“Cosmopolitan” (Briefe zum Judentum), by Stefan Zweig, translated from German (Austria) by Frédérique Laurent, Le Portrait, 350 p., €24.90, digital €15.
It is 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 some 25,000 in total. Of this imposing corpus – never published in full, and for good reason –, Litt has collected one hundred and twenty, including sixty-nine previously unpublished, on the theme of Jewishness.
Written in German (but also sometimes in French, Italian or English), they are addressed to the writer’s contemporaries. Between 1900 and 1941, Zweig exchanged with the German publisher 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 maintained with Jewish identity (“I don’t want to get too fixated on a precise idea of Jewishness, because it fluctuates within me with the rising and falling tide”) and his way of thinking about anti-Semitism or Zionism. “It never occurred to him to take a stand (…) as concretely as in these letters”notes Litt, who sees in this correspondence a “written form of private dialogues”.
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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, which goes from the advent of Nazism to Brazil, on the eve of Zweig’s suicide in February 1942, is the most striking. Faced with increasing danger, the writer, perfectly lucid, is by turns combative and helpless. To the young authors who ask him for advice, he orders them to “find as quickly as possible another livelihood extrinsic to literature”. There is no more, he insists, “no possibility 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 intended for the world” describing “without whining” their situation. He reminds all those who, he says, have been “stigmatized for a scalpel story”. To Max Brod, who then worked for the Prague newspaper Prague daily paperhe asks to send him some « original photographs of the book burning of [leurs] livres », so that he can communicate them as quickly as possible to the foreign press.
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