Paul Mendes-Flohr Messianic Radicals: Gustav Landauer and Other German-Jewish Revolutionaries The false Messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah. He is the changing form of the changeless hope. He separates every Jewish generation into those whose faith is strong enough to give themselves up to an illusion, and those whose hope is so strong they do not allow themselves to be deluded. The former are the better, the latter the stronger. Franz Rosenzweig1 In the midst of the Bavarian Revolution of 1918-1919, a group of students at the University of Munich organized a study circle to discuss the urgent social and political questions of the day. To distinguish themselves from the right-wing Corp- studenten, they fancied themselves to be a Freistudentenschaft, and met weekly in a local bookshop.2 In January 1919, they were addressed by Max Weber, who was soon to assume a professorship at the university.3 In a room packed to overflow- 1 The epigraph by Franz Rosenzweig is from “The False and True Messiah: A Note to a Poem by Jehuda ha-Levi,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1961), 350. I wish to dedicate this article to the memory of Ernest Frankel and Ernst Akivah Simon, who exemplified the cultural sensibilities and human ideals of German Jewry. 2 Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 16. The Freistudentenschaft was formally known as the Freistudentischer Bund, a left-lean- ing liberal student group with branches throughout Germany. 3 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 707. Karl Löwith, who attended the lecture, gives the date of the lecture “Science as a Vo- cation” simply as during the winter semester 1918-1919 (Löwith, Mein Leben, 16). Although there is considerable disagreement among Weber scholars, most now tend to follow Marianne Weber, who in her biography of her husband holds that the lecture took place in January 1919. See also Wolfgang Schluchter, “Excursus: The Question of the Dating of ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Pol- itics as a Vocation,’” in Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, ed. Günther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 113-116. On the basis of his research, Schluchter himself believes that ‘Science as a Vocation” was actually delivered as early as November 1917 (114-115). There is a reason, however, to doubt the veracity of Löwith’s report, which is given in vivid detail, although it is, of course, possible that Weber delivered the same lecture twice or had given substantially different lectures under the same