Arnold Zweig

Born on November 10, 1887, in Glogau, Silesia (now Głogów, Poland), he was a German-Jewish novelist, playwright, and essayist. He studied literature, philosophy, history, and related subjects at several German universities before beginning his writing career, publishing early fiction while still young.

His service in the German army during the First World War deeply shaped his outlook and his work. He became widely known for Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), a novel praised for its sharp picture of military bureaucracy and the human cost of war. Across his fiction, he returned often to questions of conscience, violence, Jewish identity, and political responsibility.

After leaving Germany in 1933, he lived in exile in Czechoslovakia and then in Palestine. In 1948 he moved to East Germany, where he remained an important literary figure and served for a time as president of the Academy of Arts. He died in East Berlin on November 26, 1968.