In the 1920s, after the completion of his Paracelsus trilogy, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer was a leading German novelist, perhaps the leading German historical novelist, and the main hope of those who looked to literature to give more explicit encouragement to national pride than did the uncrowned kings of German letters, Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, who were more committed to democratic and social ideals. As a writer whose opposition to the Versailles treaty and adherence to ideas of German greatness were incontestable, whose major works had a large readership, and who could match Mann's epic breadth and conviction, he was clearly predestined, with Hans Grimm, Hermann Stehr, and a few others, to carry the banner of heroic literature in the struggle against the "decadent" tendencies of the age--a struggle neatly summed up when Mann left the hall during Kolbenheyer's speech at the Weimar Goethe centenary celebrations in 1932. The...