Zwischen Weiss und Rot

New edition of the worldwide bestseller: The famous novel about the Russian Civil War was praised from all sides upon its release in 1930, even by the KPD newspaper 'Rote Fahne.' Karl Radek prepared a translation into Russian. As late as 1947, Johannes R. Becher ranked the novel among the 20 most important German books of the first half of the century. Edwin Erich Dwinger, the son of a Russian mother, found himself in Russian captivity at the beginning of World War I as a 17-year-old German volunteer. His novel 'The Army Behind Barbed Wire,' based on his own experiences, became one of the major book successes of the Weimar Republic in 1929. In 1930, the stirring portrayal of the Russian Civil War in 'Between White and Red' followed as a continuation, bringing the author into discussions for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dwinger succeeded in authentically depicting both sides of the civil war, in their aspirations and ideals as well as in their cruelties and atrocities. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, 'FAZ' dedicated a full-page article to the author, stating: 'For Dwinger's audience, it was not the thunder of steel and the heroism of war that mattered, but rather the destruction of people by war and in captivity that was central. Today, Dwinger's Siberia is the portrait of a vanished world and, even more, the dark painting of a German landscape of the soul.'.