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 ArnoldZweig (1887- 196$) 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 particularlythe bourgeois intelligentsia, and the manner in which it can transcend itsideological crises. He walked the path away from idealism, from Zionismand utopian socialism, to materialism, proletarian internationalism andMarxism, and proved himself as a humanist and as an educator of thepeople. <<

This depiction is not only teleological but also glosses over some of the mostfascinating and essential elements in Zweig’s political career, which thisarticle would like to address. Given Zweig’s importance and the crude natureof this narrative, it is quite surprising that it has never been sufficiently challenged. Many have countered the story of the >>Communist Arnold Zweig<<with that of the>>Jewish Arnold Zweig,<< but important as their contributionswere, they did very little to reassess his overall political career.2

This essay will therefore detail his political career offering a dramaticallydifferent interpretation to the teleological one posed above. It complementsZweig’s undeniable political transformation — from Jewish to >>general<< politics, and from anti-socialism to Marxism-Leninism — with his constant apprehension of the masses and their political passions. This unrelenting fear ofthe irrational and suggestible nature and conduct of the demos characterizedZweig’s evolving understanding of politics, and his own political role in allhis various polities: in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, in Zionism and the

i Eberhard Hilscher, Arnold Zweig. Leben und Werk (= Schriftsteller der Gegenwart22), LEast] Berlin i 985, 174. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations have been translated by the author.

2 Manuel Wiznitzer, Arnold Zweig. Das Leben eines deutsch-jüdischen Schriftstellers, Königstein im Taunus 1983; Sigrid Thielking, Auf dem Irrweg ins >>NeueKanaan<<? Palästina und der Zionismus im Werk Arnold Zweigs vor dem Exil,Frankfurt a.M. 1990; Arie Wolf, Grö1e und Tragik Arnold Zweigs. Em jüdischdeutsches Dichterschicksal in jüdischer Sicht, London 1991.

Yishv (the Jewish community in Palestine), as well as in the German Democratic Republic. These notions of political passions and dangerous masseschallenge, if not contradict completely, the traditional view of Zweig’s political biography. His notion of >>political passions,.< which underlay hisintellectual career, was obviously opposed to his developing notion of >>political reason<< and bore a great resemblance to the ideas conveyed by JulienBenda in his Trahison des Clercs (1927).3 Zweig’s apprehension of the irrational political passions — virtually ignored by previous scholarship — holds thekey to a full and nuanced understanding of his political career.

World War I as Object Lesson

Arnold Zweig’s literary career began on the eve of World War I, in the framework of a younger generation of central European spiritual Zionists, motivated by and focused on the dilemmas and identity crises of what Kurt Blumenfeld has called a >post-assimilatory generation.<<4 Zweig was no strangerto these dilemmas, but his Zionism had a constant catastrophic elementwhich distinguished him from his coevals. His >Jewish question< was primarily defined by external threats of a hostile, irrational, dangerous society,and, unlike that of his peers, his Zionism was always motivated by the anti-Semitism that he had experienced in his childhood. His earlier works — suchas Aufzezchnungen über erne famihe Klopfer and Allah (both from 1911)—

discussed anti-Semitic exclusion and persecution, in all their violence, socialaggression and psychosocial impact.5

With the outbreak of the war, Zweig enlisted in the German war propaganda effort as the author of a notoriously jingoistic booklet Die Bestie,which would haunt him for years to come.6 As a soldier he served for yearson various fronts, including more than a year in the inferno of Verdun. Therehe experienced firsthand the wartime rise in German anti-Semitism, whichculminated in the infamous Judenzahlung.7 Zwcig spent the end of the war

3 Benda’s book is almost equally critical of race, nation and class political passionsand the subordination of the intellectuals to them. The book was arguably evenmore critical of communism than it was of nationalism. Julien Benda, The Treasonof the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, New York 1969.

4 Kurt Blumenfeld/Hans Tramer, Erlebte Judenfrage. Em Vierteljahrhundert deutscher Zionismus, Stuttgart 1962, 3. This generation is often dubbed second-generation Zionists<< in the scholarship. Jehuda Reinharz, Three Generations of GermanZionism, in:Jcrusalem Quarterly 9/I (1978), 9 5-110.

This would become even clearer in his 1914 drama, Ritualmord in Ungarn. JiidischeTragàdie in fünf Aufzügen, Berlin 1914. This drama — which marked Zweig’s firstbreakthrough, and awarded him the prestigious Kleist Prize — was based on the t8$zTiszaeszlár blood libel, but echoed also the 1913 Beilis trial.

6 Arnold Zweig, Die Bestic. Erzählungen, Munich 1914.

7 Zweig, like many others, was shocked by the German state’s decision to respondto anti-Semitic allegations of Jewish men shirking frontline service by conducting

in the military-occupied eastern territories, the so-called Ober-Ost. The ruthless occupation policies and practices Zweig witnessed there further radicalized his critique of the nature of the German state.8 Much of east European

Jewry now lived under German occupation, and his encounter with them— always connected to his views on the German state and the German Jews —

left a lasting mark.Taken together, his war experiences had a formative effect, and Zweig

returned from the war a politically engaged intellectual. From 1917 he repeatedly mentioned a plan to write a vengeful political book that wouldexpose the true nature of the German war.9 In a café in Kaunas in the fall ofthat year, an officer told Zweig about the execution of a Russian prisoner ofwar — whose innocence was clear to all — by the German military governmentafter a long and politically manipulated trial. This story would serve asthe material for his vengeful book: he started sketching a drama, tentativelynamed Bjuschew, after the executed prisoner. He finished writing the play —

now named Das Spiel vorn Sergeanten Gr;scha — only in the early 1920s, andbegan to rewrite it as a novel in late 1926. Published in October 1927, DerStreit urn den Sergeanten Grischa was a critically acclaimed bestseller thatchallenged the way Germans (and German books) were discussing the GreatWar and would become the cornerstone to Zweig’s magnum opus: a novelseries titled Der grofte Krzeg der weiften Manner.

The war put an end to Zweig’s anti-socialism, but not to his anti-democratic sensibilities. He was deeply influenced by the Russian Revolution— not the least because social revolution seemed to offer the only path to theend of the endless war — but his stance regarding revolution would remainambivalent at best. His socialism, manifest both in his literary work and private correspondence, was Gustav Landauer’s and not Lenin’s. Already in hisOstjüdische Antlitz — written even prior to the war’s end — Zweig rejectedcommunism as dictatorial, violent and bloody. He ridiculed and abhorred its>terror out of goodness and bloodshed out of wise compassion.<<’° He was

the >Jewish census.< The census humiliated the Jewish soldiers — especially themanyfallen — and legitimized as plausible the anti-Semitic slander. It was an unforgivable breach of trust.

$ For an excellent study of the Ober-Ost and its policies, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicious, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and GermanOccupation in World War I, Cambridge and New York 2000. Liulevicious alsodiscusses Zweig’s writing about the Ober-Ost.

9 >>Ich will Ilinen nur sagen, daI das ganze Heer, von der hintersten Etappe bis zumvordersten Graben, von der giftigsten und niedrigsten rnoralischen Fàulnisstoffendurchseucht ist, und daI ich eines Tages mit einem viellecht tuchlosen und unerhörten Buch die Wahrhcit gestaken verde. Als Rache, das leugne ich nicht [...]<:Arnold Zweig, letter to Agness Hess, quoted in Georg Wenzel, Arnold Zweig 1887-1968. Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, Berlin and Weimar 1978, 78.

io Arnold Zweig, Das ostjüdische Antlitz. Zu zweiundfiinfzig Zeichnungen von Her-mann Struck, Berlin 1920 (quoted from The Face of East European Jewry, trans.

drawn to a different idea of revolution: a nonviolent, introspective one. Hisqualms regarding the Soviet Union oniy intensified throughout the 1920s.”

The New German Anti-Semitism and the Making of Caliban

At the time Zweig began this lifelong Grzscha project, he also embarked on aparallel yet lesser-known one, which helped shape his political worldview:an attempt to systematically analyze the wartime and postwar German anti-Semitism in terms of mass psychology and political passions. This projectalso began in 1917— less than a year after the infamous Judenzahlung — andripened into a book exactly ten years later. The first stage of the project wasZweig’s 1917 debate with völkzsch thinker Max Hildebert Boehm followingthe latter’s wartime statements about German Jews,’2 and the series of articles about >>the anti-Semitic wave<< flooding postwar Germany that Zweigbegan publishing in the Weltbühne in April 1919)3

In the summer of 1920, his anti-Semitism project moved to a second phasein a much longer series of articles entitled >>Contemporary German AntiSemitism<< in Martin Buber’s periodical Der Jude. In the opening essay ofthat series, Zweig claimed that for Jews, anti-Semitism was a >‘third-rateproblem< only — subordinate to the identity crisis of Western Jews and thechallenges of the construction of the national home in Palestine. For Germany, however, anti-Semitism was an existential problem. It was a symptomof a society in denial of its own defeat, out of touch with reality and captiveto its self-made myths. And in this sense it was ultimately a symptom of adeeply non-sovereign state.’4 Zweig saw in postwar Germany patterns that

Noah William Isenberg; illustrations by Hermann Struck, Berkeley, CA 2004,

‘Is).

it Idem, Macht oder Freiheit, in: Die Weltbülrne, November 25, 1930, 784-787.12 Idem, Jude und Europaer. Entgegnung an Max Hildebert Boehm, in: Der Jude

2/1-2 (1917), 21-28; idem,Juden und Deutsche (Em Nachwort an M. H. Boehm),in: Der Jude 2/3 (1917), 204-207. The main essay Zweig was alluding to was MaxHildebert Boehm, Vom jiidisch-deutschen Geist, in: Preufltscbe Jahrbucher 162

(October-December 1915), 404-420, in which he attacked Hermann Cohen’snotion of a natural German-Jewish bond, while praising the young (Buberian)Zionists, including Zweig, as >>dignified Jews< and natural allies in his struggleagainst Cohen. For a discussion of the impact of that essay in Zionist circles, seeUlrich Sieg, Judische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kriegserfahrungen, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuorientierung, Berlin 200;, 237ff.

13 Arnold Zweig, Die Antisemitische Welle 1. Groteskantisemitismus und Mittelstand, in: Wettbühne, April 3, 1919; idem, Die Antisemitische Welle 11. Das antisemitische Problem, in: Weltbühne, April io, 1919; idem, Die Antisemitische WelleIII. Das antisemitische Problem, in: Weltbühne, April 17, 1919.

14 Idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus [als deutsche Angelegenheit], in: DerJude 5/2 (1920-192 i), 65-76.

were similar to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has recently named the >>cultureof defeat.<’

This introductory essay sharpened claims he had made in the Weltbühnea year before, clearly situating anti-Semitism in the context of mass psychology (rather than, say, religious or historical phenomena). It also containedthe key terms that would serve him for many years to come. One of these wasthe Freudian term >>repression<< — the defense mechanism that transfersthreatening desires and impulses from the realm of the conscious to the unconscious. Contemporaneous anti-Semitism, according to Zweig, was asymptom of German repression of war memories, whose patterns and scalewere not adaptive but pathological, generating a hazardous distortion ofthe perception of reality. The other terms — Zweig’s own neologisms — werederived from his distinction between two major political passions: the >discriminating affect<< (Differenzaffekt) and >>centralizing affect<< (Zentralitätsaffekt), which he saw as central political drives in any society. The >>discrimmating affect< was, as Bart Philipsen and Georgi Verbeck succinctly describedit, >>an archaic, instinctive aversion and rejection of cultural otherness rooted(as Zweig argued) in the collective psyche of an ethnic group.’6 Zweig sawit as a universal mechanism of social delineation. But it too could deteriorateinto pathological patterns — one of which was anti-Semitism. The counterpart of the >>discriminating affect<< was the >>centralizing affect,<< defined byZweig as >>the drive that wants every group of people to believe that theworld revolves around them,<< an >>intoxicating seductive instinct, withoutwhich no fight, no war, no collective effort or achievement would comeabout.<’7

The following articles in this series on >Contemporary German Anti-Semitism<< expanded on the problem, and all too often went off on tangents, butthey never transcended this analytical framework. In the eighth article, forexample he described postwar counterrevolution and anti-Semitism as a typeof >>inward<< aggression: .>German nationalism before the war, and especially

15 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning,and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase, New York 2003 (Die Kultur der Niederlage.Dci amerikanische Süden i$6, Frankreich 1871, Deutschland 1918, Berlin 2001).

i6 Bart Philipsen/Georgi Verbeck, Caliban in the Weimar Republic: Arnold Zweig onAntisemitism, in: Nadia Lie/Theo D’haen (eds.), Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1997, i64f. Very similar notionswere conveyed by Primo Levi in the preface to his Se qilesto ë un uorno: >>manypeople — many nations — can find themselves holding [...j that >every stranger is anenemy.< For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection;it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of asystem of reason. But when this does come about [...] then, at the end of the chain,there is the Lager [the Nazi Camp].< Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The NaziAssault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf, New York 1996, 9.

17 Arnold Zweig, Caliban, oder, Politik und Leidenschaft. Versuch über die menschlichen Gmppenleidenschaften dargetan am Antisemitismus, Berlin 2000 [1927], II.

during it, was imperialist, aggressive outwards and inwards; today it is [...]aggressive inwards, that is — culturally, and in the absence of other objects —

anti_Semitic.<<t8Zweig ultimately edited these articles into a unified text — the 1927 book

Caliban, oder, Potitzk und Leidenschaft. Versuch über die menschlzchen Gruppenleidenschaften dargetan am Antisemitismus. Indeed, the famous Grischaand the virtually forgotten Catiban were twin projects, which began at thesame time, ripened slowly and came to full fruition at roughly the same time.’9Cabban is named, of course, after the famous monster in Shakespeare’s Tempest, the treacherous servant. Caliban, that >>thing of darkness,< conspiredagainst his master not for true freedom but for a better position under a newpotential master, the drunkard Stefano. The choice of title, then, illustratesnot only anti-Semitism’s folly and monstrosity but also the way in which itis abused by the powerful. Shakespeare’s Caliban, Zweig wrote, >>was thepersonification of instinct, particularly of my >discriminating affect itself.Caliban lived beneath good and evil — a guy to be pitied, despite his howlingfury. Lust, anger, hatred, revenge, fear, superstitious worshiping of the fetish,and a mass of crude power controls him. No doubt, he was the discriminatingaffect, confirming what I had discerned in the soul of the group.<2°

))Vater Freud

On March i8, 1927, Zweig requested Sigmund Freud’s >>permission to dedicate my book Catiban {...] to you,<< stressing that >>without your system ofthought, your basic ideas and your new principles< Catiban would not have

i8 Idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus als jüdische Angelegenheit [SchluJ,in: DerJude 5/Il (1920-192 i), 621-633, here 622. The fourth part of the discussion,for exampte, elucidated well the distinction between a model in which this affect issublimated and a pattern — such as the one in postwar Germany — in which thisaffect dominates the political agenda. See idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus als jüdische Angelegenheit [III], in: DerJude 5/5 (1920-1921), 264-280. In theseventh article Zweig claimed that the subtler the difference, the fiercer the >idiscriminating affect<< — similar to what Freud would describe later as >>the narcissism ofminor differences.<< See idem, Der heutige deutsche Antisemitismus als jüdischeAngelegenheit [VI], in: DerJude 5/10, 557-565. Freud addressed this notion in his1918 The Taboo of Virgintty, and again in his 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysts of the Ego, before naming it >>the narcissism of minor differences<< in his 1930

Ctvilization and Its Discontents.19 Cahban’s publication year is noteworthy also because of Benda’s Trahison des

Clercs, which appeared that very year and offered one of the most famous andelaborate discussions of the concept of political passions, >iowing to which men riseup against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions andnational passions<<. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (In. 3), 3.

20 Zweig, Caliban (fn. 17), ii.

been possible.21 As a matter of fact, Caliban was more influenced by GustaveLe Bon, and Zweig’s knowledge of Freud’s work was still quite limited at thetime.22 Nonetheless, Freud was the great mentor Zweig sought throughouthis life, and his dedication of the book was the beginning of a fascinatingcorrespondence between the two men. Zweig’s affinity to him was deeperthan his earlier affinity to Martin Buber and continued well beyond the psychoanalyst’s death. From the mid-192os Zweig wrote about the need to usepsychoanalytical principles, and especially Freudian theories of mass psychology, to analyze political phenomena, and even to chart policies basedon them. His >>Freudian politics<< differed clearly from materialistic politics,based on economy and means of production, on interests and a rational progression of history. In the inteiwar period it was in Freud’s work — not inMarxist materialism or Soviet political culture — that Zweig saw the potentialfor a deep revolution of the political arena.23 >Freudian politicsc< provide thekey to understanding Zweig’s claim regarding repressed German war memories, and his theories that irrational political drives and passions determinethe political sphere, above and beyond reason, and even beyond consideration of clear interests.

In the summer of 1932, for example, Zweig lectured before the GermanAuthors’ Association, the SDS (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), onthe affectivity of the masses, their childish conduct and their destructivedrive. Wanting to avoid the hard realities of life, Zweig claimed, the massesdeveloped an uncritical belief in the leader, dethroned reason and set in itsstead >>the mystical force of the blood.< In a time like this — he urged his colleagues — the author’s role is to bring the repressed to light.24 Again: the intellectuals’ raison d’ëtre is not only to counter the irrationality of the masses,but also to insist on the possibility and absolute necessity of their educability(Erziehbarkeit). Zweig’s harsh critique of the Soviet Union in the late WeimarRepublic conveyed similar notions: >1 have reached [...J the shocking conclusion that only people who have been educated to live together are fit forcollective life.<25

21 Ernst L. Freud (ed.), The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, trans.Elaine Robson-Scott and William Robson-Scott, New York 1970, I.

22 Even at the end of 1932, for exampLe, Zweig mentioned in passing that he bad notyet read either Freud’s 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis or his 1921

Group Psychology and the Analysis ofthe Ego. Zweig to Freud, December ii, 1932,

in: ibid., i f.23 For Zweig’s perception of Freud’s work as >revolutionary,< see his letter to Freud,

September 8, 1930, in: ibid., ioff.24 David R. Midgley, Arnold Zweig. Zu Werk und Wandlung 1927-1948, Königstein

im Taunus 1980, 751.25 Arnold Zweig, >>Macht oder Freiheit,<< in: Die Weltbühne, November 25, 1930,

784-787, here 785.

Interestingly enough, his correspondence with Freud makes amply clearthat Zweig saw himself as a member of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud,though admiring much of Zweig’s literary work, expressed doubts regardingZweig’s (often vulgar-Freudian) theoretical essays. Although Zweig oftenhad brilliant insights, he tended to be a dilettante essayist, and this was especially evident in his >>studies<< on the psychic infrastructure of politics. These>>studies<< were, to quote George Mosse, always attempts at >.exorcising theirrational.<<26 Zweig revealed his thoughts about the political potential ofpsychoanalysis, indeed its mission in the realm of politics, in a late 1930 letterto Freud:

>4 would like to write [...] about your relationship to Nietzsche. To me itseems that you have achieved everything that Nietzsche intuitively felt tobe his task, without his being really able to achieve it [...]. Analysis hasreduced the will to power to what lies at its basis. [...] Now it would besplendid if you were to make a study of the real >will to power,< that is tosay the politicians’ lust for power in the sociological struggle, and if youwere to pursue it [...] from its conscious ideological stage right down tothe depths. Then the cycle of the Freud-Nietzsche relationship would becomplete.<<27

De Vriendt Goes Home: Political Passions in Our Midst

The violent political passions Zweig detected in Germany (and also in theSoviet Union) stood in stark contrast to the idealized way in which he depicted east European Jewry (in his Ostjüdische Antlitz) and Zionism (in hisNeues Kanaan).28 The Jewish polity depicted in his texts, while not withoutits flaws, was led by ideas. This changed following his first visit to Palestinein 1932. >>How strange this tragically mad land you have visited must haveseemed to you,< Freud wrote to his young friend, not failing to state that>>Palestine has never produced anything but religions, sacred frenzies, presumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearance by means ofthe inner world of wishful thinking. <<29 During his visit, Zweig had intendedto rewrite his Caliban, but instead he started writing a short novel aboutthe assassination of Dr. Jacob Israel de Haan (i$$ 1-1924). De Haan’s life anddeath were the stuff great novels are made of: he was a Dutch Jewish poetand journalist, who revealed his homosexuality through his writing. He em-

26 George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, Bloomington, IN 1985, 50.

27 Zweig to Freud, December 2, 1930, in: Letters (fn. 21), 22f.

2$ Zweig/Struck, Das ostjüdische Antlitz (fn. io); Arnold Zweig, Das neue Kanaan.Eine Untersuchung iiber Land und Geist zu i Steinzeichnungen von HermannStruck, Bertin 1925. In Benda’s Trahison des Clercs (In. 3), by contrast, Zionismloomed large in his discussion of political passions.

29 freud to Zweig, May 8, 1932, in: Letters (In. 21), 40.

igrated to Palestine as a Zionist in 1919, but there he grew disillusioned withZionism and became one of its ultra-Orthodox (haredi) opponents. >>Thetheme has been in my mind for a long time, Zweig wrote to Freud, as hefound himself writing this new book, in which de Haan was renamed >deVriendt.<< Zweig’s appropriation of de Haan’s story took on a new and unexpected dimension as he wrote:

>>For a month I sketched away [...] only to discover some ten days laterthere was a flaw at the most vital spot — de Haan was not murdered byArabs at all, as I had believed for years, but by a Jew, a political opponent,a radical Zionist [...]. I realize now what a frightful blow to me this was— at first I did not take it in. I laid a new foundation for my work; this newfact was far better than the old; it compelled me to see things accuratelywithout pro-Jewish prejudice and to examine the political murder of oneJew by another exactly as though it were a political murder in Germany

And indeed the Calzban project seems to have spilled into De Vriendt kehrthelm, as Zweig named his new critical book. The murder of De Vriendtstemmed from the same political passions that inflamed German postwaranti-Semitism and the Arab riots of 1929. That was the very reason Zweigsituated the murder — which took place in 1924 — in the context of the Arabriots and the Zionist reaction to them. The dense book was saturated withpassions and dark drives, portrayed in a noticeably Freudian manner: DeVriendt’s own passions, as he is torn between his sexual drives and whatZweig called his Gottestrieb — his drive to divinity;3’ the vengeful plans of theArab relatives of de Vriendt’s young lover; and, of course, the politicalpassions of de Vriendt’s Zionist opponents. So, for example, the hatred of themurderer — a quintessential diaspora Jew named Mendel Glass — for his victim is masterfully linked to his Oedipal rage, patricidal wishes toward his eastEuropean father, and his repressive religious observance.

De Vriendt exposes the tragic and inherently violent nature of nationbuilding. Its violence — just like German nationalism in Zweig’s writing afterthe war — was never, and could never be, directed only outward. Zweig letone of the protagonists explain the logic of the assassination offhandedly:>>It’s just as simple a process as the rising of the moon. [...] and do you knowwhy it’s happening again today? We are becoming a nation, and that is theproof. A nation treats its children pretty brutally — it lets them be killed inmasses, perish in degradation, and starve; as witness the history of the world,latest section.<<32

30 Ibid.,4if.31 Zweig, letter to Martin Buber, July i, 1932, in: Jewish National and University

Library Jerusalem, Martin Buber-Archive, Arc. Ms. Var. 305, Het 930/4.

32 Arnold Zweig, De Vriendt kehrt heim, Berlin 1932 (quoted from: De Vriendt GoesHome, trans. Eric Sutton, New York 1933, 200).

Like many central European Zionists, Zweig saw Zionism not only as aJewish national movement but also as a moral alternative to the path takenby other central European nationalisms of its day. The realization that theNew Canaan — which he had previously eulogized as an idealist utopia ofsorts — was also subject to the same political passions should not to be takenlightly. Viewing Zionism as a movement driven by political passions, Zweighad a growing awareness that his own position within the movement was aprecarious one. Zweig thus found himself to be an outsider also in the Zionist polity. More than anything else this realization marks Zweig’s break fromZionism.

))Wzthout Any false Hopes: In Palestine, 1933-194 8

Dc Vriendt appeared only a few months prior to Hitler’s rise to power inGermany, which forced Zweig to emigrate. After the initial months in France,the Zweig family decided to move to Haifa, Palestine. The complexities of hisdecision to move to a polity he had just criticized so harshly in his latest bookcannot be fully explored here.33 Some of his letters expressed nothing shortof enthusiasm about the planned move to Palestine, while the entry in hispocket diary upon arrival to Haifa conveyed the opposite: >>In Palestine: in aforeign land< (in der fremde).34 Whatever his thoughts and considerationswere, Zweig surely did not expect at the end of 1933 that he would stay fifteen long years in Haifa. Though his conflict with the Zionist Yzshuv wouldlater intensify, he did seem to find some kind of relief precisely in his estrangement from his new setting. In his first letter to Freud from Palestine,for example, he wrote:

>>In the center of Haifa, smoking my last French cigar, at last I can settledown to write to you. [...] I am unusually well, to give you some quicknews about myself. All the depressions which have often tortured me soterribly in recent years have vanished. The Fatherland, the Father State,the economic burden, concern about the preservation of my property — allthis has dropped away from me and with it have gone many tensions andcompulsive ideas. I don’t care anymore about >the land of my fathers.< Ihaven’t got any more Zionistic illusions either. I view the necessity ofliving here among the Jews without enthusiasm, without any false hopesand even without the desire to scoff.<<5

33 I have explored this extensively in Adi Gordon, In Palestine, in a Foreign land:The Weekly >>Orient< between >>German Exile<< and the >>Yekke Immigration,<Jerusalem 2004 [Hebrew].

34 Quoted in: Jost Hermand, Arnold Zweig mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bildokumenten, Reinbek 1990, 74.

3 Zweig to Freud, January 21, 1933, in: Letters (fn. 21),

In spite of his hardships as an author exiled from his language, his constantcomplaints, his ideological objections to the Yzshuv and his plans for furthermigration, Zweig did remain in Palestine until the summer of 1948. However, the longer Zweig stayed, the clearer it became that he was not strikingroot in Palestine — not even as a marginal and relentless voice of the opposition. This became amply clear in the early 1940S when Zweig co-edited theGerman-language weekly Orient, which counter to its proclamations was apart of the Exttpresse (German press in exile), and a forum for many non-Zionist immigrants to Palestine (such as Louis Furenberg).

Scholars have tended to exaggerate the significance of Zweig’s criticalstatements vis-à-vis the Yishuv and to attribute to him an alternative brandof Zionism, which was not tolerated and led to his eventual break from Zionism and emigration from Palestine. An in-depth examination of his writings,however, reveals hardly anything more than faultfinding. He arrived as anexile of sorts and seems to have been set on returning to Europe. Palestinehad little to offer him, and he, in turn, had little to offer it.

Even as he grew closer to materialist Marxism, Zweig’s political world-view — regarding both world politics and Jewish politics — never abandonedthe theory of >>pohtical passions< he had developed in Galiban. In a draftfrom that time, titled >>The Immaterial Fundamentals of Politics,< Zweigdescribed a synthesis of three competing elements in politics: materialism(>>Die materiellen Grundlagen<), idealism (>>Das Reich der Ideen<), andpsyche (>>Das Reich der Triebe<<), identical to the political passions and theaffects of his Calzban project. >>And so it is there, where these three components of political life concur in the same direction, that the greatest political event and forces come into being. <3 Each component, then, had a certainautonomy, and materialist monism was rejected. True to form, Zweig wroteabout >>The Political Passions at Palestine’s Substructure<<:

>>It is part of human — and hence also Jewish — shame and pride, not todiscuss publicly passions and their impact. All in life is ascribed to ideologies and other intellectual constructs — to ideas and genial inspiration.Prejudice — as one is accustomed to call the impacts of passions — is indeedsaid to play a role among other peoples and groups, such as the prejudiceagainst the Jews. But among the Jews themselves, and especially in Palestine, no political prejudices are said to be found. Unfortunately it does notand could not be that way, Jews are human, and humans, as soon as theyappear as members of a group, act with collective passions (Gruppenleidenschaften). <<37

36 Arnold Zweig, Die immateriellen Grundlagen der Politik, undated draft, catalogedas >>1934-1935,<< in: Literature Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, ArnoldZweig Archive (hereafter AZA), 1264.Idern, Die politischen Leidenschaften im Grundbau Palästinas [zi July 1936], in:ibid., 1269.

Democracy Redefined, Germany Revisited:from Haifa to East Berlin

Parallel to Zweig’s estrangement from the Yishuv, he unmistakably movedever closer to Marxism and the Soviet Union. To a large extent the two processes were also linked to one another. The crisis of 1933 already forced him— a vocal Weimar critic of the Soviet Union — to overcome his previousapprehensions. On April i, 1933 — the day of the Nazi nationwide anti-Jewish boycott, which marked the beginning of Nazi anti-Jewish policy — Zweigwrote a note to himself, under the title >>The Jews<<:

>>(i) They [the Jews] do not recognize their circumstance — that they areupheld by the left, while they are moving to the right; (2) they do notrecognize their foes, nor that the ruling class does not protect them; ()they do not recognize themselves — that their >chosenness< is a misinterpretation of their history and mission.<<

His conclusion was that >‘only anti-fascism and democracy could guaranteeJewish existence, everywhere — also within our midst. Let’s not fool ourselves! No fantasies in politics ! <<38 Anti-fascism, of course, should be understood here as the self-designated title of the communist-led Popular Front.39

In Palestine Zweig continued his class-based reinterpretation of the >>Jewish question.<< In a piece from the mid-193os entitled >>Why the German JewsFell,<< he depicted contemporaneous German anti-Semitism as the revenge of>>the spirit of old Prussia<c against the Jews whose emancipation was historically bound with the initial corrosion of >>the hegemony of the Prussian bureaucracy and old military caste.<<4° An even clearer mark of Marxist reinterpretation can be seen in the new volumes Zweig added while in Palestine tohis Grischa cycle of novels (Erzzehung vor Verdun, 1935; Emsetzung einesKonzgs, 1937).

However, the focal point of Zweig’s political writing at the time was notsocial injustices, nor the lot of the proletariat. It was rather focused — andmost apparently so from 1938 — on the lessons of the collapse of >>weak<<democracies, and primarily the demise of the Weimar republic. In the early1940S he addressed these very questions in his novel Das Bell von Wandsbek,but already in early 1938, influenced by events in Europe, he developed hisold concepts of the role of irrational political passions in modern mass so-

3$ Quoted in: Hermand, Arnold Zweig (fn. 34), 72 f. (original in AZA, 926).

39 He expressed the same notion in the first book he wrote in exile: >The GermanJews were oblivious to their state. [...] They did not realize, and still do not realize,that they [...] are proletarians — proletarians with a thick layer of bourgeois culture.< Arnold Zweig, Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit. Em Versuch, ed. Kurt Patzold, Leipzig 1991 10.

40 Idem, Warum die deutschenJuden fielen, AZA, 139$.

cieties into 13 theses about >>strong dernocracies,<< whose main points werearticulated most succinctly in the following six theses:

i. >Only democracy enables the creation of a system, of a life-structureand of a pattern of thought, out of the drives of human coexistence.<<

2. >>[...] a precondition to the realization of democratic ends is the subjugation of all to reason and its rules.<<

. >>A certain mass of power has to be reached in order to force decencyand maintain it.<

4. >>[...] political life is mass life, i.e. the playground of passions.<<

io. Whoever shapes the passions >>affirms the assumption of democraticlife, and gains his right to partake in the [democratic] game<<. Whoeverdoes not, has no right to influence the democratic game.

ii. >>[...] democracy is not absolute freedom for all, but the maintenanceof a framework that will enable maximal freedom for democrats bycurtailing the freedom of action of democracy’s opponents [...].<<

The final thesis was simply the concluding cry >>long live the strongdemocracy ! <<4’

But did Zweig’s idea of >strong democracy<< merely convey the principleof a >>defensive<c or >>militant democracy<< (wehrhafte, streitbare Demokratie)along the lines of Karl Loewenstein or Karl Mannheim? Or was he actuallymore influenced by a Jacobin ideal and Soviet model, leaning toward whatJacob Talmon named a >totalitarian democracy< ?42 Zweig’s correspondencewith Lion Feuchtwanger hints that the latter may be the case, as he proclaimed (even prior to Operation Barbarossa) that >>at its heart of heartsRussia is already a democratic state.’x43 Furthermore, even when writing forthe Tel Aviv Assembly of the League for the Rights of Men, Zweig did nothesitate to call for the curtailment of rights in the name of democracy:

>Democracy is based on the recognition of the rights of men, which fascism, in all its forms, denies. This is a clear distinction we must accountfor. Hitlerite barbarism grew and flourished because it claimed that itsopponents, qua democrats, must tolerate all opinions and defend [theright to express them], even if they reject the rights of men and attack thetenets of democracy. Unfortunately it was only much later that it reached

41 [Der Sinn der Dernokratie heift, demokratisches Leben zu ermoglichcn], untitledand undated document, AZA, ii88.

42 Karl Mannheim, Mao and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in ModernSocial Structure, New York 1940; Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of TotalitarianDemocracy, London iz; Karl Loewenstein, Political Power and the Governmental Process, [Chicago] 1957.

43 Zweig to Feuchtwanger, June 19, 1941, in: Lion Feuchtwanger/Arnold Zweig,Briefwechsel, 1933-1958, ed. Harold von Hofe, vol. c, Berlin 1984, 230.

the correct response: that a democrat has the duty to prevent immaturepeople from destroying the institutions established for and by maturepeople. And that there is a right to imprison a criminal and to institutionalize the mentally ill. These are the rights of men that we allow them.<<44

His accentuated critique of the Massendemokratie is reminiscent not only ofliberal thinkers (Ortega y Gasset, Benda) but even more predominantly ofcontemporaneous conservative thinkers, and it also exposes a surprisinglycoherent element of his political worldview. Zweig’s political affinities wererepeatedly transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century. A prewar anti-socialist became a non-Marxist socialist in the 1920S and later, in the193 os, increasingly embraced the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. Yetthrough all these changes, even as he grew incleasingly sensitized to theplight of the proletariat and adopted its cause, Zweig remained apprehensiveof the masses. As he was confronted with a series of inconceivable catastrophes and crises — the Great War, the rise of Nazism, exile from Germany, andWorld War II — Zweig’s apprehension seems quite understandable. The specter of the irrational masses and their political passions, in turn, shaped fromthe very beginning Zweig’s self-understanding as an intellectual and seemedto have provided his sense of political raison d’ftre. Moreover, his oftenoverlooked theses about the danger inherent in democracy, and the needto tame with force the political passion of the irrational masses, may explain— even more than his social sensibilities (what Fritz Raddatz called his >>loveof justice<<)45 — why he returned precisely to the Soviet occupation zone.Maybe, a few years after the Holocaust Zweig felt safer in a regime thatwould keep the German voxpoputi in check.

Research into Zweig’s vita and opera has thus far focused on the fascinating though elusive question of his affinities, and the shifts therein. All toooften scholars have portrayed him as oscillating between two poles, betweenhis Jewishness and his Germanness, between his bourgeois sensibilities andhis socialism, depicting an engagement with one pole as counteracting andlimiting the other. Even the titles of some biographies convey this pattern:one book touted >>aJewish-German author’s fate told from a Jewish perspective,<< while another’s title counters with a proclamation that >>it is all aboutGermany.<<46 However, these dimensions in Zweig’s biography were nevermutually exclusive, but rather often mutually constitutive.

Arnold Zweig to the General Assembly of the League of the Rights of Men, AZA,1200.

4 Fritz J. Raddatz, Arnold Zweig und die Liebe zur Gerechtigkeit, in: Die Zeit,January 28, 1999, online: <http://www.zeit.de/1999/o5/Arnold_Zweig_un&die_Liebe_zur_Gerechtigkeit>.

46 Wolf, GröIe und Tragik Arnold Zweigs (fn. 2); Wilhelm von Sternburg, UrnDeutschland geht es uns. Arnold Zweig: Die Biographie, Berlin 1998.

Moving beyond these entrenched positions, and focusing rather on thecentrality of his notions of political passions and of the affectivity of themasses, this essay has offered a new reading of Zweig’s intellectual andpolitical biography. Surprisingly, underneath Zweig’s dramatic ideologicalconversions — in Verdun and the Ober-Ost, in exile and during the Holocaust, in Haifa and East Berlin — a continuity emerges: an almost coherentpolitical idealist, much aware of his precarious position in a dangerous andviolent world whose underlying structure is based upon the political passionsof the masses. In such a world he found his calling as a politically engagedintellectual, opposing the vox popuk in the endless — and indeed hopeless —

pursuit of a world led by political reason.

Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fürdeutsche Geschichte 38

(2010)

Politische LeidenschaftenZur Verknupfung von Macht, Emotion

und Vernunft in Deutschland

Herausgegeben vonJosé Brunner

Sonderdruck

WALLSTEIN VERLAG