Martin Buber: Fruhe kulturkritische und philosophische Schriften 1891-1924 (review)

This is the first and important cornerstone of what is projected to become a monumental edition comprising 21 volumes of the complete writings of Martin Buber in German. It will eventually replace the four-volume edition in which Buber assembled his writings giving his work its final shape and order. The authenticity of the master's final vision of his life and work was a great advantage but also left the altering mark of hindsight on the definitive shape of his work. The new edition will help to correct this by presenting a different view on Buber, one of a continually evolving author who over time assumes an increasingly distinct voice. The sheer comprehensiveness of the body of texts of a man who had made writing his career early on, along with a thorough introduction rich in illuminating details and a commentary, make it possible to rediscover important new aspects of a figure who long has become a towering pioneer in modern philosophy, religious thought, and Judaism.

Rich and instructive, Martin Treml's 80-page introduction takes the reader through the formative early years of Buber's intellectual life, from 1891 to 1924. During this period, Buber moved from the world of the turn of the century Vienna literati circles, through spiritual and mystical periods of reawakening, to what will emerge in ever-clearer contours as his discovery of the dialogical principle. It is also the period during which Buber plays an important role in the challenge of Herzl's position, confronting Herzl and his camp with the call for cultural Zionism. At the same time, Buber also moves in circles that seek to mobilize the best of German traditions against what they consider a concerted anti-German threat from the World War I allies on the opposite side of the battlefield. Among his contemporaries, it was Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Peter Altenberg to whom he felt initially particularly close. Herzl appreciated him early on and made him a regular contributor to his press. Buber also remained in close contact with Georg Simmel, with whom he had studied and who presents a key influence on Buber's thought. The names of Gustav Landauer, the Forte Circle, Adolf Paquet, and Florens Christian Rang stand for other dialogues that were crucial for Buber's intellectual growth. Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, and Gershom Scholem, on the other hand, made great efforts to mark their distance from a man whose thinking they considered to have been fatally misguided. (Rosenzweig will make his appearance in a later volume.) While Treml's introduction impresses by its erudite balance, he curiously claims that Scholem, otherwise "a great polemicist[,] took with regard to Buber a more balanced stance" (p. 18). This comes a bit as a surprise given Scholem's sustained and affectively overcharged rejection of anything even remotely reminiscent of Buber.¹

This wide-ranging scope of Buber's interests shows him from the very beginning as a man able to easily move between different seemingly exclusive cultural and intellectual spheres. On one hand a typical son of his time engaged in the projects of renaissance, recovery, and alternative life style, Buber combines these pursuits with an original capacity to rethink the conflicted and antagonistic forces of his time, approaching them as opposite poles of one and the same harmonious whole of the project of modernity. At the same time, Buber's thought allowed for this harmony to still contain, reflect, and even celebrate the contradictions at the heart of his time. If the formulation of the dialogical principle helped Buber to address the predicaments of his period, it also became the catalyst for turning his own thought into a powerful medium to contemplate the contemporary problematic in a critical way.

Besides two early texts of 1891 (his bar mitzvah speech) and 1892, there are notes on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and review essays on new Viennese literature and other fiction. But the most important texts...