By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — When Sigmund Freud learned that the Nazis in Berlin had publicly burned his books on May 10, 1933, he said: “What progress! In the Middle Ages they would have burned me themselves, now they are content to burn my books.” The return of the “Middle Ages” and the burning of the Jews was nine years away. The smoke of the book fires would become the smoke of the crematoria.
Homer in his poem Odyssey writes that Odysseus was ready to die, just to “see at least the smoke rising from his native shores in the distance.” The Latin proverb Dulcis fumus patriae – “Sweet is the smoke of the fatherland” is well known. German Jews who sought the smoke of the fatherland after May 10, 1933, decided to seek refuge outside Germany after seeing the smoke coming from the burning of books by Jewish authors.
One of the writers whose books burned in the Nazi bonfires was Arnold Zweig, a close friend of Freud, an admirer and active user of his psychoanalysis. Zweig saw his books burning, for he stood in the crowd of thousands of autodafé spectators outside the Opera House on Unter den Linden in Berlin. According to his description, the books were stacked “in bundles three meters by three meters” and “resembled carts with convicts on their way to the guillotine, […] there was mystical, somber music in a minor key. […] I was the only one in the crowd who did not sing, who did not salute as the swastika flags passed us by.” Zweig, who had recently bought a beautiful new house with a garden in Berlin’s Eichkamp neighborhood, decided that night: “Good or bad, we will leave Germany.”
Arnold Zweig was born in Groß-Glogau in 1887. He studied philology, philosophy and art history at the universities of Breslau, Munich, Göttingen, Rostock and Tübingen, but did not receive an academic degree. Literary success came to Zweig in 1915, when he was awarded the Heinrich Kleist Prize for his drama Ritual Murder in Hungary (1914), about a blood libel against Jews in the town of Tiszaeslar in 1882. On the Passover holiday, local Jews were accused of kidnapping and murdering a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Esther Szojmosi, and using her blood for ritual purposes. This was a traditional Passover accusation, but the Tiszaeslar blood libel became one of the most prominent anti-Jewish actions in Europe in the late nineteenth century.
During World War I, Zweig served in the German army. He began his journey as a German nationalist. In November 1914, he published a collection of short stories called The Monster, filled with honest and heroic Germans defending themselves against murderous Belgians. After the Battle of Verdun, Zweig became a pacifist and left-wing radical. In Sketch of My Life he wrote: “When I was drafted into World War I in 1915, I was an idealist and an individualist. In the war I learned from my own experience what is worth the camaraderie that binds people of our circle with the most diverse representatives of the working people in daily danger and in trouble.” The writer was moving away from nationalism, approaching “comradeship” and becoming a socialist.
The greatest fame brought Arnold Zweig novel The Dispute about Unter Grisha (1927), translated into many languages. The novel tells of a Russian prisoner of war unjustly convicted by a German court and executed in order to frighten German soldiers inclined to succumb to the “revolutionary temptation” of spreading the Russian Revolution to Germany.
Zweig’s colleague and friend Lyon Feuchtwanger wrote about Zweig’s development as a writer: “It was clear to Arnold Zweig from his earliest youth that he was born to be a writer. But the best “years of learning” for the writer turned out to be all the same upheavals that had to survive the German of our generation, and moreover, a Jew by blood. In the period of illusory peace and illusory order, reigning before the First World War, Arnold Zweig learned many disciplines useful to every writer. Hardly anyone learns them nowadays. But then came the First World War, and the Second World War, and the revolution, and counter-revolution, and realized in practice, fascism, and imperialism, and it forced the writer to discard all useless knowledge and intelligently use all useful.” Apparently, by “useless” knowledge Feuchtwanger means the writings of nationalists, and by “useful” knowledge he means the books of socialists.
After World War I, Zweig became a Zionist socialist. Perhaps influenced by his correspondence with Martin Buber, he considered moving to Palestine. After his visit to Palestine, on May 1, 1932, Zweig wrote to Freud: “I thought: ‘What a mistake to want to come back here! What else is left now of the Europe that I love, of this Germany that is a large part of me, of the sources of energy? […] Why didn’t I stay there, among the landscapes of Galilee or on the seashore in Tel Aviv or on the Dead Sea?”
In his correspondence with Freud (1927-1939), Zweig wrote that he lost touch with Europe when he smoked the last cigar brought from there. Relocating to Haifa in 1934, Zweig found it difficult to fit in with the Jewish population of Palestine. He was disgusted by Jewish nationalism. He did not learn Hebrew and wrote in German. He could not feel like a Jewish writer. German Jewish writers were not recognized as national writers in Germany, a German Jewish writer was not recognized as a Jewish writer by the new Jews in the country of Israel. On January 28, 1934, Freud wrote from Vienna to Zweig: “It has now come to my attention that you have been cured of your unrequited love for the imaginary country of your fathers. Such enthusiasm does not suit a man of our type.”
Zweig’s conflict with Palestinian Jews was growing. In a letter from Haifa on February 15, 1936, he describes his moods to Freud: “Something rebels in me against living in Palestine. I feel that I am in the wrong place. The world here is very small, and it is further diminished by the nationalism of the Hebrew speakers, who do not allow material to be published in any other language.”
Puzzled by the discrepancies with Palestinian Jews, Zweig asks Freud in the same letter, “But what to do now? Where to settle in the expectation of staying there long enough? In America, my mind tells me. But my heart does not want to go so far away. I am comforted by the hope, changing colors like a chameleon, that in a few years Germany will open its doors to me again and will need me. […] You and only you prevented my foolish scheme to arrive again in May in Eichkamp (a district of Berlin. – A. G.), that is, in a concentration camp, where I would have found my death.” On August 18, 1933 Freud warned Zweig, as well as Feuchtwanger, that he should not return to Germany to settle his property affairs, but rather stay abroad in safety and wait out the Nazi riots.
Zweig expresses his disappointment with the Zionists in a letter to Freud from Haifa on July 16, 1936: “As for me, even in my work, to my great regret, I have retained my political spirit, and I have no opportunity to purify my thoughts. In confusion I stand before the fact that the foundations of the edifice built here have loosened much more than I thought at first, and I am saddened to think how little attention is paid here to Jewish-Arab cooperation, which every reasonable person at once considers necessary.” Zweig comes to see the establishment of an Arab-Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the conflict between the two nations. He belonged to a minority in the Land of Israel.
After the end of the First World War and the revolutions in Russia, Germany and Hungary, the revolutionary concept and the bearing of the title of revolutionary became risky for the Jews of Europe and pushed them towards a safer course of action, forcing them to take on a different, less risky guise – they became liberals. Liberalism was a cleansing of the national burden, of the peculiarities of popular consciousness. The characteristic feature of liberalism is that it seeks to create a society in which the individual, not God, not an earthly ruler, not a hegemonic class, not a nation, is the supreme value. The views of Freud and Zweig were the concepts of liberals and atheists.
Arnold Zweig’s departure from Palestine dragged on until the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. By then he had ceased to be a Zionist, but remained a socialist. In 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formed, whose authorities invited Zweig to become its citizen. Thirteen years after his letter to Freud, the writer’s dream came true: “Germany will open its doors to me again and will need me.” Communist Germany opened its doors to the former Zionist. He became a member of the GDR parliament, president of the Academy of Arts of this country and received from the hands of the Big Soviet Brother Lenin Prize “For strengthening peace between peoples.”
Zweig did not become a liberal. He became a communist. It was the same Zweig who in 1921-1922 wrote: “Atheistic and materialistic socialism of the Marxist model, which proceeds from the idea of the insatiability of the poor and their lust for power, is now as much a church, as much a denomination as any other. It rejects spiritual freedom and the divine spiritualization of man, reducing everything to ‘scientific’ determinism, it professes the dogma of the inevitable development of social relations according to materialistic, political-economic laws, it seeks to do away with classes and class domination, to overcome national boundaries by creating an international, supernational society.”
Zweig becomes a minister of this “church” that rejects “spiritual freedom” and reduces everything to “scientific” determinism. He “professes the dogma of the inevitable development of social relations according to materialistic, political-economic laws”, dogmatist and “historical materialist.” Zweig found a fatherland where the German language resounded again, where his works were printed in large numbers, where he was respected and exalted. He spoke the communist language and sanctified the human rights that had been taken away from his countrymen. The Germany he returned to began to resemble the Nazi Germany from which he had escaped. And only one corner of his heart was not overrun by the disease of totalitarianism – the Jewish one.
Zweig ceased to be a Zionist, but he did not become an anti-Zionist. In an Open Letter of January 1953, at the height of the doctors’ affair in the USSR, he defended the Zionist movement as “the half-brother of socialism” and railed against those who “denigrate a movement that has allowed another, incomparably smaller people to prove its national rebirth by brilliant feats against a much stronger enemy.” In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Zweig refused to sign a letter from GDR cultural figures condemning “Israeli aggression” against Arab countries.
For Arnold Zweig, World War I was a terrible trauma. He wrote a series of novels about it, The Great White Man’s War. He began the war as a fervent German patriot in the German army, but became a pacifist under the influence of the carnage he experienced. For many Jews and the Jewish people, this war was a warning not to participate in the world slaughter on any side. Jews began to turn cosmopolitan everywhere, but this transformation was also rejected by non-Jews during World War II and the Holocaust. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 provided an opportunity to finally legitimize Jewish patriotism. They could love the country of their own people rather than foreign countries.
Arnold Zweig, former German patriot, former Zionist, later cosmopolitan, became a German patriot again in the last years of his life, a patriot of East Germany, a communist country similar to the Germany from which he fled. Arnold Zweig, festooned with Communist decorations, died on November 26, 1968. He had time to learn of the intervention of the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries in Czechoslovakia, a former attempt to destroy the human socialism that the writer failed to find in his new Germany.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.