Graf, Oskar Maria

Born July 22, 1894, in Berg, Bavaria; died June 28, 1967, in New York. German writer.

A baker’s son, Graf ran away from home and led a vagabond’s life. He joined the army in 1915. He was sentenced to be shot for mutiny but was confined to a psychiatric hospital instead. He took part in the revolutionary movement of 1918–19 as a member of an independent social democratic party. In 1933 he emigrated and wrote an open-letter pamphlet to the Nazi government, “Burn Me” (1933). Graf’s first books were the collections of poems Revolutionaries (1917) and the novella The Early Time (1922; Russian translation, 1925). The novel We Are in a Trap (1927) is autobiographical. One of the significant works of antifascist literature is Grafs novel Anton Sittinger (1937; Russian translation, 1939). The novel The Unrest Caused by the Peacemaker (1948) portrays the everyday life of the Bavarian countryside. The novel The Conquest of the World (1948) describes the dreadful consequences of atomic war. Also well known are the play Ballad of a Small Town (1952), the novel Escape to Mediocrity (1959). and the collection of stories The Peasant’s Big Mirror (1962).