"""" 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.