“Cosmopolitan” (Briefe zum Judentum), by Stefan Zweig, translated from German (Austria) by Frédérique Laurent, Le Portrait, 350 p., €24.90, digital €15.
It would be an understatement to say that Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a great letter writer. According to Stefan Litt, the German-Israeli archivist to whom we owe this volume of letters, the Austrian writer wrote or dictated about 25,000 in total. From this imposing corpus – never published in its entirety, and rightly so – Litt has compiled one. one hundred and twenty, including sixty-nine unpublished, on the subject of Judaism.
Written in German (but sometimes also in French, Italian or English), they are addressed to the writer’s contemporaries. Between 1900 and 1941, Zweig exchanged with the German editor Anton Kippenberg, with Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud and with his peers Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Romain Rolland… Throughout the pages the complex relationship he had with the Jewish identity (“I don’t want to become too obsessed with a precise idea of Judaism, because it fluctuates within me with the tide that rises and falls.”) and their way of thinking about anti-Semitism or Zionism. “It never occurred to him to take a position (…) as concretely as in these letters.”points out Litt, who sees in this correspondence a “written form of private dialogues.”
As in the original edition published in Berlin in 2020, the volume is divided into three periods: 1900-1918, 1920-1932 and 1933-1941. The last one, which starts from the arrival of Nazism in Brazil, on the eve of Zweig’s suicide in February 1942, is the most striking. In the face of growing danger, the writer, perfectly lucid, sometimes appears combative and defenseless. To the young authors who ask him for advice, he orders them to “Find as quickly as possible another means of life extrinsic to literature”. There is no more, he insists, “no chance for a German-speaking Jewish writer.”
Little by little, discouragement
However, he does not give up. From 1933 he campaigned for a common voice. He would like to sign with Roth, Werfel, Wassermann, Döblin… a “manifesto destined for the world” describing “without complaining” your situation. He remembers all those who, according to him, have been “stigmatized by a scalpel story.” To Max Brod, who was then working at the Prague newspaper. Prager Tagblattasks them to send him some « original photographs of the burning of books [leurs] books”, to be able to communicate them as quickly as possible to the foreign press.
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