1. Biographical Background

The setting of Buber’s early childhood was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic conglomerate whose dissolution in 1918 effectively ended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe. Buber was born into fiin-de-siècle Vienna, home of light opera and heavy neo-romantic music, French-style boulevard comedy and German social realism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and vibrant journalism, a cultural cauldron aptly captured in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities ( Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften , 1930–1932). Jews and other national minorities were not afforded full freedom of residence and acquisition of property across the Empire until the “Basic Law on the General Rights of Nationals” of December 1862 (“December Constitution”).…