  Buber’s thought matured under the impact of Landauer’s harsh critique, which persuaded Buber that he had unduly romanticized the war. Buber’s 1916 lead essay for the new journal Der Jude still praised the war as an opportunity for the modern Jew to forge, out of the chaos of rupture, a feeling for community, connection, a new unity, a unified Gestalt, one that could restore the Jewish people to a condition of wholeness. For Buber’s friend Landauer, such thoughts were “very painful…very repugnant, and borderline incomprehensible. Object though you will, I call this way of thinking aestheticism and formalism and I say that you have no right…to try and tuck these tangled events into your philosophical scheme (schönen und weisen Allgemeinheiten): what results is inadequate and outrageous” (Letters of Martin Buber, p. 189; transl. modified). Landauer continued to argue, “Historical matters can only be talked about historically, not in terms of formal patterns (formalem Schematismus) … I gladly grant that behind this is the desire to see greatness; but desire alone is not sufficient to make greatness out of a confused vulgarity” (ibid., 190–1). Landauer’s challenge to the grotesque fusion of Erlebnis, Gemeinschaft, and Gestalt out of world war and mass slaughter precipitated the end of aesthetic religiosity in Buber’s work.