A committed Zionist could simultaneously hold ardent enthusiasm for the German war effort

Evidence

Arnold Zweig’s preoccupations with eastern Jewry, Zionism, and the potential for Jewish renewal did not begin on the eastern front. Born in 1887 in the Lower Silesian town of Glogau to assimilated parents, Zweig grew up in a modern German-Jewish household. He attended numerous German schools and universities, finally pursuing a degree in philosophy, literature, and philology. Like many of the more self-conscious German Jews of his generation, Zweig discovered an interest in Jewish matters around 1911–12, when he published his short works Aufzeichnungen über eine Familie Klopfer [Notes on the Klopfer family] (1911) and Novellen um Claudia [Novellas about Claudia] (1912), both of which deal with questions of assimilation and Jewish identity. Zweig’s engagement with the German Zionist project can be traced to these early years, when he became acquainted with the writings of Buber and began to contribute to such Zionist publications as Die Freistatt as well as to the Prague-based momentous Bar Kohba anthology of 1913, Vom Judentum [On Judaism], a watershed work in the sphere of German-speaking cultural Zionism. Until the outbreak of the war, Zweig’s literary career followed a path of Jewish issues and concerns, perhaps most poignantly expressed in his Ritualmord in Ungarn [Ritual murder in Hungary] (1914), a tragic play based on a nineteenth-century Jewish blood libel case, for which he received the coveted Kleist Prize in 1915. … Zweig’s profound and enduring interest in Jewish affairs did not, however, preclude ardent support for the German war effort. In August 1914, he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl (née Joseph), telling her of his unbridled enthusiasm for what he saw as the “deeply binding power of the Kulturgemeinschaft” that had intensified in the war. “Greater Germany [das große Deutschland] is here again,” he went on to remark, adding that as a Jew, “I shall take passionate interest in Germany’s destiny… . Indeed, in my inherently Jewish way, I shall make Germany’s concern my own concern.” Curious as it may seem, Zweig had a expressed a similar will to make Germany’s literary concern into his own in “Zum Problem des jüdischen Dichters in Deutschland” [On the problem of the Jewish writer in Germany] of the previous year. His early enthusiasm for staking out a space in the Germany literary and cultural realm carried over into the war years in a new manifestation. Though he volunteered as early as 1914, he was kept from service, due to his bad eyesight, until spring of the following year. Zweig eventually served intermittently in Belgium, Hungary, and Serbia until April 1916, when he was finally stationed in France for more than a year. During his first year of service, Zweig remained a loyal Vaterlandsverteidiger (defender of the Fatherland), to the point of insisting on being married in uniform in July 1916. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 418

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to scholarship on assimilated German Jews’ dual loyalties and the limits of acculturation before 1933 — echoes work like Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture and the broader German-Jewish symbiosis debate.