SOURCE: Schwab, Gweneth B. “Herod and Barabbas: Lagerkvist and the Long Search.” Scandinavica 20, no. 1 (May 1981): 75-85.

In the following essay, Schwab asserts that in his novels Barabbas and Herod and Mariamne Lagerkvist “depicts mankind with reference to one of the most significant events in religious history and reveals the same turmoil, confusion, and incompleteness that has always defined man.”

The world recoiled from World War I only to instigate the forces which would produce World War II. The pattern of crisis of the twentieth century is well known: the crisis of faith in God, of faith in science, of faith in history, and of faith even that man can learn from or correct his own errors. The holocaust soiled the century with a horror nearly indescribable. The crisis of the century repeated itself over and over in the crises of individual consciences. Yet, out of these ashes of...