Leonhard Frank's fiction and dramas span expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the realistic literature of the Weimar period. He was a champion of the common people, a pacifist, an opponent of the death penalty, and a socialist. Pacifist and socialist themes are presented in his works sometimes in an earnest didactic mode, sometimes as sentimental melodramatic pathos. Social commitment is gradually displaced by Frank's great theme of grand passions, often of an illicit or socially disapproved nature, such as his novel of incestuous love, Bruder und Schwester (1929; translated as Brother and Sister, 1930), or the story Karl und Anna (1927; translated as Carl and Anna, 1929), in which a homecoming soldier replaces a comrade--who is still a prisoner of war--in the bed and heart of the latter's wife.

Frank suffered greatly from exile and the loss of contact with his native culture and society during the Nazi period. In spite...