الحب والحياة

by Emil Ludwig, عادل زعيتر (translator)

اشتهر المؤلف إميل لودفيغ بكتاباته في السير الذاتية للعظماء وأشهرهم عالميا كتابه عن نابليون، إلى جانب كتبه عن بسمارك، كليوباترا، جوته، لينكولن وغيرهم، ونعرفه في العربية بترجمة كتابه الشهير، النيل: حياة نهر. تعلم إميل لودفيغ الكثير عن الحياة والحب من دراساته لسير العظماء وكتابته عنهم، وكانت حياته في حد ذاتها رحلة شيقة من ألمانيا إلى سويسرا وحتى أمريكا ثم بالعكس، في وقت تاريخي حاسم ضم حربين عالميتين.

يقدم لودفيغ نفسه في هذا الكتاب كتلميذ للفيلسوف أبيقور، وكرجل فردي ثابت جاد في التقدم من دراسة القلب البشري إلى دراسة الطبيعة التي هي عالم خال من كل فاجعة خلوا قاطعا. وهذه الأفكار والمشاعر خاصة بأوروبي ينشد السعادة الفردية، وفي المثل العليا التي يدور حولها كيانه، وهي الحب والسعادة والعظمة، يبحث بحثا جهد الاستطاعة، ليقدم وصفته لكل قارئ.

Paperback

Published January 26, 2022

About the author

Emil Ludwig (originally named Emil Cohn) was born in Breslau, now part of Poland. Ludwig studied law but chose writing as a career. At first he wrote plays and novella, but also worked as a journalist. In 1906, he moved to Switzerland, but, during World War I, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt in Vienna and Istanbul. He became a Swiss citizen in 1932, later emigrating to the United States in 1940.

At the end of the Second World War, he went to Germany as a journalist, and it is to him that we owe the retrieving of Goethe's and Schiller's coffins, which had disappeared from Weimar in 1943/44. He returned to Switzerland after the war and died in 1948, in Moscia, near Ascona.

During the 1920s, he achieved international fame for his popular biographies which combined historical fact and fiction with psychological analysis. After his biography of Goethe was published in 1920, he wrote several similar biographies, including one about Bismarck (1922–24) and another about Jesus (1928). As Ludwig's biographies were popular outside of Germany and were widely translated, he was one of the fortunate émigrés who had an income while living in the United States. His writings were considered particularly dangerous by Goebbels, who mentioned him in his journal.

Ludwig interviewed Benito Mussolini and on December 1, 1929 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His interview with the founder of the Republic of Turkey appeared in Wiener Freie Presse in March 1930, addressing issues of religion and music. He also interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow on December 13, 1931. An excerpt from this interview is included in Stalin's book on Lenin. Ludwig describes this interview in his biography of Stalin. What was originally an omitted section of the interview by Joseph Stalin himself, Professor of Montclair State University Grover Furr had finally published an English version of it.

Ludwig's extended interviews with T.G. Masaryk, founder and longtime president of Czechoslovakia, appeared as Defender of Democracy in 1936.