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Updated: May 11, 2025
As Stefan Zweig puts it: "In vain will you remind him that the perfect, the absolute, are rarely attainable in this world; that, even to the sublimest will, no more is possible than an approach to perfection.... His glorious unwisdom makes it impossible to recognize this wise dispensation." His rages, then, are the spasms of pain of a perfectionist wounded by imperfection.
Not without struggle can such serene regions be attained. A friend of Zweig before the war, his friend to-day, I have witnessed all that was endured by this free European spirit whom the war robbed of that which he had held most dear; robbed him of his artistic and humanist faith, thereby depriving him of any reason for existence.
Zweig devotes to Jeremiah a dramatic poem, which I propose to analyse, making extensive quotations. The work consists of nine scenes. It is written in prose mingled with verse, sometimes free, sometimes rhymed, the transition from prose to verse occurring when emotion breaks from control. The form is ample and rhetorical.
Their sallies and counter-sallies jostle one another; but at the close their voices unite in measured choruses, breathing the thoughts of the prophet, the guardian of Israel. Zweig has steered his course skilfully between the dangers of archaism and anachronism.
We rediscover our preoccupations of the moment in this epic of the fall of Jerusalem; but we find them as the faithful of recent centuries found day by day in their Bible the light which lightened their road in hours of difficulty sub specie aeternitatis. "Jeremiah is our prophet," Stefan Zweig said to me. "He has spoken for us, for our Europe. The other prophets came at their due time.
In masterly fashion, Zweig shows how a vague rumour spreads in the hallucinated mind of the multitude, to attain in an instant a certainty surpassing that of truth. Details pass from mouth to mouth; precise figures of the false victory are given. Jeremiah, the defeatist prophet, is mocked.
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