ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to Die Maschinenstürmer it was noted that Hinkemann marked the end of the earlier of the two major phases into which Toller’s dramatic oeuvre naturally divides itself. In the tragic vision of Hinkemann, the vision of a world in which, irrespective of political reforms, the leaden yoke is, in the words of Ernst Heilborn, laid on a man’s shoulders by God’s own hands (1) , Toller had reached a conclusion beyond which advance in the same direction was impossible: the sequence, Friedrich, Sonja, Jimmy Cobbett, Hinkemann, was complete. From now on, even though his plays continue to contain ‘victims’ — Karl Thomas, Reichpietsch and Köbis, Dr Frank Färber and Anna Gerst, and Pastor Hall — they are primarily studies in the misuse of power and the closely related theme of the miscarriage of justice. The second phase also resembles the first in that it begins quite hopefully, almost optimistically, with the comic treatment of a defeated demagogue and ends with the death of Pastor Hall in the shadow of a Nazi concentration camp, though the progress from tenuous hope to despair is less direct.
Wotan Unbound was, says Toller,
Written in the cheerful power of growing early springtime in the year 1923 in the fortress-prison of Niederschönenfeld (2) .
