Teutonic Tetralogy

YOUNG WOMAN OF 1914--Arnold Zweig --Viking ($2.50). .

German authors like to give themselves plenty of room. Good German Author Arnold Zweig* herewith puts out the first volume of his War epic. Volumes 2 and 4 (Education before Verdun, The Crowning of a King') are still to come. Volume 3 is the already-published The Case of Sergeant Grischa, one of the few good War books, often compared with the world-best-selling All Quiet on the Western Front, sometimes preferred to it.

Readers of Sergeant Grischa will remember Hero Bertin as the intellectual military clerk whose sympathy for Grischa was horrified, heartfelt and ineffectual. Here Bertin is shown in palmier days. At the outbreak of the War he was a pale but ambitious youth, a promising author with no money, living in blissful sin in Berlin with Lenore Wahl. Her family, rich Potsdam bankers, looked down their noses at Bertin, not because he was a Jew (they were that too) but because he had no money and because he was regarded as unsound by the Junkers, whom they worshipped. Unbeknownst to her parents, lovely Lenore called frequently at Bertin's shabby room; they considered themselves modern and happy. Then came August 1914, mobilization, breakup. After Lenore came home from a visit to Bertin's camp she found she was pregnant. Things being what they were and Bertin and herself too young to know better, there was nothing for it but an abortion. Luckily her parents were away on a holiday, her young brother David was man enough to make the arrangements. But she had to go through it all without Bertin; for that she could not forgive him. When he was shifted to the Western Front, to the lethal chamber of Verdun, Lenore was hardly sorry. Then she discovered she loved him still. To her astonishment her parents changed their minds about the Junkers, about Bertin too. By a lot of management, a little luck, she got her man home for a four-day leave, married him good & proper. Their honeymoon over and Bertin gone, she was quite sure she loved him.

The Author-Arnold Zweig is one of the postWar, German-Jewish writers (others: Lion Feuchtwanger, Emil Ludwig. Franz Werfel) who have made present-day German letters something for smart U. S. publishers to conjure with. Professorial-looking, no friend of war, he was not raised to be a soldier but a professor. Some five universities, years of study in philosophy, languages. French and English literature, graduated him to pick & shovel work in a Labor Corps. Like his hero Bertin he sweated his spectacles steamy in Macedonia, Serbia, northern France, spent 13 months at Verdun before he settled down on the Eastern Front. Now, with the help of his education, he is getting the War out of his system, hopes to have it all out by the end of 1933.

*Not to be confused with Austrian Author Stefan Zweig (Conflicts, Amok, Joseph Fonche, Three Alastcrs), no kin.

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