Wolfgang von Weisl: Autobiographic Works

Wolfgang von Weisl, born in Vienna in 1896, is the most significant and radical revisionist Zionist of Austrian origin. After the First World War he has successfully contributed to paving the way for an independent Jewish state in Palestine as a politician, physician, officer, economist, author and journalist. His lifes work, his autobiography and numerous political and literary publications, newspaper articles, oriental non-fiction and travelogues, medical and religious-psychological treatises, lyrical, narrative and dramatic works, are yet unexplored. With the annotated (more than 700 remarks) and extensively introduced edition of two autobiographic, still unpublished manuscripts of Weisls written legacy, which are provided with a chronological table of the most important actors involved, a glossary, bibliography, subject and personal register, the present volume is the first contribution to this crucial desideratum. In the first text (approximately 300 printed pages), Weisl recounts ventures of his Viennese youth, his fathers cooperation with Theodor Herzl, his turn to revisionist Zionism under the influence of Wladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, his first two stays in Palestine (1922, 1924) and his adventurous Arab journeys to Jordan, Yemen, Saudi-Arabia by order of the Berlin Ullstein news agency. In the second text in diary form (150 printed pages), Weisl describes his internment in British concentration camp Latrun (1946) and his four-week hunger strike which has aroused great national and international attention, whereby he demonstrates the allegiance to Mahatma Gandhi. The autobiography captivates by its fascinating contrast between modern Viennese Jewish middle class possession and education and ancient, biblical Jerusalem, the Jewish colonisation of Palestine, as well as the exotic, Muslim-Arabic world of the Middle East. Weisls Latrun diary thereby provides a - yet unknown in this form - first-hand, authentic insight into the everyday life of the prisoners, the tension between left and right Zionists, though united in their unwavering resistance against the British mandate rule. Many fellow inmates of Weisl will be appointed in the highest state rankings in the independent State Israel, which is proclaimed two years later: as Knesset-delegates, ministers or even as head of the government. The conflict-ridden explosiveness of the Israeli state formation is reflected in Latrun en miniature. Its world-political dimension, which Weisl explicitly strived to enforce with all his activities and agitations, is more topical today than ever before.