W. v. Weisl´s Drama and Novel in the Sign of Zionism

This volume contains an edition of two literary works written by the Viennese doctor, politician, artillery officer, journalist and oriental expert Wolfgang von Weisl (18961898). Up to now, the play Erlöser (Redeemer) had only appeared in a bibliophile private print of a few (approx. 50) copies, published by the Vienna publishing house Girschner in 1919, while the novel Der Anfang der Wandlung Israels (The Beginning of the Change in Israel) had only been pre-printed in two remote Zionist weekly publications: first in 1934, translated into Hebrew, in "HaYarden" ("The Jordan", Jerusalem), then in 1938/39 in German original language in "Medina Iwrit" ("Jewish State", Vienna / Prague), but only fragmentary there, since the magazine after the invasion the Hitler troops had to stop appearing immediately in March 1939. The edition that is now available thus presents the first complete German original version of the novel. Both works are partly historical, partly fictional and are inspired autobiographically. They deal with the millennia-old Jewish struggle for freedom. The drama depicts the so-called Second Jewish War (132135 AD) under Simon Bar Kochba`s leadership against the pagan Romans and the Jewish Christians who collaborated with them, while the novel depicts the struggle of the Jewish settlers of the third Aliyah (German "rise", 1919-1923) against the Arab "natives" of Palestine, but also in the resistance against the British mandate to describe a free "new territory" in the spirit of the backward-looking utopia of Theodor Herzl`s novel of the same name (published in 1902) The two central figures, Bar Kochba and Joseph Trumpeldor, a former Tsarist officer, are still considered glorified national heroes and messianic martyrs in the history of the Jews. While Bar Kochba constantly acts as the commander of the Jewish rebels on stage, the peculiarity of the novel is the physical absence of Trumpeldor. The latter had fallen with seven companions, defending Tel- Chai in the Upper Galilee against the predominance of the Arab attackers on the eve of the novel`s start, March 1, 1920. However, the dead Trumpeldor lives on as a freedom fighter in the consciousness of the Jewish colonists and, as it were, celebrates his resurrection in the form of the young equestrian officer Eldad Schu`al, who also immigrated from Russia and is to be considered also the alter ego of the author Wolfgang von Weisl, being also a former artillery commander of the army of Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. Both works politically are used to prepare the founding of the State of Israel, which is to be given quasi-religious legitimacy both in drama and in the novel through permanent references to the Bible.