Essays IV

For the first time from the estate: two essays by Arnold Zweig that have lost none of their topicality. In the "Alpine Book", written in exile in Palestine during the first fifteen months of the Second World War, Zweig provides nothing less than an outline of European history from the Stone Age to the present. Coupled with this, he develops ideas about the influence of a landscape around the Alpine massif on character and history. It is a large-scale attempt to prove the origins of democracy and the growth of humanity's morality, of "world morality". At the same time, Zweig develops a psychoanalytical interpretation of the phenomenon of Hitler. The book, begun in October 1939 at the suggestion of a US non-fiction and textbook publisher for the student audience there, was neither published in its English translation during the war nor in East or West Germany in the post-war years. The commission to write an "outline of the history of Palestine and the people of Israel in it" sprang from similarly great publishing ambitions. The essay was written within six weeks in the summer of 1948, when Zweig stopped off not far from Prague on a fact-finding trip for a place to work and live in Europe. This text, too, represents a very personal look back at four thousand years of history, not least - with the prehistory of the state of Israel - also at tensions in the Middle East that continue to have an impact today.