship between persons; a vital, mutual glance, wingless but filled with mythic avians. “In der Tiefe der Seele ist Gemeinschaft,” Landauer writes: “In the depth of the soul, there is community.”[3]
This invocation is not political per se—it is mythological. He uses ‘community’ like Hesiod might use ‘earth’: as a primary, undegenerated condition.
Let us pause here and descend into reflection. For it is in Landauer’s mystical anthropology that one finds not just a political theorist, but a poet who has reconfigured the very subjects of poetry. He calls not for representation, but for ontological regeneration. Not for protest, but for communion.
I recall a dimly lit square in Munich, brimming with Baroque balconies and the hoarse breath of streetcar wires, where I once stumbled upon a small brass plaque bearing Landauer’s name. It was coldly clipped: “Revolutionär. Erschlagen 1919.” Slain. But he was never more alive than in the footnotes of time. Like Plotinus, he knew that what binds us is not matter but participation—and that violence corrodes the cords that tether the real back to itself.
One passage shines like an inverted star in my thoughts: “Mystik ist nicht Flucht aus der Welt, sondern neue Verwandtschaft mit ihr, durch tiefere Erkenntnis der Seele”—“Mysticism is not an escape from the world, but a new kinship with it, through deeper knowledge of the soul.”[4]
Consider this: mysticism as kinship. Not merely with God, or the infinite—but with the all-too-world. In this singular inversion, Landauer plucks ontology from the clouds and deposits it in the silence between two strangers sharing bread. Suddenly, the mystical act is to listen. To place one’s hand on the shoulder of the perishing. To extend hospitality, not to prophets, but to muffled souls. His revolt was artisanal. He did not prophesy Lenin; he evoked Rumi with a beard of German ash.
This may explain why he was killed in a moment numbed with mechanistic vengeance. He refused dogma. He unthreaded the revolutionary into herbs, meat, sacred texts, children’s laughter. For Landauer insisted that one must “inhabit freedom,” not merely demand it. His speech was not of overcoming, but of becoming.
Let us revisit that earlier citation: “we destroy [the state] by behaving differently toward one another.”
It is almost absurd in its naivety, is it not? In an age of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic governance, what hope does a relational ethics have? Here lies the philosophical conundrum that Landauer bequeaths—he dares to call for metaphysical disobedience. The Inner Revolution.
There is little doubt that modernity has failed to answer Landauer. He wasn’t answered in the hammering of barricades, nor in the letters penned from Reichstag benches. But perhaps he left his answer not in politics, but in voice. In the act of saying, saying simply: awaken. Lend your hand not to demolish but to reassemble. Compose the world anew, like verse.
Thus ends the trail of a man who dreamed cities with the mind of Rilke and argued rebellion with the nerve of Pascal. Gustav Landauer remains a fringe-lightning—too mystic for the Marxists, too radical for the liberals, yet ultimately closer to the heart of poetry than either lineage dares claim.
He sends this whisper through the decades: The world will not be transformed by conquest—but by presence.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, Jewish mysticism, community
—
[1] Landauer, Gustav. “Revolution.” In Revolution und andere Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Edition AV, 1998, p. 18.
[2] Landauer, Gustav. Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik. Gießen: Anaconda Verlag, 2010, p. 54.
[3] Landauer, Gustav, and Martin Buber. Briefwechsel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 113.
[4] Ibid., p. 120.