Many German Jews saw World War I as an opportunity to gain equal rights in the German Empire. Yet some associated it rather with the encounter with Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jewry. Being deployed to parts of Poland, Galicia or the later Ukraine, writers such as Arnold Zweig, Sammy Gronemann and Max Brod were confronted with orthodox Jewry and accessed a different cultural and religious system. After the war, they described their experiences in various literary genres. While Zweig idealized Eastern European Jewish life in his essay „Das ostjüdische Antlitz“ (1920) and Gronemann tried to illustrate daily life and explain religious traditions in his memoir „Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich“ (1924), Brod developed the idea of an educational system for the Jewish minority.