When Liebe Was Just a Five-Letter Word: Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Love 47

Abstract

So begins Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür (The Man Outside), a “play,” the subtitle tells us, “no theatre will produce and no public will want to see.” Borchert completed The Man Outside only a little over a year after the end of World War II. Produced as a radio play in early 1947, a stage production followed, but Borchert never saw it. He died, a victim of diseases contracted during the war. The play was a hit. Its protagonist is Beckmann, a Wehrmacht soldier whose homecoming is delayed because of an involuntary stay of “three years in Siberia” in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. He is tortured by the knowledge that by following his orders, eleven men detailed on a reconnaissance mission went to their deaths. But he has also suffered. He explains: “We are murdered each day, and each day we commit murder!” He plunges into the Elbe, but the river “spit[s] on [his] suicide,” forcing him to seek another way out.

A man comes to Germany.

And there he sees a quite fantastic film[…]. And when at the end he’s standing in the street again[…] he realizes that it was really a perfectly ordinary everyday film[…] About a man who comes to Germany, one of the many. One of the many who comes home—and then don’t come home, because there’s no home there for them any more. And their home is outside the door.¹