The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl

by Ernst Pawel

"At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state." So begins Ernst Pawel's remarkable study of Herzl. In The Labyrinth of Exile Pawel restores the vital link between the myth of the founding father of Zionism and the human being and demonstrates that the reality of Herzl's life is much more complicated and far more interesting. Legendary and all too human, Herzl remains one of the emblematic figures of modern times.

Genres: Biography

572 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Ernst Pawel was a German American biographer, novelist, and translator who worked primarily for New York Life Insurance from 1946 to 1982. Pawel wrote about the Holocaust and Sigmund Freud in three novels from 1951 to 1960. From 1954 to 1965 he translated books by Georges Simenon and Lotte Lehman. During the 1980s, Pavel released biographies of Franz Kafka and Theodor Herzl. Following his death in 1994, Pawel's biography of Heinrich Heine and his own memoir were released.

The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was nominated for the American Book Award for Nonfiction in 1984.

Reviews

[kobushi · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone who has spent even a modicum studying modern Jewish historical events (and here let’s say from the late 19th century onwards), it would be effectively impossible not to have encountered the name Theodor Herzl. While I knew about him and the basics for awhile, my ken did not advance much beyond that. It wasn’t until I got the light biographical sketch followed by his surprising usage of Wagner’s Tannhauser as the opening music for the First Zionist Congress thanks to the phenomenally under-rated “A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser” by Leah Garrett that I knew this was a man I needed to learn more about. My initial view of him was “Solomon Maimon if he firmly kept one foot in Judaism and got out in the sun more” but even that barely scratches the surface for we find out right from the beginning—the first paragraph in the first chapter no less!--that Theodor Herzl was a really weird guy:

“At the age of thirty-five, the fashionable Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl fantasized about the collective conversion of the Jews in a mass ceremony at the Cathedral of St. Stephen. By the time he died, a mere nine years later, he had redefined Jewish identity in terms of a modern secular faith and created a national movement which, within less than half a century, led to the foundation of the Jewish state.”

Pawel, Ernst. The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (p. 1). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

A salient question those reading this after 2020 may be asking: how does this book differ from Derek J. Penslar’s contribution to the Jewish Lives series? I had and honestly still have this question because with cards out, while I have read other books from the aforementioned series, this one still remains to be opened. But still based on my previous experiences including reading the prototype essay by Penslar on Herzl, I can venture a guess: it’s newer (1989 vs 2020) and shorter (approx. 500 vs 250 pages). Beyond that...good question. The blurb makes it sound similar to Ernst Pawel’s biography and the reviews are quite good, but I’ve a feeling if one wants “uncensored no holds barred Herzl”, the better answer is our book here. While Pawel can get a little tongue-in-cheek at times, the lens rarely moves from the man of the hour, a man whom led a troubled existence (to the say the least), and also a man whom at times can be both crude and quite funny and self-deprecating: “If you send a man to Rome, he should know something about history. Art history for Venice, and for Paris—a bit of medicine” (L, 6/13/84).” (p. 87)

But Herzl wasn’t just self-deprecating; he wasn’t just neurotic, and possibly (or almost certainly) bipolar; he wasn’t just weird beyond any measurable count of the word and its multivalent meanings. He was all that and more because in spite of not technically being the first one with the Zionist idea, he was essentially the only one that “spoke with an English accent.” Or as our book notes: “Herr Doktor [Theodor] Herzl of Vienna, famous author and journalist, who from his photograph gazed upon them like Moses incarnate, who spoke High German and consorted with ministers and kings, seemed a far more credible Messiah than heimish Dr. Pinsker from Odessa and similar homegrown Yiddish prophets, the likes of whom could be found in every shtetl by the wagonload.” (page 271-272)

Herzl may have been manic to the point of insanity, but the man could write, the man could talk (at least later and if we believe his own recollections of certain events notably his audaciously tone deaf meeting with Baron Maurice de Hirsch which contains enough chutzpah to kindle a forest fire), and somehow when he was on, HE WAS ON. However, like other historical and ahistorical greats such as Alexander and Feanor son of Finwë, his star shone bright and attracted adorers and haters in equal numbers; it also like a supernova gone awry, imploded well before its time.


But he had his limits to and in one of the choicest cuts from his diaries written when he reached them, we find Herzl spitting fire at his own constituents:

“All right, Jews, I as a poor and helpless journalist have nevertheless managed, within five years’ time, to reach the point where I can negotiate with the Sultan in person. I have done my part, and then some. But you have left me in the lurch. You are a despicable rabble—go to hell.” (page 464)

This is a book that keeps on giving. At times, it gets colorful with Pawel sometimes injecting some unexpected current era (of 1989 at least) commentary into events that transpired at the turn of the century. But it’s engaging and the source material is amply quoted. What’s more, he doesn’t hold back even at the end when noting the “appalling legacy” of Herzl’s descendants: all basically in some way or another killed themselves. Like the “traditional” Jews who nowadays may criticize Moses Mendelssohn for his children leaving the tribe, laying the blame on Herzl for not being “frum” enough vastly overlooks a host of other issues that led to such an unfortunate ending for his line. The blame may rest heavily on him for being an absentee father who constantly hummed and mentally choreographed his own movie, but for Jews all over, without him doing what he did when he did it, Israel as an independent nation state may still be a pipe dream.

[Yalla Balagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernst Pawel spent years cataloging Theodor Herzl's every megalomanic episode, failed play, marital catastrophe, and grandiose diplomatic stumble, and came out the other side with a case for the Zionist idea far more persuasive than any pamphlet Herzl ever produced. Pawel was a serious literary biographer, author of a celebrated life of Kafka, whose skepticism cuts to the bone. His portrait of Herzl as a narcissistic, manic-depressive Budapest playwright who dreamed up a state for the Jewish people the way lesser men dream of promotions is devastating and admiring at once. The conclusion is that Herzl's extraordinary achievement owed everything to force of personality, with originality of thought a distant second place, and that this, paradoxically, is exactly what the Zionist project required.

A Budapest Jew named Theodor Herzl got laughed at by Rothschilds, stonewalled by the Sultan of Turkey, patronized by Kaiser Wilhelm, and managed to convene the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, writing in his diary that in fifty years there would be a Jewish state. He was off by one year.

Pawel traces the whole combustible arc with an eye for the detail that exposes the man behind the monument. His skepticism about Herzl the person only amplifies the astonishment at Zionism the achievement.

Pawel's own life gave every reason to find the Zionist idea valid. Born in Breslau in 1920, a refugee from Hitler's Europe, a man who watched the continent devour its Jews from across an ocean. His Herzl biography carries the weight of that experience. History rewards the theatrical, the stubborn, and the slightly delusional, and Herzl was all three in extraordinary abundance. A dandified journalist who fantasized about mass baptism at a Viennese cathedral somehow willed Israel into existence. Pawel, to his credit and perhaps his surprise, found the whole operation magnificent.

Zionism as Pawel constructs it is the vindication of the outrageous bet, the proof that history occasionally hands the trophy to the most stubborn person in the room. The book ages into greater relevance with every passing decade, as the Israeli state Herzl conjured from wounded pride and sheer force of will continues to exist against considerable opposition.

Theodor Herzl, born in Budapest in 1860 to an assimilated Jewish family that worshipped German culture with the devotion of the recently invited, spent his first thirty-five years pursuing literary fame with frantic energy. He failed at playwriting, succeeded brilliantly at journalism, watched the Dreyfus trial in Paris, and experienced what Pawel calls a transformation of staggering implausibility. The dandified feuilletonist became the prophet of Jewish nationhood. He wrote in his diary "In Basel I founded the Jewish state," and he was correct.

It is vital to grasp that Herzl's story is every persecuted people's story, compressed into one furious lifetime, because the lesson it carries is transferable and urgent. Dignity, once surrendered to the convenience of others, recovers only through collective will, that a people without sovereignty is a people permanently available for someone else's purposes, and that the distance between a dream written in a diary and a flag raised over a nation is, in the final reckoning, exactly one generation of extraordinary stubbornness.

❤️ 🇮🇱

[Billy McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, well researched.