Ernst Toller: Art and Politics

Abstract

Although Ernst Toller achieved international fame as a dramatist in the 1920s — his plays were translated into more than twenty languages — his work and reputation have suffered a severe decline that derives, in part, from peculiar historical and political factors. Because he was Jewish, and because he was an outspoken opponent of Nazism, his writings were proscribed in 1933 and the staging of his plays in Germany forbidden. Following the end of the Second World War, when it might have seemed his reputation would be rehabilitated, he fell victim to the Cold War and the West’s distrust of Communism. West Germany, in the 1950s and 1960s, had little liking for the ‘red’ Toller; in 1977 only one of Toller’s plays, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla! Such is Life!) was in print there. Since 1978, thanks to the work of the scholars W. Frühwald and J. M. Spalek, Toller’s work is available again and a fresh appreciation of his art is now possible.

‘A Jewish mother bore me, Germany nursed me, Europe educated me, the earth is my homeland, the world my fatherland.’ (T. 4/228)