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ADI GORDON (NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA)
Against Vox Populi- Arnold Zweig's Struggle with Political Passions
Beyond Ideological Conversion and Homecoming Upon returning to Berlin from Palestine in October 1948, novelist Arnold Zweig (1887-1968) was likely the most prominent Jewish intellectual in the Soviet occupation zone, and later in East Germany. His return to Germany was often identified with an ideological conversion. East German Eberhard Hilscher has depicted Zweig's life and work as a symbol of (East) Germany's maturation: »In many regards his life can serve as a modeL He exemplified particularly the bourgeois intelligentsia, and the manner in which it can transcend its ideological crises. He walked the path away from idealism, from Zionism and utopian socialism, to materialism, proletarian internationalism and Marxism, and proved himself as a humanist and as an educator of the people.«' This depiction is not only teleological but also glosses over some of the most fascinating and essential elements in Zweig's political career, which this article would like to address. Given Zweig'S importance and the crude nature of this narrative, it is quite surprising that it has never been sufficiently chal lenged. Many have countered the story of the »Communist Arnold Zweig« with that of the"Jewish Arnold Zweig,« but important as their contributions were, they did very little to reassess his overall political career.2 This essay will therefore detail his political career offering a dramatically different interpretation to the teleological one posed above. It complements Zweig's undeniable political transformation - from Jewish to »general« pol itics, and from anti-socialism to Marxism-Leninism - with his constant ap prehension of the masses and their political passions. This unrelenting fear of the irrational and suggestible nature and conduct of the demos characterized Zweig's evolving understanding of politics, and his own political role in all his various polities: in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, in Zionism and the
1 Eberhard Hilscher, Arnold Zweig. Leben und Werk (= Schriftsteller der Gegenwart 22), lEast] Berlin 1985, £74. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations have been trans lated by the author. 2 Manuel Wiznit7:er, Arnold Zweig. Das Leben eines deutsch-jiidischen Schrift stellers, Konigstein im Taunus 1983; Sigrid Thielking, Auf dem lrrweg ins »Neuc Kanaan«? Palastina und der Zionismus im Werk Arnold Zweigs vor dem Exil, Frankfurt a. M. 1990; Arie Wolf, Groge und Tragik Arnold Zweigs. Ein jiidisch deutsches Dichterschicksal in jiidischer Sicht, London 1'991.
,,~, 2 13 ADIGORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POUTICAL PASSIONS 133
Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), as well as in the German Dem in the military-occupied eastern territories, the so-called Ober-Ost. The ruth ocratic Republic. These notions of political passions and dangerous masses less occupation policies and practices Zweig witnessed there further radical challenge, if not contradict completely, the traditional view of Zweig's po ized his critique of the nature of the German state.s Much of east European I litical biography. His notion of »political passions,« which underlay his Jewry now lived under German occupation, and his encounter with them } intellectual career, was obviously opposed to his developing notion of »po - always connected to his views on the German state and the German Jews left a lasting mark. \ litical reason« and bore a great resemblance to the ideas conveyed by Julien 1 Benda in his Trahison des e/ercs (1927).3 Zweig's apprehension of the irratio Taken together, his war experiences had a formative effect, and Zweig ! nal political pas'sions - virtually ignored by previous scholarship - holds the returned from the war a politically engaged intellectual. From 1917 he re key to a full and nuanced understanding of his political career. peatedly mentioned a plan to write a vengeful political book that would expose the true nature of the German war.9 In a cafe in Kaunas in the fall of that year, an officer told Zweig about the execution of a Russian prisoner of World War I as Object Lesson war - whose innocence was clear to all- by the German military government Arnold Zweig's literary career began on the eve of World War J, in the frame after a long and politically manipulated trial. This story would serve as work of a younger generation of central European spiritual Zionists, moti the material for his vengeful book: he started sketching a drama, tentatively vated by and focused on the dilemmas and identity crises of what Kurt Blu named Bjuschew, after the executed prisoner. He finished writing the play menfeld has called a »post-assimilatory generation.«4 Zweig was no stranger now named Das Spiel vom Sergeanten Grischa - only in the early 19205, and to these dilemmas, but his Zionism had a constant catastrophic element began to rewrite it as a novel in late 1926. Published in October 1927, Der which distinguished him from his coevals. His »Jewish question« was pri Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa was a critically acclaimed bestseller that marily defined by external threats of a hostile, irrational, dangerous society, challenged the way Germans (and German books) were discussing the Great and, unlike that of his peers, his Zionism was always motivated by the anti War and would become the cornerstone to Zweig's magnum opus: a novel Semitism that he had experienced in his childhood. His earlier works - such series titled Der grope Krieg der weipen Manner. as Aufzeichnungen iiber eine Familie Klopfer and Allah (both from 19II) The war put an end to Zweig's anti-socialism, but not to his anti-demo discussed anti-Semitic exclusion and persecution, in all their violence, social cratic sensibilities. He was deeply influenced by the Russian Revolution 'I aggression and psychosocial impact.! - not the least because social revolution seemed to offer the only path to the I', With the outbreak of the war, Zweig enlisted in the German war propa end of the endless war - but his stance regarding revolution would remain ganda effort as the author of a notoriously jingoistic booklet Die Bestie, ambivalent at best. His socialism, manifest both in his literary work and pri which would haunt him for years to come.6 As a soldier he served for years vate correspondence, was Gustav Landauer's and not Lenin's. Already in his I on various fronts, including more than a year in the inferno of Verdun. There Ostjudische Antlitz - written even prior to the war's end - Zweig rejected r. he experienced firsthand the wartime rise in German anti-Semitism, which communism as dictatorial, violent and bloody. He ridiculed and abhorred its \. culminated in the infamous Judenzahlung.7 Zweig spent the end of the war »terror out of goodness and bloodshed out of wise compassion.«l0 He was
3 Benda's book is almost equally critical of race, nation and class political passions the »Jewish census.« The census humiliated the Jewish soldiers - especially the and the subordination of the intellectuals to them. The book was arguably even manyfallen - and legitimized as plausible the anti-Semitic slander. It was an unfor more critical of communism than it was of nationalism. Julien Benda, The Treason givable breach of trust. of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, New York 1969. S for an excellent study of the Ober-Ost and its policies, see Vejas Gabriel Liule 4 Kurt Blumenfeld/Hans Tramer, Erlcbte Judenfrage. Ein Vierteljahrhundert deut vicious, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culrure, National Identity and German scher Zionismus, Stuttgart 1962,43. This generation is often dubbed »second-gene Occupation in World War I, Cambridge and New York 2000. Liulevicious also ration Zionists« in the scholarship. Jehuda Reinharz, Three Generations of German discusses Zweig's writing about the Ober-Ost. Zionism, in; Jerusalem Quarterly 9h (1978), 95-IIO. 9 "Ich will Ihnen nur sagen, daB das ganze Hecr, von der hintersten Etappe bis zum This would become even clearer in his 1914 drama, Ritualmord in Ungarn. Jiidische vordersten Graben, von der giftigsten und niedrigsten moralischen Faulnissroffen Trag()die in funf Aufziigen, Berlin 1914. This drama - which marked Zweig's first durchseucht ist, und daB ich eines Tages mit einem viellecht ruchlosen und uner breakthrough, and awarded him the prestigious Kleist Prize-was based on the 1882 horten Buch die Wahrheit gestalten werde. Al~ Rache, das leugnc ich nieln [. .. ]«: TiszaeszIar blood libel, but echoed also the 1913 Beilis trial. Arnold Zweig, letter to Agness Hess, quoted in Georg Wenzel, Arnold Zweig 1887 6 Arnold Zweig, Die Bestie. Erzahlungen, Munich 1914. 1968. Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Hildern, Berlin and Weimar 1978, 78. 7 Zweig, like many others, was shocked by the German state's decision to respond 10 Arnold Zweig, Das ostjudische Antlitz. Zu zweiundfiinfzig Zeichnungen von Her to anti-Semitic allegations of Jewish men shirking frondine service by conducting mann Struck, Berlin 1920 (quoted from The Face of East European Jewry, trans. 134 ADIGORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS -- ._~.l5. , drawn to a different idea of revolution: a nonviolent, introspective one. His were similar to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has recently named the »culture qualms regarding the Soviet Union only intensified throughout the 1920S.11 of defeat.«l) This introductory essay sharpened claims he had made in the Weltbuhne a year before, clearly situating anti-Semitism in the context of mass psychol I The New Germarl Anti-Semitism and the Making oJCaliban ogy (rather than, say, religious or historical phenomena). It also contained r At the time Zweig began this lifelong Grischa project, he also embarked on a the key terms that would serve him for many years to come. One of these was parallel yet lesser-known one, which helped shape his political world view: the Freudian term »repression« - the defense mechanism that transfers an attempt to systematically analyze the wartime and postwar German anti threatening desires and impulses from the realm of the conscious to the un I Semitism in terms of mass psychology and political passions. This project conscious. Contemporaneous anti-Semitism, according to Zweig, was a \ • also began in 1917 -less than a year after the infamous Judenzahlung - and symptom of German repression of war memories, whose patterns and scale ripened into a book exactly ten years later. The first stage of the project was were not adaptive but pathological, generating a hazardous distortion of Zweig's '9'7 debate with volkisch thinker Max Hildebert Boehm following the perception of reality. The other terms - Zweig's own neologisms - were the latter's wartime statements about German Jews,ll and the series of arti derived from his distinction between two major political passions: the »dis ( cles about »the anti-Semitic wave« flooding postwar Germany that Zweig criminating affect« (DiJJerenzafJekt) and »centralizing affect« (Zentralitats began publishing in the Weltbuhne in April 19 19. I3 affekt), which he saw as central political drives in any society. The »discrim t In the summer of 1920, his anti-Semitism project moved to a second phase inating affect« was, as Bart Philipsen and Georgi Verbeck succinct! y described j in a much longer series of articles entitled »Contemporary German Anti it, »an archaic, instinctive aversion and rejection of cultural otherness rooted !' Semitism« in Martin Buber's periodical Der Jude. In the opening essay of (as Zweig argued) in the collective psyche of an ethnic group.« [6 Zweig saw that series, Zweig claimed that for Jews, anti-Semitism was a »third-rate it as a universal mechanism of social delineation. But it too could deteriorate problem« only - subordinate to the identity crisis of Western Jews and the into pathological patterns - one of which was anti-Semitism. The counter challenges of the construction of the national home in Palestine. For Ger part of the »discriminating affect« was the »centralizing affect,« defined by many, however, anti-Semitism was an existential problem. It was a symptom Zweig as »the drive that wants every group of people to believe that the of a society in denial of its own defeat, out of touch with reality and captive world revolves around them,« an »intoxicating seductive instinct, without ! to its self-made myths. And in this sense it was ultimately a symptom of a which no fight, no war, no collective effort or achievement would come deeply non-sovereign state.'" Zweig saw in postwar Germany patterns that about.«17 The following articles in this series on »Contemporary German Anti-Sem itism« expanded on the problem, and all too often went off on tangents, but they never transcended this analytical framework. In the eighth article, for Noah William Isenberg; illustrations by Hermann Struck, Berkeley, CA 2.004, example he described postwar counterrevolution and anti-Semitism as a type !<\ II 5). II Idem, Macht oder Freiheit, in: Die Weltbuhne, November 2.51 1930,784-787. of »inward« aggression: »German nationalism before the war, and especially 12. Idem, Jude und Europaer. Entgegnung an Max Hildebert Boehm, in: Der Jude 2.h-2 (1917), 21-2.8; idem, 1uden und Deutsche (Ein Nachwoft an M. H. Boehm), 15 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, in: DerJude 2/3 (1917), 2.04-207. The main essay Zweig was alluding to was Max and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase, New York 2003 (Die KulUlr der Niederlage. Hildebert Boehm, Vom jiidisch-deutschen Geist, in: Preufiische Jahrbiicher 162 Der amerikanische Siiden 1865, Frankreich 1871, Deutschland 1918, Berlin 2001). (October-December 19! 5), 404-420, in which he attacked Hermann Cohen's 16 Bart PhilipseniGeorgi Verbeck, Caliban in the Weimar Republic: Arnold Zweig on notion of a natural German-Jewish bond, while praising the young (Buberian) Antisemitism, in: Nadia Lierrheo D'haen (eds.), Constellation Caliban: Figura Zionists, including Zweig, as »dignified 1ews« and natural allies in his struggle tions of a Character, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1997, 164 f. Very similar notions against Cohen. For a discussion of the impact of that essay in Zionist circles, see were conveyed by Primo Levi in the preface to his Se questo eun uomo: »many Ulrich Sieg, Jiidische lntellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kricgserfahrungen, welt people - many nations can find themselves holding [. <.] that >every stranger is an anschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuorientierung, Berlin 2001, 237ff. enemy.< Forthe most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; 13 Arnold Zweig, Die Antisemitische Welle L Groteskantisemitismus und Mittel it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a stand, in: Weltbuhne, April 3, 1919; idem, Die Antisemitische Welle II. Das anti system of reason. But when this does come about [ ...] then, at the end of the chain, semitische Problem, in: WeJtbuhne, April 10, 1919; idem, Die Antisemitische Welle there is the Lager [the Nazi Camp].« Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi III. Das antisemitische Problem, in: Weltbiihne, April 17, 1919. Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf, New York 1996,9. 14 Idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus [als deutsche Angelegenheit], in: Der 17 Arnold Zweig, Caliban, oder, Politik und Leidenschaft. Versuch iiber die mensch Jude 512 (1920-1921), 65-76. l lichen Gruppcnleidenschaften dargetan am Antisemitismus, Berlin 2000 [1927], II. r """""-').'>1".1",,'; ;aos;;;;c;:;; Z$; 12 -''?{PI''
136 ADIGORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS 137
I, during it, was imperialist, aggressive outwards and inwards; today it is [...] been possible. 21 As a matter of fact, Caliban was more influenced by Gustave aggressive inwards, that is - culturally, and in the absence of other objects Le Bon, and Zweig's knowledge of Freud's work was still quite limited at the anti-Semitic.«,8 time'" Nonetheless, Freud was the great mentor Zweig sought throughout I Zweig ultimately edited these articles into a unified text the 1927 book his life, and his dedication of the book was the beginning of a fascinating Caliban, oder, Politik und Leidenschaft. Versuch iiber die menschlichen Grup correspondence between the two men. Zweig's affinity to him was deeper I penleidenschaften dargetan am Antisemitismus. Indeed, the famous Grischa than his earlier affinity to Martin Buber and continued well beyond the psy and the virtually forgotten Caliban were twin projects, which began at the choanalyst's death. }lrom the mid-1920s Zweig wrote about the need to use same time, ripened slowly and came to full fruition at roughly the same time. 19 psychoanalytical principles, and especially 'Freudian theories of mass psy Caliban is named, of course, after the famous monster in Shakespeare's Tem chology, to analyze political phenomena, and even to chart policies based I" pest, the treacherous servant. Caliban, that »thing of darkness,« conspired on them. His»Freudian politics« differed clearly from materialistic politics, i against his master not for true freedom but for a better position under a new based on economy and means of production, on interests and a rational prO potential master, the drunkard Stefano. The choice of title, then, illustrates gression of history. In the interwar period it was in Freud's work - not in not only anti-Semitism's folly and monstrosity but also the way in which it Marxist materialism or Soviet political culture that Zweig saw the potential ( is abused by the powerful. Shakespeare's Caliban, Zweig wrote, »was the for a deep revolution of the political arena. 23 »Freudian politics« provide the personification of instinct, particularly of my ,discriminating affect' itself. key to understanding Zweig's claim regarding repressed German war memo i Caliban lived beneath good and evil a guy to be pitied, despite his howling ries, and his theories that irrational political drives and passions determine fury. Lust, anger, hatred, revenge, fear, superstitious worshiping of the fetish, the political sphere, above and beyond reason, and even beyond consider v, and a mass of crude power controls him. No doubt, he was the discriminating ation of clear interests. affect, confirming what I had discerned in the soul of the group.«20 In the summer of 1932, for example, Zweig lectured before the German Authors' Association, the SDS (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), on affectivity of the masses, their childish conduct and their destructive »Vater Freud« \ drive. Wanting to avoid the hard realities of life, Zweig claimed, the masses f' On March 18, 1927, Zweig requested Sigmund Freud's »permission to dedi developed an uncritical belief in the leader, dethroned reason and set in its "i cate my book Caliban [...] to you," stressing that »without your system of stead »the mystical force of the blood.« In a time like this he urged his col thought, your basic ideas and your new principles« Caliban would not have leagues -the author's role is to bring the repressed to light.l.4 Again: the intel lectuals' raison d'etre is not only to counter the irrationality of the masses, but also to insist on the possibility and absolute necessity of their educability II (Erziehbarkeit). Zweig's harsh critique of the Soviet Union in the late Weimar ,t 18 Idem, Der heutige deutsche Amisemitismus als jiidische Angelegenheit [SchluB], Republic conveyed similar notions: »I have reached [ ...] the shocking con in: Der Jude 5/11 (1920-1921),621-633, here 62.2.. The fourth part of the discussion, J for example, elucidated well the distinction between a model in which this affect is clusion that only people who have been educated to live together are fit for sublimated and a pattern such as the one in postwar Germany - in which this collective life.«') affect dominates the political agenda. See idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitis mus als jiidische Angelegenheit llII), in: DerJude 5/5 (1920-1921),264-280. In the seventh article Zweig claimed that the subtler the difference, the fiercer the »discri minating affect« similar to what Freud would describe later as "the narcissism of 21 Ernst L. Freud (ed.), The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, trans. minor differences.« See idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus als jiidische Elaine Robson-Scott and William Robson-Scott, New York 1970,1. Angelegenheit LVI], in: Der Jude 5/ro, 557-565- Freud addressed this notion in his 22 Even at the end of 1932, for example, Zweig mentioned in passing that he had not 1918 The Taboo ofVirginity, and again in his 1921 Group Psychology and the Ana yet read either Freud's 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis or his 1921 lysis ofthe Ego, before naming it »the narcissism of minor differences« in his 1930 Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego. Zweig to Freud, December n, 193 2 , Civilization and Its Discontents. in: ibid., 51 f. 19 Caliban's publication year is noteworthy also because of Benda's Trahison des 23 For Zweig's perception of Freud's work as»revolutionary ,« see his letter to Freud, Clercs, which appeared that very year and offered one of the most famous and September 8, 1930, in: ibid., lOff. elaborate discussions of the concept of political passions, »owing to which men rise 24 David R. Midgley, Arnold Zweig. Zu Werk und Wandlung 1927-1948, Konigstein up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and im Taunus 1980, 75f. national passions". Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (fn. 3), 3. 25 Arnold Zweig, »Macht oder Freiheit,,, in: Die Weltbiihne, November 25, 1930, 20 Zweig, Caliban (fn. 17), 11. 784?87, here 785. :"d·,;\~, Q{ zajiC;: 2 a "' .~'JI'."
13 8 ADl GORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS 139
Interestingly enough, his correspondence with Freud makes amply clear igrated to Palestine as a Zionist in 19I9, but there he grew disillusioned with that Zweig saw himself as a member of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud, Zionism and became one of its ultra-Orthodox (haredz) opponents. »The though admiring much of Zweig's literary work, expressed doubts regarding theme has been in my mind for a long time,« Zweig wrote to Freud, as he Zweig's (often vulgar-Freudian) theoretical essays. Although Zweig often found himself writing this new book, in which de Haan was renamed »de had brilliant insights, he tended to be a dilettante essayist, and this was espe Vriendt.« Zweig'S appropriation of de Haan's story took on a new and un ~ cially evident in his »studies« on the psychic infrastructure of politics. These expected dimension as he wrote: »studies« wer~, to quote George Mosse, always attempts at »exorcising the lOFor a month I sketched away [ ...] only to discover some ten days later irrational.«26 Zweig revealed his thoughts about the political potential of there was a flaw at the most vital spot - de Haan was not murdered by r~ psychoanalysis, indeed its mission in the realm of politics, in a late 1930 letter Arabs at all, as I had believed for years, but by a Jew, a political opponent, ~I to Freud: a radical Zionist [ ...J. I realize now what a frightful blow to me this was »l would like to write [...] about your relationship to Nietzsche. To me it I - at first I did not take it in. I laid a new foundation for my work; this new seems that you have achieved everything that Nietzsche intuitively felt to fact was far better than the old; it compelled me to see things accurately be his task, without his being really able to achieve it r...]. Analysis has 1 without pro-Jewish prejudice and to examine the political murder of one reduced the will to power to what lies at its basis. [ ...] Now it would be Jew by another exactly as though it were a political murder in Germany splendid if you were to make a study of the real >will to power,< that is to [...].«3 0 I say the politicians' lust for power in the sociological struggle, and if you And indeed the Caliban project seems to have spilled into De Vriendt kehrt were to pursue it [ ...] from its conscious ideological stage right down to ~ heim, as Zweig named his new critical book. The murder of De Vriendt the depths. Then the cycle of the Freud-Nietzsche relationship would be stemmed from the same political passions that inflamed German postwar complete.«27 ~I anti-Semitism and the Arab riots of 1929. That was the very reason Zweig situated the murder - which took place in 1924 - in the context of the Arab riots and the Zionist reaction to them. The dense book was saturated with De Vriendt Goes Home: Political Passions in Our Midst passions and dark drives, portrayed in a noticeably Freudian manner: De "1!.1, The violent political passions Zweig detected in Germany (and also in the Vriendt's own passions, as he is torn between his sexual drives and what ! Soviet Union) stood in stark contrast to the idealized way in which he de Zweig called his Gottestrieb - his drive to divinity;3 l the vengeful plans of the picted east European Jewry (in his Ostjiidische Antlitz) and Zionism (in his Arab relatives of de Vriendt's young lover; and, of course, the political Neues Kanaan).28 The Jewish polity depicted in his texts, while not without passions of de Vriendt's Zionist opponents. So, for example, the hatred of the its flaws, was led by ideas. This changed following his first visit to Palestine murderer - a quintessential diaspora Jew named Mendel Glass - for his vic \; in 1932. "How strange this tragically mad land you have visited must have tim is masterfully linked to his Oedipal rage, patricidal wishes toward his east seemed to you,« Freud wrote to his young friend, not failing to state that European father, and his repressive religious observance. »Palestine has never produced anything but religions, sacred frenzies, pre De Vriendt exposes the tragic and inherently violent nature of nation sumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearance by means of building. Its violence - just like German nationalism in Zweig'S writing after the inner world of wishful thinking.«29 During his visit, Zweig had intended the war - was never, and could never be, directed only outward. Zweig let to rewrite his Caliban, but instead he started writing a short novel about one of the protagonists explain the logic of the assassination offhandedly: the assassination of Dr. Jacob Israel de Haan (1881-I924). De Haan's life and »It's just as simple a process as the rising of the moon. [...] and do you know death were the stuff great novels are made of: he was a Dutch Jewish poet why it's happening again today? We are becoming a nation, and that is the and journalist, who revealed his homosexuality through his writing. He em- proof. A nation treats its children pretty brutally - it lets them be killed in masses, perish in degradation, and starve; as witness the history of the world, 26 George L Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, Bloomington, IN 1985,50. latest section.«32 27 Zweig to Freud, December 2, 1930, in: Letters (fn. 21),22 f. 28 Zweig/Struck, Das ostjiidische Andia (fn. 10); Arnold Zweig, Das neue Kanaan. 30 Ibid., 4 d. Eine Untersuchung tiber Land und Geist zu 15 Steinzeichnungen von Hermann 31 Zweig, letter to Martin Buber, July I, 1932, in: Jewish National and University Struck, Berlin 1925. In Benda's Trahison des Clercs (fn. 3), by contrast, Zionism Library Jerusalem., Martin Buber-Archive, Arc. Ms. Var. 305, Het 93°/4. loomed large in his discussion of political passions. 32 Arnold Zweig, De Vriendt kehrt heim, Berlin 1932 (quoted from: De Vriendt Goes 29 freud to Zweig, May 8,1932, in: Letters (fn. 21),40. Home, trans. Eric Sutton, New York 1933,200). AOJ GORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS 141 ---_._,,-- --- Like many central European Zionists, Zweig saw Zionism not only as a In spite of his hardships as an author exiled from his language, his constant Jewish national movement but also as a moral alternative to the path taken complaints, his ideological objections to the Yisbuv and his plans for further by other central European nationalisms of its day. The realization that the migration, Zweig did remain in Palestine until the summer of 1948. How New Canaan - which he had previously eulogized as an idealist utopia of ever, the longer Zweig stayed, the clearer it became that he was not striking sortS - was also subject to the same political passions should not to be taken root in Palestine - not even as a marginal and relentless voice of the oppo lightly. Viewing Zionism as a movement driven by political passions, Zweig sition. This became amply clear in the early 1940S when Zweig co-edited the
j had a growing awareness that his own position within the movement was a German-language weekly Orient, which counter to its proclamations was a • : precarious one. Zweig thus found himself to be an outsider also in the Zion part of the Exilpresse (German press in exile), and a forum for many non t !ist polity. More than anything else this realization marks Zweig's break from Zionist immigrants to Palestine (such as Louis Fiirenberg). (, Z' . Scholars have tended to exaggerate the'significance of Zweig's critical ~l IOnIsm. \ statements vis-a.-vis the Yisbuv and to attribute to him an alternative brand , of Zionism, which was not tolerated and led to his eventual break from Zion , »Without Any False Hopes«; In Palestine, [933- 1948 ism and emigration from Palestine. An in-depth examination of his writings, . De Vriendt appeared only a few months prior to Hitler's rise to power in however, reveals hardly anything more than faultfinding. He arrived as an Germany, which forced Zweig to emigrate. After the initial months in France, exile of sorts and seems to have been set on returning to Europe. Palestine :~ ; the Zweig family decided to move to Haifa, Palestine. The complexities of his had little to offer him, and he, in turn, had little to offer it. Ig; decision to move to a polity he had just criticized so harshly in his latest book Even as he grew closer to materialist Marxism, Zweig's political world m~ cannot be. fully explored here» Some of his 1ette:s expre.ssed nothing .sho:t view - regarding both world politics and Jewish politics - never abandoned iJ I of enthUSiasm about the planned move to Palestine, while the entry III hiS the theory of »political passions« he had developed in Caliban. In a draft ' .. i pocket diary upon arrival to Haifa conveyed the opposite: »In Palestine: in a from that time, titled »The Immaterial Fundamentals of Politics,« Zweig I foreign land« (in der Fremde»)4 Whatever his thoughts and considerations described a synthesis of three competing elements in politics: materialism 'j were, Zweig surely did not expect at the end of 1933 that he would stay fif (,.Die materiellen Grundlagen«), idealism (»Das Reich der Ideen«), and ~ I, teen long years in Haifa. Though his conflict with the Zionist Yishuv would psyche (»Das Reich der Triebe«), identical to the political passions and the '.': i later intensify, he did seem to find some kind of relief precisely in his es affects of his Caliban project. »And so it is there, where these three com t) trangement from his new setting. In his first letter to Freud from Palestine, ponents of political life concur in the same direction, that the greatest politi 6 i for example, he wrote: cal event and forces come into being.«3 Each component, then, had a certain autonomy, and materialist monism was rejected. True to form, Zweig wrote ; I »In the center of Haifa, smoking my last French cigar, at last 1can settle I about »The Political Passions at Palestine's Substructure«: down to write to you. ( ... ) I am unusually well, to give you some quick news about myself. All the depressions which have often tortured me so »It is part of human - and hence also Jewish - shame and pride, not to terribly in recent years have vanished. The Fatherland, the Father State, discuss publicly passions and their impact. All in life is ascribed to ideo the economic burden, concern about the preservation of my property - all logies and other intellectual constructs - to ideas and genial inspiration. this has dropped away from me and with it have gone many tensions and Prejudice - as one is accustomed to call the impacts of passions - is indeed compulsive ideas. I don't care anymore about >the land of my fathers., I said to playa role among other peoples and groups, such as the prejudice haven't got any more Zionistic illusions either. I view the necessity of against the Jews. But among the Jews themselves, and especially in Pales living here among the Jews without enthusiasm, without any false hopes tine, no political prejudices are said to be found. Unfortunately it does not and even without the desire to scoff.«H and could not be that way, Jews are human, and humans, as soon as they appear as members of a group, act with collective passions (Gruppen leidenscbaften).« 37 I have explored this extensively in Adi Gordon, In Palestine, in a Foreign Land: The Weekly "Orient« between »Gt;rman Exile« and the "Yekke Immigration,« 36 Arnold Zweig, Die immateriellen Grundlagen der Politik, undated draft, cataloged Jerusalem 2004 [Hebrew]. as »1934-1935." in: Literature Archive, Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin, Arnold Quoted in: Jost Hermand, Arnold Zweig mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bildokumen Zweig Archive (hereafter AZA), 1264. ten, Reinbek 1990,74. 37 Idem, Die politischen Leidenschat:ten im Grundbau Palastinas [21 July 1936], in: Zweig to Freud, January 21,1933, in: Letters (fn. 21),55-5 8. ibid., 1269. 142 ADIGORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAl. PASSIONS 143 ------Democracy Redefined, Germany Revisited: cieties into 13 theses about »strong democracies,« whose main points were From Haifa to East Berlin articulated most succinctly in the following six theses: Parallel to Zweig's estrangement from the Yishuv, he unmistakably moved 1. »Only democracy enables the creation of a system, of a life-structure ever closer to Marxism and the Soviet Union. To a large extent the two pro and of a pattern of thought, out of the drives of human coexistence.« cesses were also linked to one another. The crisis of 1933 already forced him 2. »[...] a precondition to the realization of democratic ends is the sub jugation of all to reason and its rules.« ~ - a vocal Weimar critic of the Soviet Union - to overcome his previous ( apprehensions. On April I, 1933 - the day of the Nazi nationwide anti-Jew 3. »A certain mass of power has to be reached in order to force decency ish boycott, which marked the beginning of Nazi anti-Jewish policy - Zweig and maintain it.« wrote a note to himself, under the title »The Jews«: 4. »[ ...] political life is mass life, i.e. the playground of passions.« .] »(1) They [the Jews] do not recognize their circumstance that they are 10. Whoever shapes the passions »affirms the assumption of democratic upheld by the left, while they are moving to the right; (2) they do not life, and gains his right to partake in the [democratic] game«. Whoever recognize their foes, nor that the ruling class does not protect them; does not, has no right to influence the democratic game. they do not recognize themselves - that their >chosenness< is a misinter II. »[...] democracy is not absolute freedom for all, but the maintenance pretation of their history and mission.« of a framework that will enable maximal freedom for democrats by His conclusion was that anti-fascism and democracy could guarantee curtailing the freedom of action of democracy's opponents [.,.].« Jewish existence, everywhere - also within our midst. Let's not fool our The final thesis was simply the concluding cry »long live the strong 8 selves! No fantasies in politics! «3 Anti-fascism, of course, should be under democracy! «41 9 stood here as the self-designated title of the communist-led Popular Front.3 But did Zweig's idea of »strong democracy« merely convey the In Palestine Zweig continued his class-based reinterpretation of the »Jew of a »defensive« or »militant democracy« (wehrhafte, streitbare Demokratie) ish question.« In a piece from the mid-1930S entitled »Why the German Jews along the lines of Karl Loewenstein or Karl Mannheim? Or was he actually Fell,« he depicted contemporaneous German anti-Semitism as the revenge of more influenced by a Jacobin ideal and Soviet model, leaning toward what »the spirit of old Prussia« against the Jews whose emancipation was histori Jacob Talmon named a »totalitarian democracy«?41 Zweig's correspondence cally bound with the initial corrosion of »the hegemony of the Prussian bu with Lion Feuchtwanger hints that the latter may be the case, as he pro reaucracy and old military caste.",40 An even clearer mark of Marxist reinter claimed (even prior to Operation Barbarossa) that »at its heart of hearts pretation can be seen in the new volumes Zweig added while in Palestine to Russia is already a democratic state.«43 Furthermore, even when writing for his Grischa cycle of novels (Erziehung vor Verdun, 1935; Einsetzung eines the Tel Aviv Assembly of the League for the Rights of Men, Zweig did not Konigs, 1937)' hesitate to call for the curtailment of rights in the name of democracy: However, the focal point of Zweig's political writing at the time was not social injustices, nor the lot of the proletariat. It was rather focused - and »Democracy is based on the recognition of the rights of men, which most apparently so from 1938 on the lessons of the collapse of "weak« cism, in all its forms, denies. This is a clear distinction we must account democracies, and primarily the demise of the Weimar republic. In the early for. Hitlerite barbarism grew and flourished because it claimed that its 1940S he addressed these very questions in his novel Das Beil von Wandsbek, opponents, qua democrats, must tolerate all opinions and defend [the but already in early 1938, influenced by events in Europe, he developed his right to express them], even if they reject the rights of men and attack the old concepts of the role of irrational political passions in modern mass so tenets of democracy. Unfortunately it was only much later that it reached
41 lDer Sinn der Demokratie heiBt, demokratisches Leben zu ermoglichenl, untitled 38 Quoted in: Hermand, Arnold (fn. 34), 72f. (original in AZA, and undated document, AZA, !l88. 39 He expressed the same notion in first book he wrote in exile: »The German 42 Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern were oblivious to their state. [... 1They did not realize, and still do not realize, Social Structure, New York 1940; Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian are proletarians prolec,trians with a thick layer of bourgeois cul Democracy, London 1952; Karl Loewenstein, Political Power and the Govern ture." ArnoW Zweig, Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit. Ein Versuch, cd. Kurt Pat mental Process, [Chicago] 1957. zold, Leipzig 199 1 11934), 10. 43 Zweig to Feuchtwanger, June 19, 1941, in: Lion FeuchtwangeriArnold Zweig, 40 Idem, Warum die deutschen Juden {ielen, AZA, 1398. Briefwechsel, IQH-I'H8. ed. Harotd von '}" '<1'1;:;;;::;:: egg m;c: d4t4kU At;; .. '!~"'i'"
144 AD! GORDON ARNOLD ZWEIG'S STRUGGLE WITH POLITICAL PASSIONS 145 the correct response: that a democrat has the duty to prevent immature Moving beyond these entrenched positions, and focusing rather on the people from destroying the institutions established for and by mature centrality of his notions of political passions and of the affectivity of the people. And that there is a right to imprison a criminal and to institution masses, this essay has offered a new reading of Zweig's intellectual and alize the mentally ill. These are the rights of men that we allow them.«44 political biography. Surprisingly, underneath Zweig's dramatic ideological His accentuated critique of the Massendemokratie is reminiscent not only of conversions - in Verdun and the Ober-Ost, in exile and during the Holo liberal thinkers (Ortega y Gasset, Benda) but even more predominantly of caust, in Haifa and East Berlin a continuity emerges: an almost coherent contemporafleous conservative thinkers, and it also exposes a surprisingly political idealist, much aware of his precarious position in a dangerous and \ I coherent element of his political worldview. Zweig's political affinities were violent world whose underlying structure is based upon the political passions repeatedly transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century. A pre of the masses. In such a world he found his calling as a politically engaged war anti-socialist became a non-Marxist socialist in the 19l0S and later, in the intellectual, opposing the vox populi in the endless - and indeed hopeless _ I 1930S, increasingly embraced the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. Yet pursuit of a world led by political reason. through all these changes, even as he grew increasingly sensitized to the plight of the proletariat and adopted its cause, Zweig remained apprehensive of the masses. As he was confronted with a series of inconceivable catastro phes and crises - the Great War, the rise of Nazism, exile from Germany, and World War II - Zweig's apprehension seems quite understandable. The spec ter of the irrational masses and their political passions, in turn, shaped from the very beginning Zweig's self-understanding as an intellectual and seemed to have provided his sense of political raison d'etre. Moreover, his often overlooked theses about the danger inherent in democracy, and the need to tame with force the political passion of the irrational masses, may explain even more than his social sensibilities (what Fritz Raddatz called his »love of justice«)45 - why he returned precisely to the Soviet occupation zone. Maybe, a few years after the Holocaust Zweig felt safer in a regime that would keep the German vox populi in check. Research into Zweig's vita and opera has thus far focused on the fascinat ing though elusive question of his affinities, and the shifts therein. All too often scholars have portrayed him as oscillating between two poles, between his Jewishness and his Germanness, between his bourgeois sensibilities and his socialism, depicting an engagement with one pole as counteracting and limiting the other. Even the titles of some biographies convey this pattern: one book touted »aJewish-German author's fate told from a Jewish perspec tive,« while another's title counters with a proclamation that »it is all about Germany.«46 However, these dimensions in Zweig's biography were never mutually exclusive, but rather often mutually constitutive.
44 Arnold Zweig to the General Assembly of the League of the Rights of Men, AZA, 1200. 45 Fritz]. Raddatz, Arnold Zweig und die Liebe zur Gerechtigkeit, in: Die Zeit, January 28, [999, online: Politische Leidenschaften Zur Verkniipfung von Macht, Emotion und Vernunft in Deutschland Herausgegeben von Jose Brunner Sonderdruck WALLSTEIN VERLAG .'