Simplicissimus, which has more than once been called the greatest of all German novels, has a terrible relevance in the America of today, writes Eric Bentley in his preface to this edition. "For the Thirty Years' War, which is its subject, was not just any war. It was a war which inflicted death not on individuals only but on cities, on populations, and it was a war in which life went on, between battles, in the seventeenth-century equivalent of deep shelters protected from the neighbors by machine guns: a war which, even more than other wars, brought out the worst in human nature....
Simplicissimus, which has more than once been called the greatest of all German novels, has a terrible relevance in the America of today, wr...