Alexander M. Frey

Alexander M. Frey (1881–1957) was a German author whose antiwar novel Die Pflasterkästen (published in English as The Cross Bearers) is considered by some critics to be superior to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. A lifelong friend of Thomas Mann, Frey refused to join the National Socialist Party, despite having served as a medic in the trenches of World War I alongside dispatcher Adolf Hitler, and would later need to escape Germany into exile as his books were burned by the Nazis. He spent the last twenty years of his life in Switzerland, though without being granted legal status until a few days before his death.