ABSTRACT
It is often mistakenly believed that expressionism, in St John Ervine’s words, was simply ‘the despair and neurosis of a defeated people’, a movement of intellectual crisis originating during the First World War and its aftermath. Before 1914 the young German writers who may be called Expressionists frequently portrayed an isolated individual struggling to give expression to the life force within him: this may be termed the Nietzschean element. Georg Kaiser is a remarkable phenomenon in theatrical history. At the height of his creative power, and during the climax of German Expressionism, that is, between 1917 and 1923, twenty-four plays by him were performed on the German stage. In Kaiser the idea of social reform is only of secondary importance: a Nietzschean self-overcoming, a spiritual regeneration must come first before society can be changed. In the final act Eustache de Saint-Pierre commits suicide that he may go on before the six into death and show the way.
