Arnold Zweig's cycle of novels about the First World War

Few are left of those writers who forty or fifty years ago took a direct part in the creation of a great critical-realist literature in Germany. More of the great writers are now deceased - we mourn the loss of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Feuchtwanger, Döblin, Hesse, Leonhard Frank, and also Brecht, Becher and Wolf. Born in 1887 - the above-mentioned writers were either born shortly before him or were his contemporaries - Arnold Zweig knew them all and accompanied them in their aspirations; a ray of the radiance of this great age of art and enlightenment falls on him. He is one of its last torchbearers, a writer in whom spiritual breadth, traditionalism and a connection with the future are happily combined.