Word: grischa
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...shining exception to this pattern of War fiction is Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa. It is an old-fashioned moral study, and Author Zweig is almost the only War novelist for whom armed conflict is only a part of the war between good & evil that rages as fiercely when the guns are silent. Last week Author Zweig published the fourth volume of Grischa's moral story. A long and involved book called The Crowning of a King, it deals, superficially, with the intrigues of the German general staff over the selection of a king...
...scope of that plan was suggested in The Case of Sergeant Grischa. A goodhearted, simple Russian soldier, Grischa escaped from a German prison camp, hid in the woods, took the clothes and identity of a dead German deserter. He was caught and sentenced to be shot for desertion. Grischa proved his identity, was nevertheless ordered shot in his false identity as a German deserter. Gradually, as one soldier after another was shocked at the injustice, his case became the centre of a major conflict. A sergeant tried to save him, then a lieutenant, finally a general. They compromised their army...
...Grischa was eventually shot, in one of the most powerful scenes in War fiction. In his next two novels Zweig turned back to trace the earlier careers of some of the people who had defended Grischa. Young Woman of 1914 told of the marriage of Werner Bertin, who had been one of Grischa's first defenders. Education Before Verdun told how Bertin had learned the facts of war life, and the savagery of conflicts between officers. Now, in The Crowning of a King, the consequences of their stand in the Grischa case are traced in the subsequent careers...
...novels about the World War, from Andreas Latzko's Men in Battle (1930) to Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), have been in terms of frontline fighting. To such outstanding exceptions as John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers and Arnold Zweig's Case of Sergeant Grischa was added this week Author van der Meersch's Invasion-the first novel to show what the War was like for civilians caught behind the German lines. Invasion's scene is the district around Lille, in northern France, a narrow strip between the Belgian border and the trenches...
Background rather than theme, incidents rather than story, are the memorable notes in Education Before Verdun. As in Sergeant Grischa, the War is not the subject but the setting-with the difference that here the setting overlooms the human figures struggling in brief silhouet before its curtain. Fortress-girt Verdun, innermost circle of the Western Front's hell; where in 1916 the French and Germans each lost 350,000 men; where, between February and July, 23 million shells punctuated the deadlocked argument; Douaumont, captured and recaptured but each time by an accident, the death trap where an explosion wiped...