Glaeser, Ernst

(1902-1963)

   writer; his Jahrgang 1902 (Class of 1902), an autobiographical novel, is ranked among the best fictional accounts of World War I Born to the family of a judge in the Hessian town of Butzbach, he settled in Wiesbaden following university studies and worked as a freelance writer and stage director He was literary director of the Southwest German Radio Station during 1928-1930 His fame was assured with the 1928 publication of Jahrgang 1902, an erotic, political, and psychological account of ordinary life on the home front A similar mix of sexuality and politics appeared in his 1931 novel Das Gut im Elsass.

   Glaeser's politics remain a subject of speculation. He incurred the wrath of rightist elements during the Republic, some of whom initiated legal proceedings against him for allegedly sacrilegious publications. He was a socialist during the late 1920s and he published Der Staat ohne Arbeitslose (State without unem-ployed), a celebration of Soviet Russia, in 1931. His espousal of pacifism in-duced his emigration to Switzerland in November 1933 after his books had been burned by the NSDAP. Yet he was never trusted by fellow exiles, many of whom found it suspicious that the Nazis failed to ban his post-1933 writings. Involved with a Nazi circle in Zürich, he returned to Germany in May 1938 and was soon chief editor of the army newspaper,* Adler im Süden. In a sharp volte-face after World War II he published an article praising the exile literature that had served as the "conscience of the nation."

   REFERENCES:Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals; Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers; Kunisch, Handbuch.