Andreas Latzko

Born in Budapest in 1876, Andreas Latzko was a Hungarian-born writer who worked in both Hungarian and German and later became known as a pacifist novelist and biographer. After early literary work in drama and fiction, he gained international attention for writing that challenged the values of militarism and nationalism.

His reputation was made by Men in War (Menschen im Krieg), a 1917 collection drawn from his experience as an officer on the Italian front during World War I. Rather than celebrating battle, the book focused on exhausted soldiers, wounded minds, and the damage war does to ordinary people, which gave his work unusual emotional force.

Latzko spent his later years in exile and died in Amsterdam in 1943. Though he is less widely read now than some of his contemporaries, he remains an important literary witness to World War I and one of the clearest fictional voices of European pacifism.