The dispute over Sergeant Grisha

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Cover of the first edition from 1927

The dispute over Sergeant Grischa is the title of a novel by the author Arnold Zweig that was published in 1927 by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam ; the first English edition appeared in 1928.

The novel is part of Zweig's hexalogy The Great White Men's War .

action

The Russian soldier Grigorij Iljitsch Paprotkin, called Grischa, is a German prisoner of war in the area of ​​the military administration in Upper East . To see his wife and newborn daughter, he escaped from the prison camp in late 1917. On his way home he meets a group of partisans led by the young Babka. The latter advises him, if the Germans should attack him, to pretend to be the Russian deserter Bjuschew. But this turns out to be a fatal mistake. Byushev is to be executed because, according to a decree by General Albert Schieffenzahn, every Russian deserter who stays behind the German front for more than three days without going into captivity is treated as a spy. When Grischa realizes this, he reveals himself to be the escaped prisoner who he actually is. But even when he can clearly prove his true identity, that can no longer help him. General von Lychow, Paul Winfried (Lychow's nephew and adjutant) and von Lychow's Judge-Martial Posnanski try to save Grischa. Babka, who is expecting a child from Grisha, also plans to rescue him. On the orders of General Schieffenzahn ("the barely veiled portrait of Ludendorff ") Grischa is finally executed.

Emergence

The author had the idea for this novel back in 1917. While working as a writer in the press department of Ober Ost, he had heard of the fate of this Russian soldier. In 1921 he wrote this story as a drama under the title The Game for Sergeant Grischa . However, this found neither a publisher who printed it nor a theater that performed it. And so from 1926 to 1927 he wrote a novel version of the material, which was printed in 82 parts in the Frankfurter Zeitung from June to September 1927 under the title All against One . The entire novel was first printed in 1927 by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam, although this edition states 1928 as the year of publication.

effect

The dispute over Sergeant Grischa was one of the first German-language novels about the First World War that dealt critically with it. This novel made the author famous internationally. In the years up to 1929 the novel sold only 55,000 times in Germany. As a result of the war book boom triggered by Nothing New in the West, the circulation rose to 300,000 copies by 1933, when Zweig left Germany and his books were banned. An English translation was published in New York as early as 1928. Two years later, a film was made in the United States. In 1931 a translation into Hebrew was published, making The Dispute over Sergeant Grischa next to Das Heil von Wandsbek Zweig's only novel published in Hebrew. In the GDR, this novel was required reading in schools.

filming

The first film was made in the USA in 1930 by Herbert Brenon . Another film adaptation, this time for television, was made in 1968 in the GDR at DEFA .

Audio book

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Kindlers Literatur Lexikon im dtv in 25 volumes. Munich 1974, p. 9045
  2. ^ A follow-up to the first edition, also to be found in the 1st edition 2004 in the Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, ISBN 3-7466-5207-3
  3. ^ The book of 1000 books , Harenberg Verlag Dortmund 2002, ISBN 3-611-01059-6 , p. 901
  4. ^ Dieter Sabiwalsky: Two German literatures - also in school? Frankfurter Rundschau of October 19, 1968, p. V ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / original Ausgabe.fr-online.de  

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