ABSTRACT
The German playwrights, between 1900 and the war years, portrayed with incredible intensity and violence the clash between generations, in which incest and murder play an important part. The German stage, then, with its treatment of revolt, violence and mysticism, clearly demonstrated, even before the outbreak of the First World War, the new outlook which can be called expressionist. The famous anthology of German Expressionist verse, Menschheitsdammerung, which was edited by Kurt Pinthus and which appeared in 1920, seemed to prophesy a new millennium, but the chiliastic overtones are very much apparent. The attitude of revolt in Germany was more extreme than in any other European country because of the more pronounced philistinism of the established society and the traditional feeling of isolation and vulnerability of the artist in Germany; the theatre, particularly, anticipated by fifty years anything that the British stage dared or deigned to consider.
