Exploitation

From The Very Moment Stefan Zweig arrived on East German soil in early 1964, indeed even before he did so, the GDR sought to use him as “living proof” of the truth of the story behind the book and film of Naked among Wolves (Nackt unter Wölfen). Zweig's presence was also used more generally to confirm the effectiveness and humanity of communistled antifascist resistance under Hitler. This chapter will examine in detail the process of this exploitation. First, the GDR presented Zweig's experience of Buchenwald as identical to that of Stefan Cyliak in Naked among Wolves. This had the added effect of framing this experience entirely within the typical GDR narrative of communist-led antifascist resistance — a framing that played down the specifically Jewish character of that experience. In the interests of such a framing, Zacharias Zweig's account of his son's rescue, serialized in February 1964 in the Berliner Zeitung am Abend, was, as we shall see, substantially altered.

The SED also attempted to use Stefan Zweig both as an example of its avowed philo-Semitism and as a mouthpiece for its anti-Zionist sentiment. This may appear inconsistent to us today, but according to East German readings of the Second World War, Nazi anti-Semitism served the interests of imperialist capitalism; Zionism, in the present, also served these interests. Only in the socialist countries, so the argument ran, could Jews, as socialists, truly be emancipated — at the unstated price of abandoning their Jewishness (according to a set of statistics for 1978, East Berlin's Jewish Community had a mere 340 members; yet at the same time some 4,000 GDR citizens living in East Berlin were recognized as racial victims of Nazism). In something of a balancing act, then, Zweig's Jewishness had to be visible enough for him to be used in a variety of ways, yet never emphasized; his function, after all, was to serve primarily as a mirror reflecting communist courage, rather than the Jewish experience of discrimination and persecution under Nazism.