ABSTRACT
There is a peculiar irony in the fact that the strongest historical evidence of German-speaking authors taking an affectionate interest in Yiddish and the Yiddish-speaking communities of Eastern Europe is found in the period when the hostilities between European nations had come to a head during World War I. The encounters on which this chapter focuses were initiated when German writers were stationed in Eastern Europe, as soldiers in the Kaiser's army. The few texts are arguably minor components in the complex history of socio-cultural relations between the Jewish populations in Eastern Europe and the population of the German-speaking world. The encounters with East European Jewry, the chapter discusses on the basis of testimonies published in the 1920s, are those of Sammy Gronemann, Arnold Zweig, Alfred Doblin, and Joseph Roth. Gronemann couches his eye-opening encounter with the East in the language of the self-ironizing raconteur, Arnold Zweig may be thought of as the great rhapsodist of the East European Jew.
