Word: grischa
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...been made up of human beings. To the few that read it, a little book called Way of Sacrifice, by a Prussian officer who had fought before Verdun, came with the shock of revelation. Few months later a much wider U. S. audience was discovering The Case of Sergeant Grischa. Though it never became such an enormous seller as All Quiet on the Western Front, it soon ranked as a modern classic, has sold nearly 250,000 copies in English translation alone. Those two novels (both German) were generally admitted to be the best produced by the war. Last week...
...without that endorsement, there was no danger that Education Before Verdun would lack readers, but whether it. too, would take its place among modern classics was more dubious. The third of Author Zweig's tetralogy-in-progress (Young Woman of 1914, Education Before Verdun, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, The Crowning of a King-the last yet to appear), but the second in his time scheme, Education Before Verdun seeks to repeat Sergeant Grischa's case in terms of the Western Front. Perhaps because its inhumanly terrible story is not so concentrated, the sympathy it arouses is more...
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...
...Arnold Zweig has written of the years of peace with an imagination dominated by visions and fears of war, of the years of war with an imagination dominated by dreams and hopes of peace. Last week readers who recalled his powerful War novel, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, found Author Zweig's short stories cut in the same essential pattern as his longer and more ambitious work, read of humble people who were destroyed or demoralized by events beyond their control or understanding, who sometimes attempted a brief resistance, but more often submitted hopelessly to fate. Most of Author...
...Henri Barbusse (Le Feu), England's C. E. Montague (Disenchantment), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer), Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Germany's Fritz von Unruh (Way of Sacrifice), Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), Arnold Zweig (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), Franz Werfel (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh), America's John Dos Passes (Three Soldiers) have all added to the slowly mounting testimony as to what degree of murder war actually is. Last week another U. S. author added his docket to the record...