author
Arnold Zweig
1887–1968
A sharp, humane voice of 20th-century German literature, he is best remembered for fiction shaped by the moral shock of World War I. His best-known novel, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, helped make him an important literary critic of war, power, and bureaucracy.
1 Audiobook
Die Novellen um Claudia
by Arnold Zweig
About the author
Born in Glogau, Silesia, in 1887, Arnold Zweig grew up in a Jewish family and studied at several German universities before making his name as a writer. His experience serving in World War I became central to his work and helped turn him into a committed pacifist.
He is best known for The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), a novel that brought him wide recognition for its powerful portrait of military injustice. Britannica and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum both note how strongly his writing challenged militarism, and how his books later became targets under the Nazi regime.
After leaving Germany in 1933, he lived in Czechoslovakia and then in Palestine before settling in East Berlin in 1948. There he remained a prominent literary figure until his death in 1968, remembered for combining storytelling with a deep concern for conscience, politics, and the human cost of war.