[excerpt] I AND THOU

Buber's immense posthumous popularity is not confined to him. Those
who read I and Thou also read Hesse's Steppenwolf and
talk of Heidegger, usually without having read him, just as students
did in Germany in the twenties. This goes with a sexual revolution
and an interest in drugs, a vast enthusiasm for Dostoevsky, Indian
philosophy, and Buddhism. The whole syndrome has come to life again
along with interest in Bertolt Brecht whose antisentimental and
antiromantic protests have to be seen against the background of a
time that acclaimed Hesse and Buber. His toughness has some of the
swagger of adolescent rebellion. But their neo-romanticism also had,
and still has, a particular appeal for adolescents. A book's
survival usually owes not a little to its vices.