Stefan Zweig and Theodor Herzl
On the writer's encounter with the editor of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse "Feuilleton"
Over the break I read Stefan Zweig’s memoirs The World of Yesterday (1942) in the 2010 English translation. Overall, I didn’t enjoy the time I spent with this pretentious writer. Though I learned some things about fin-de-siècle Vienna and the reversals following the First World War, Zweig is given to a kind of flattery—of himself, of his “illustrious friends,” and of his audience—that warps everything he describes. A chapter on Paris, “a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone came there happy,” is better thought of as a tourist brochure for the Grand Tour.
The book has many tableau portraits of famous writers, politicians, and artists, some long forgotten some still remembered. Many of these are quite pretentious as well, but the portrait he offers of Theodor Herzl (really, the reason I picked up the book) captures something important.
Zweig meets Herzl for the first time in 1901. Der Judenstaat, the pamphlet that had set an important swath of Eastern European Jewish aflame, had been published in 1896. By 1901, Herzl was at the peak of his Zionist struggle. He was in the midst of negotiations with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II over Palestine. At the Zionist Congress that December in Basel, Herzl would face a growing rift in the organization between his followers, a younger set of left-wing pioneering types from Eastern Europe, as well as a cultural Zionist rump.
But he still needed a day job. And his day job was editor of the cultural section “The Feuilleton” of the highbrow Vienna newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse. It was of course as a literary man that Herzl had built his reputation. Vienna, and especially Jewish Vienna, was off put by his Zionism but probably mostly thought it was comical and ridiculous. Perhaps it flattered their pride that they were immune from a messianic contagion that had affected their brethren—former brethren?—in the East.
It was in his capacity as editor of the prestigious newspaper that Zweig, an aspiring poet and culture writer of around 20, meets him. In an impressive vignette, Zweig conveys something of Herzl’s tremendous natural presence.
Writes Zweig: “Herzl rose to greet me, and instinctively I felt there was a grain of truth in the ill-intentioned joke about the King of Zion—he really did look regal with his high forehead, his clear-cut features, his long and almost blue-black beard and his deep-blue, melancholy eyes. His sweeping, rather theatrical gestures did not seem affected, because they arose from a natural dignity….Even standing in front of the shabby desk heaped high with papers in that miserably cramped editorial office with its single window, he was like a Bedouin desert sheikh; a billowing white burnous would have looked as natural on him as his black morning coat…”
Herzl became Zweig’s editor at the paper, and he speaks of Herzl’s efforts to recruit him to Zionism. When asked about division in the Zionist ranks, Zweig reports the following remark which, accurate or not, is extremely revealing of how Herzl saw the “Jewish problem” from the point of view of the Jews and not merely of the anti-Semites:
“Don’t forget, we’ve been used to dealing with problems and arguing over ideas for centuries. After all, historically speaking, we Jews have gone two thousand years without any experience of bringing something real into the world. Unconditional commitment has to be learnt, and I still haven’t learnt it myself. I still write for feuilletons now and then, I am still Feuilleton editor, when it should really be my duty to have only one thought in the world and never write a line about anything else. But I’m on my way to rectifying that; I’ll have to learn unconditional commitment myself first, and then maybe the rest of them will learn with me.”
Zweig would see Herzl fairly often for the next three years until Herzl’s death at 44 in 1904. Zweig’s description of the funeral in Vienna, on July 7, 1904 is striking.
“Suddenly people arrived at all the Viennese railway stations, from all lands and countries; Western, Eastern, Russian, Turkish Jews….There was uproar in the cemetery itself; too many mourners suddenly poured like a torrent up to his coffin, weeping, howling and screaming in a wild explosion of despair….There was an almost raging turmoil; all order failed in the face of a kind of elemental, ecstatic grief. I have never seen anything like it in a funeral before or since.”
Herzl’s funeral procession, July 7, 1904
Herzl had died physically and spiritually exhausted, and as the end came near he may have thought that all his efforts had been for nought. And, on that July day, it would have been hard to know whether or not this was true.
Though I am a Zionist, perhaps it’s worth trying to reconstruct the perspective of a well-meaning but rather skeptical observer that day:
“This powerful man clearly struck a nerve in the oppressed Jewish masses of the East. He promised them that the hour of redemption was a possibility, and that it could be brought forth through a political rather than a spiritual awakening combined with a single-minded and practical devotion to the cause. But is this not merely Jewish history repeating itself in tragic rhymes? Is not Jewish history replete with examples of leaders who promise the people redemption and lead them only to their ruin? How different really is this Herzl from Shabtai Zvi? Why would this time be any different? The only difference between this failed messiah and the last is that now we have reasonable hopes that the situation of the Jews will improve rather than deteriorate.”
This perspective was not at all crazy and in fact wasn’t unreasonable. But Herzl saw that the age to come was not to be reasonable. As he put in The Jewish State: “If we were to wait till average humanity had become as charitably inclined as was Lessing when he wrote Nathan the Wise, we should wait beyond our day, beyond the days of our children, of our grandchildren, and of our great-grandchildren. But the world’s spirit comes to our aid in another way.”
Jewish history, like all of history but perhaps more so, is full of ironies. Though he died thinking himself a failure, Herzl’s dream would ultimately be realized—though only in part and at tremendous cost. The comfortable and brilliant world of Jewish Vienna was utterly destroyed, never to return. But few could see this, and even among those who “see” the boundary between delusion and true political insight may be quite thin. Most ordinary people just have to judge by the results, at a later historical time, when comfortably in the grip of a new set of illusions.