Martin Buber (1878–1965), philosopher of dialogue and champion of the German-Jewish symbiosis, initially refused to return to Germany in a public capacity after the Holocaust. Yet during the 1950s, Buber, then in his seventies, accepted two important prizes from the Germans and lectured to university audiences across the country. His speeches and lectures left a lasting impression on the young generation, even as much of world Jewry accused him of being “callous or stupid” or simply an opportunist for accepting honors on German soil. An analysis of Buber's correspondence, interviews, and lectures reveals that he returned to Germany not to confront the past, but to fight for the future. He sought to discredit the rigid ideologies and political jargon of the Cold War years by urging the fighters for human truth, wherever they may reside, to join forces: to visualize that which they have in common, to engage in dialogue, to learn to say “We.” When read together as part of a single enterprise, the acceptance speeches and lectures mark the stages in Buber's quest to conceptualize and to model genuine conversation among humanists—individuals as estranged from one another as a German Jew from Germany after 1945.

The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone had attended a school for preachers—only I hadn't studied there.

We tend … to forget that something can happen not merely “to” us and “in” us but also, in all reality, between us.