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Zionism Bad, Zionists ... Good? Two GDR Historical Novels As Journalism: Arnold Zweig's Traum Ist Teuer and Rudolf Hirsch's

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Zionism Bad, Zionists ... Good? Two GDR Historical Novels As Journalism: Arnold Zweig's Traum Ist Teuer and Rudolf Hirsch's Paul O’Doherty Zionism bad, Zionists ... good? Two GDR Historical Novels as Journalism: Arnold Zweig’s Traum ist teuer and Rudolf Hirsch’s Patria Israel . This paper examines the portrayal of Zionists in two novels published in the GDR by Jewish authors who had been in Palestinian exile during the Nazi period. It contrasts the differentiated approach of the novels, in which disagreements with the ideology of Zionism are set against the sympathetic portrayals of some individ- ual Zionists, with the blanket condemnations of Israel that were to be found in the media in the GDR. The literature is thus shown to have been, in a small way, a corrective to the excesses of the media, and thus to have had a function that was ‘pädagogisch’ rather than ‘staatspädagogisch’ . The paper claims that, in respect of Israel and Zionism, these two novels did indeed offer the ‘Neues und Wahres’ demanded by Christoph Hein that was so lacking in the press of the GDR. While the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was widely covered in the GDR media, the coverage was almost exclusively pro-Palestinian. Yet there was a small body of literature published in the GDR which presented a more differentiated picture. This article will investigate two such novels written by authors who were themselves Jewish and had been in Palestinian exile during the Nazi period but who came to reject Zionism: Traum ist teuer , by Arnold Zweig, and Patria Israel , by Rudolf Hirsch. I aim to show that these novels make a firm distinction between Zionism and at least some Zionists, in a way that may be seen as a corrective to journalistic excesses in the GDR. Before looking at the novels themselves, I shall first attempt to establish the literary, historical and political context in which they were published. In the Wörterbuch der Literaturwissenschaft , the GDR critic Christine Trä- ger traces the origins of the German historical novel to the Romantic period, and specifically mentions Novalis ( Heinrich von Ofterdingen , 1799/1800) and Achim von Arnim ( Die Kronenwächter , 1817/1854). 1 Authors in the GDR, she claims, turned to the historical novel in connection with the “Aneignung des humanist. Erbes”. 2 Among those she lists are Bertolt Brecht ( Die Ge- schäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar , 1949), Rosemarie Schuder ( Die Ketzer von Naumburg, 1955), Stefan Heym ( Lassalle, 1969; Der König David Bericht , 1 Christine Träger: Historischer Roman. In: Claus Träger (ed.): Wörterbuch der Literaturwissenschaft . Leipzig 1986. Pp. 215-217, here p. 216. 2 Loc. cit. 168 1972), and historical Erzählungen by Anna Seghers ( Die Hochzeit auf Haiti , 1949). This ‘appropriation of the humanist inheritance’ may be considered to have had an essentially didactic function: Fritz Martini has called it “staatspädago- gisch”.3 This use of the novel to convey to the reader the basic Marxist ideals of the state was summarised in 1973 by Rosemarie Schuder when she offered the following interpretation of the political function of the historical novel: “Habe ich die Gesetzmäß igkeiten des Klassenkampfes erfaßt, dann fügen sich die Fakten meiner Darstellung.”4 If Schuder’s definition is accepted as an accurate description of the no- velist’s brief, then there was little difference between the function of literature and the function of the press in the GDR. Yet there is little doubt that literature in general sometimes tried to subvert the ‘staatspädagogisch’ function of the media. In 1987, for instance, Christoph Hein thanked the GDR’s newspapers for indirectly promoting book sales. The press’s “Zurückhaltung in der Be- richterstattung und der verläß liche Konsens ihrer Meinungen” had led to the GDR becoming not the “Leseland” that Klaus Höpcke and others claimed it was,5 but a “Buchleseland”. GDR readers, said Hein, looked to books not just for “Unterhaltung und Geschichten”, but also for “Neues und Wahres”. 6 This statement echoes the second half of the claim made by George Bernard Shaw in 1907 that “journalism can claim to be the highest form of literature; for all the highest literature is journalism.”7 While neither novel is particularly ac- complished in literary or aesthetic terms, I propose to investigate whether either of them offered the kind of “Neues und Wahres” to which Hein refers. Traum ist teuer , which proved to be Zweig’s last novel, 8 was widely reviewed in the GDR press. Although it was not regarded necessarily as an ex- ample of his best writing, it nevertheless ran to a second edition in 1963 and a third in 1964, though a fourth and final GDR edition did not follow until 1983. The novel is set in Palestine during World War II. It is essentially the story of the gradual disillusionment of the central character, Richard Karthaus (also known as Dick Cardhouse), a Viennese doctor and ‘Schülersschü ler’ of Freud, with the Zionist ideal that he had espoused before going into Palestinian exile. 3 Fritz Martini: Über die gegenwärtigen Schwierigkeiten des historischen Erzählens. In: Fritz Martini: Literarische Form und Geschichte . Stuttgart 1984. P. 202. 4 Rosemarie Schuder: Interview (mit Helga Herting). In: Weimarer Beiträge 19 (4/1973). P. 75. 5 See Klaus Höpcke: Probe für das Leben. Literatur in einem Leseland. Halle 1982. 6 Christoph Hein: Die Zensur ist überlebt, nutzlos, paradox, menschenfeindlich, volks- feindlich, ungesetzlich und strafbar. In: Christoph Hein: Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen. Berlin 1990. Pp. 77-104, here p. 87. 7 George Bernard Shaw: Preface to The Sanity of Art . In: George Bernard Shaw: Ma- jor Critical Essays . Harmondsworth 1986. Pp. 311-318, here p. 311. 8 Arnold Zweig: Traum ist teuer . Berlin 1962. Henceforth: Zweig. .
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