Arnold zweig

Arnold Zweig (10 November 1887 in Groß-Glogau - 26 November 1968 in Berlin) was a German-Jewish writer.

Biography

Arnold Zweig was born in 1887 in the town of Groß-Glogau, in the Prussian province of Silesia. He studied at Breslau, Berlin, Göttingen and other universities in Germany. During World War I he was a soldier in the German Army and served on both major European fronts.

As a result of his experiences in the war, in 1927 he wrote the novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa (Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa), considered one of the best novels warlike. In it he relates the story of a Russian prisoner of war victim of the Prussian bureaucracy.

It is his best-known novel and the first in a cycle of novels in which he describes the impact of war on capitalist society.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he emigrated to Palestine, given his status as a fervent anti-militarist and influential spokesman for Zionism.

In 1943, during his exile, he published the novel Wandsbek's Axe (Das Beil von Wandsbek). The idea for the novel arose after Arnold Zweig read in the newspaper Deutsche Volkszeit on April 18, 1937, the news about a master butcher turned executioner. The news was part of the events known as Altona's Bloody Sunday, when on July 17, 1932, an SA march in the town of Altona (today part of Hamburg) ended in a confrontation with the police and Party sympathizers. Communist from Germany.

In 1948 Zewig returned to East Germany, where from 1950 to 1953 he was president of the East German Academy of Letters.

In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on several occasions.

Works

His work is a mixture of humanity with realism and a subtle irony. He wrote about the Jews and Zionism, such as in the novel De Vriendt Comes Home (1933) and the book of essays Insulted and Exiled (1934). He published his memoirs in 1967.