“Life of the Community”: Gustav Landauer Reads Friedrich Hölderlin

Abstract

In March 1916 the German Jewish writer, philosopher, and anarchist-activist Gustav Landauer gave a lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine” (1802) at a women’s club in central Berlin. The lecture aims to derive from Hölderlin a concept of community designed to disavow German militarism and gesture to a wholly different understanding of the social. Taking his cue from Hölderlin, Landauer thus argues that community is not a state in which self-sufficient subjects join together on the basis of certain ostensibly shared attributes (language, territory, ethnicity, etc.) but is a relationship of mutual obligation geared toward irreducible openness—a “community of love” (Liebesgemeinschaft). Accordingly, Landauer not only anticipates crucial aspects of later engagements with the concept of community but also sets the tone for an anarchistic strand of Hölderlin reception around the time of World War I that has hitherto remained relatively underexplored.