Arnold Zweig und Magnus Hirschfeld (Berlin und Palästina)

Abstract The poet Arnold Zweig and the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, two German-Jewish atheists, are compared in their views on the emancipation of Jews and homosexuals in the 20th century. Without knowing about each other, the two visited Palestine in 1932, where they grappled with Zionism and the idea of a Jewish state. Zweigʼs reflections on Palestine are expressed in his 1932 novel »De Vriendt kehrt heim,« while Hirschfeldʼs »Weltreise eines Sexualforschers,« published in 1933 in Swiss exile, formulated his ambivalent, ultimately negative attitude toward Zionism. Zweig lived and worked in Palestine, despite all his reservations, until the founding of the State of Israel. Hirschfeld, who was almost twenty years older, died in France in 1935. Hirschfeldʼs lifelong fight against the persecution of homosexuals was supported by Zweig in many ways, but in the last decades of Zweigʼs life, as a member of the Jewish community in East Berlin, he almost completely faded into the background of his cultural-political activities.