LETTERS: TLs, to T. MacCallum Walker, 10/4/56. (WITH #6546)
Stefan Zweig Rallies Aid For German Jewish Children, 1933,
Together With
A Letter About Zweig By Anna Freud
[Judaica]. (Zweig, Stefan). [From the front wrapper:] Address by Mr. Stefan Zweig, At the House of Mrs. Anthony de Rothschild, On Thursday, November 30th, 1933, To the Committee for the Luncheon at the Savoy Hotel, Dec. 20th, 1933, In Aid of German Jewish Women and Children. [n.p., 1933].
12 mo.; interior fresh and bright; hard cardboard printed wrappers, sewn; wrappers lightly soiled; red cloth spine; an attractive copy of a most scarce publication.
Boxed together with:
Freud, Anna. Typed letter signed, “Anna Freud,” to Mr. T. MacCallum Walker, London, 4th October 1956.
8vo.; one leaf, typed on one side only; folded horizontally for mailing; else fine.
First edition of a privately published speech by Zweig on a most important cause, together with a typed letter signed by Anna Freud (a respected psychoanalyst in her own right) in which she discusses her father’s assessment of and friendship with Zweig.
The address by Zweig is a perceptive, eerily prescient talk about the dangers impending for Jewish children and adults in Germany. Zweig discusses the harsh conditions for Jews in then-contemporary Germany (which would worsen as the decade progressed), examining both the external and internal psychological harms inflicted upon German Jews on a regular basis. He implores his audience to contribute to a fund to send German Jewish children to Palestine, suggesting this as the only viable alternative to subjecting an entire generation to ceaseless abuse:
I…wish to speak now not of the entire tragedy of the Jews in Germany, which staggers, but only and solely of the terrible plight of the children.
Certainly, the catastrophe that has come upon the Jews of Germany has affected all alike, people of all ages, men and women. It has torn innumerable people from their home, from their work, from all that life meant to them, from a community of which they had formed part for centuries, and the record of this devastation has already filled many volumes.
….The adult may find consolation in the history of his ancestors, in similar events in the past, and he has the comfort of knowing that by far the greater part of the world condemns what is now being done in Germany. (p. 1)
Zweig goes on to discuss the impact of the German situation on children, who are much more vulnerable; he mentions Freud and his theories in passing:
It is the defenseless, the children, the young people, the growing generation who must have all our care, for they are in danger, almost in mortal danger, faced by a double peril.
The first menace that confronts the Jewish children in Germany to-day is the sense of inferiority. We know, through the splendid work of that great Jewish master of the soul, Sigmund Freud, that the sense of inferiority is not merely a light shadow cast upon the soul…but a very serious malady which saps the vitality and destroys the joy of life. And we also know, thanks to his revealing researches now long accepted by the entire world, that the malady is almost invariably implanted in childhood.
….This sense of inferiority is the terrible epidemic that is menacing the Jewish children of Germany to-day, and we Jews know better than anyone the sinister nature of this malady, for it has afflicted our whole people for centuries. It has been the endemic disease of our race, the terrible infection to which we succumbed for centuries in the Ghetto… (pp. 3-4)
Zweig ends this short but powerful speech with a plea to send “as many Jewish children as possible” from Germany to “the native soil of Palestine” so that they can live in freedom and with self-respect (p. 7). His concluding paragraph is particularly chilling, when juxtaposed with the historical reality:
The children to whom you are extending your kindness do not yet know for how much they will have to thank you. But from the b
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