  Among the young Buber’s first publications are essays on, and translations into Polish of, the poetry of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buber’s literary voice may be best understood as probingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging a path between East and West, Judaism and Humanism, national particularity and universal spirit. His deliberate and perhaps somewhat precious diction was nourished by the contrasts between the German classics he read at home and the fervently religious to mildly secular Galician Jewish jargon he encountered on the outside. Reentering the urban society of Vienna, Buber encountered a world brimming with Austrian imperial tradition as well as Germanic pragmatism, where radical new approaches to psychology and philosophy were being developed. This was a place where solutions to the burning social and political issues of city, nation, and empire were often expressed in grandly theatrical oratory (Karl Lueger) and in the aestheticizing rhetoric of self-inscenation (Theodor Herzl). As a student of art history, German literature, and psychology in Vienna, Leipzig, Zürich, and Berlin, Buber made himself at home in a bohemian world of letters.