Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann: Eine Lebensbekanntschaft im Licht ihrer Korrespondenz (1908–1933) by Marlen Eckl and Jeffrey B. Berlin (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann: Eine Lebensbekanntschaft im Licht ihrer Korrespondenz (1908–1933) by Marlen Eckl and Jeffrey B. Berlin
• Birger Vanwesenbeeck

Marlen Eckl and Jeffrey B. Berlin, Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann: Eine Lebensbekanntschaft im Licht ihrer Korrespondenz (1908–1933). Schriftenreihe des Stefan Zweig Zentrum Salzburg 16. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2023. 218 pp.

Marlen Eckl and Jeffrey B. Berlin’s Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann, the sixteenth volume in the Schriftenreihe series of the Stefan Zweig Zentrum Salzburg, marks the latest addition to the ongoing “Jewish turn” in Zweig studies. Composed of the previously unpublished letters and postcards from Wassermann to Zweig (Zweig’s correspondence to Wassermann has unfortunately not been recovered) and duly contextualized by Eckl and Berlin with cross-references to diary entries as well as to other correspondences, Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann sheds new light on two popular early twentieth-century writers—one German, the other Austrian—for whom the [End Page 123] question of Jewish identity constituted a recurring topic across the quarter-century of their correspondence. “Lebensbekanntschaft” is an accurate term to describe Zweig and Wassermann’s relationship for, even though it never quite developed into an intimate friendship (as Eckl and Berlin point out, in only two letters does Wassermann address Zweig by his first name), their shared stake in the literary enterprise (both had the same German publisher for many years) as well as their lived experiences of the specter of antisemitism meant that they often turned to each other in moments of crisis.

This is not to say that Zweig and Wassermann agreed on all matters Jewish, nor is it to disregard the stark contrast in their respective economic backgrounds. Indeed, as Eckl and Berlin make clear from the start, the poverty in which Wassermann grew up made for a rather more laborious path toward literary success than did the trajectory of Zweig, who, coming from an upper middle-class Viennese family, was, as Wassermann put it in one of his letters to him, “ein Kind des Luxus” (7). Part, then, of what makes Stefan Zweig und Jakob Wassermann such a fascinating and rewarding read is that it puts fully on display the heterogeneity of German-language Jewish intellectuals (among the other Jewish writers that make frequent appearances in the volume are Martin Buber, Raoul Auernheimer, and Arthur Schnitzler) and their various positions regarding the ruling political questions of the day. Thus, although Zweig and Wassermann were united in their critique of Zionism, they rejected it on different grounds. Whereas the former celebrated a Jewish cosmopolitanism “ohne Erde, nur durch Blut und Geist” (100), the latter saw such cosmopolitanism as leading only to isolation and rootlessness, embracing instead a double-consciousness nationalism that simultaneously championed his German and his Jewish identity. Likewise, whereas Wassermann initially saw in World War I an opportunity for German Jews like himself to show their patriotism and thereby be finally considered as full-fledged German citizens, Zweig was more skeptical. In a letter to Abraham Schwadron sent around this time, he wrote, “Ich bin fest überzeugt, dass die Erbitterung [,] die jetzt schon latent ist, nach dem Kriege sich nicht gegen die Kriegshetzer, die Reichspost-Partie, sondern gegen die Juden entladen wird” (84). This disagreement brings about a temporary radio silence between Wassermann and Zweig, one of a handful throughout their Lebensbekanntschaft, with the result that, despite spanning a quarter-century, the size of the correspondence from Wassermann to Zweig remains relatively small: just thirteen letters and thirty-four postcards in all. Yet this paucity of primary materials is deftly [End Page 124] offset by Eckl and Berlin via the wealth of contextual information that they bring to their study of these two authors including an extensive “Anhang” section that reproduces in full the three essays that Zweig published about Wassermann’s works. In these reviews Zweig hails Wassermann as a German-language Balzac, a writer whose epic scope makes his works, together with that of Thomas Mann, one of the few within German literature with a genuine claim to world literature: “in ihm ist heute ein Wille über die deutsche hinaus in die Weltliteratur” (181).

Divided into eleven chapters bookended by...