ZWEIG, ARNOLD

Zweig, Arnold: translation

(1887-1968)

writer; his antiwar novelDer Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa(The case of Sergeant Grischa, 1927), ranked with Erich Remarque's*All Quiet on the Western Front, became an international best-seller. He was born in Gross-Glogau, Silesia, to a Jewish saddlemaker; his fam-ily moved to Kattowitz in 1897. During 1907-1915 he studied literature, art history, philosophy, and psychology; his earliest fiction appeared inDie Gaste, a student magazine that he helped edit at Breslau. Although his romantic novel of 1912,Novellen um Claudia, was widely acclaimed, it was the 1914 dramaRitualmord in Ungarn(Ritual murder in Hungary), focusing on Jewish identity, that won him the 1915 Kleist Prize.

Zweig volunteered for the army in 1915 and served first near Verdun and then from 1917 in the press bureau on the Eastern Front.While the war made him a pacifist, his contact with Lithuania'sOstjuden* awakened his interest in Judaism. After the war he settled initially in Starnberg in Bavaria,* but moved to Berlin* in 1923 to enhance his prospects. He briefly editedJudische Rund-schauand wrote occasional essays forDie Weltbuhne.* But his fame rests with the Sergeant Grischa stories. Both the play (Das Spiel um den Sergeanten Gris-cha, 1921) and the novel tell the story of a Russian prisoner of war whose fate is decided in a struggle between progressive and reactionary forces in German society. Employing irony and social realism to transmit an antiwar message,Grischawas part of a tetralogy (withJunge Frau von 1914,Erziehung vor Verdun, andEinsetzung eines Konigs) known collectively asDer grosse Krieg der weissen Manner(The great war of the white peoples).

Zweig avoided political affiliation, but began advocating partnership with the workers movement in the early 1930s. InBilanz der deutschen Judenheit(trans-lated asInsulted and Exiled), written in 1933, he claimed that "Jews* are pro-letarians...despite their luxury, their ten-room apartments, their university education, and their intellectual professions. He argued that since they clung to easily revokable privileges, they should abandon their dreams of equality and join the working-class movement.

Zweig fled Germany when Hitler* seized power and resided initially in south-ern France. He took his family to Palestine in December 1933. After fifteen years in Haifa, he returned to East Berlin in 1948 and became the German Democratic Republic s most celebrated author.