Professor Westfield searches for an understanding of the waste of the Great War and a release from his existential crisis.

It’s right to wrestle oneself away from the mutilation through the external. For the problem of life involves displacing the activity deeper and deeper into ourselves. That is the only way to freedom, the only possibility for this eternal, fundamental requirement of mankind to finally become fact.

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933); appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926); and also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

He investigates the oppositions in the inner life not by that which separates them, by which they just become oppositions - but rather by that which brings them close to one another. … He does not try to make comprehensible why a man acts in some way, instead he simply depicts the animated urge from which he must act in a certain way. - Arthur Moeller-Bruck