ABSTRACT
Translated and edited by Alan Raphael Pearlman
Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was born into a Prussian-Jewish family and volunteered for military service in the First World War. Deeply affected by his wartime experiences, Toller turned communist agitator, becoming involved in the fleeting Bavarian Soviet Republic (1919), for which he was subsequently imprisoned. It was while incarcerated that Toller became something of a prolific dramatist and poet. In 1927, three years after his release, the ground-breaking political theatre practitioner Erwin Piscator directed Toller’s Hoppla, We’re Alive! (Hoppla, wir leben!) in Berlin. Toller’s epic play, set mostly contemporaneously and ‘in many countries’, dramatizes the struggles encountered by a revolutionary after he has been released from a mental asylum, particularly through the impact of his friends’ accommodation to the political status quo, finally resulting in his suicide. The destiny of Toller’s anti-hero was to be mirrored in the dramatist’s own life. Interned and tortured in a Nazi concentration camp, Toller, along with numerous compatriot artists and writers, found himself as an émigré in the USA, and ended his own life in a New York hotel. This version contains a few corrections to the 2000 edition by the translator, and some of the appendices to that edition.
