Greetings from Devil’s Island

Greetings from Devil’s Island. Dreyfus’s Hut. Dreyfus. Published by M. & Co. Nachf.

It is hard to exaggerate the international interest in the Dreyfus Affair. Papers across Europe and North America reported in great detail about every turn and twist, more often than not on page one. Then as now, other people’s antisemitism always seems so much more self-evident than one’s own, and the self-righteousness with which the miscarriage of justice suffered by Dreyfus was pilloried can only be described as gobsmacking. Among those who lamented with great pathos that of all the nations it should be France with her proud revolutionary legacy who had become mired in this injustice there were more than a few who in truth had been wary of that legacy all along. Genteel Germans could barely contain their Dreyfusard sympathies, insisting that the Dreyfus Affair could not have taken place in Germany—which was true only in the sense that, in Germany, Jews, in crass contravention of their constitutional rights, could not become officers, let alone assume the sort of position that gave Dreyfus access to sensitive documents.