By guest reviewer, Peter Geyer
Sometimes the sequel is better than the original. Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa is the same; it’s better than its prequel, Education Before Verdun. The second novel in Zweig’s “A Trilogy of the Transition” series about World War I, The Case of Sergeant Grischa is widely considered to be the best of the three. At the time of its publication in 1927, in fact, it was often compared favorably with the much more famous All Quiet on the Western Front by Zweig’s contemporary, Erich Maria Remarque. It certainly raises many of the same moral questions about how nations fight their wars.
The plot, based on a true story, revolves around the hapless Russian soldier, Sergeant Grischa. It is the waning days of the war, and Grischa is laboring away in a prisoner of war camp. But, anticipating the end of the war, Grischa cannot face having to wait any longer to be reunited with his wife and the daughter he has never seen. He simply must escape. On the run from the Germans, he falls in with a motley assortment of other escapees, criminals and deserters. While he finds their companionship comforting for a time, Grischa will not be satisfied with anything less than going home. Worried about what would happen to him if he were recaptured and discovered to be an escaped prisoner, however, Grischa assumes the identity of a dead Russian who had, until recently, been another member of this band of outlaws. Well, it turns out that Grischa is recaptured, and unfortunately, the Russian who he is masquerading as was a known deserter. Even more unfortunate for Grischa, the Germans, who are facing their own problems with deserters, have issued a policy to execute any deserter from either side that they find. In this simple case of mistaken identity, Grischa is sentenced to death.
Grischa is ultimately able to reassert his true identity, however the damage has already been done. The merciless wheels of the mighty Imperial German military justice machine have caught Grischa, and try as he and his German defenders might, he cannot escape.
The Case of Sergeant Grischa is a brisk read, with engaging prose that at times verges on the poetic. Grischa’s trial and appeals merely form the mundane skeleton of the plot. The spiritual and moral struggles of the various characters involved in this passion play are what add flesh to the frame. Grischa’s anguish becomes our anguish as every attempt at salvation fails. By the end, nobody wants to see Grischa die. At the same time, nobody has the power to prevent it.
The question of the novel ultimately becomes, why does saving the life of one Russian become so important when millions of others are dying on the battlefield. The answer is given by Grischa’s staunchest defender, General Von Lychow, when he proclaims, “It is because justice is the foundation of all States, that nations have the right to tear themselves to pieces in their defense. But when a State begins to work injustice, it is rejected and brought low.” Arnold Zweig, in The Case of Sergeant Grischa, makes a very powerful case that, in the end, a nation is not brought down by losing a war. Rather, it is brought down by forgetting what it is fighting that war for in the first place. A very interesting conclusion when one considers what happened in Germany after it lost that war.
464 pgs.
