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Vision and Aftermath: Four Expressionist War Plays
English, German (translation)
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
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June 26, 2025This is a very good collection of Expressionist war plays (although what we all mean by "Expressionist" is, as usual, up for grabs). The collection contains four plays:
I would call Carl Hauptmann's War: a Te Deum a bold Symbolist drama. It's more of an enormous pageant about the horrors of war than anything else, and the fact that Ritchie collects it here under the Expressionist rubric demonstrates only how capacious the category of Expressionism is. War: a Te Deum avoids any sense of the usual Expressionist dramatic structure and it has no central character whom it follows. What it does have is a hopeful ending. That is one version of (Tollerian) Expressionism, at least.
Reinhard Goering's Naval Encounter is a truly brilliant piece of theatre. It's a chamber drama of madness and action set in a gunboat turret. The play's debt to naturalism and, indeed, to the Grand-Guignol is quite clear, though the play doesn't do any of the narrative reversals that are so common in the Grand-Guignol or the comédies rosses from the period. Instead, Goering's play is poetic and language driven, in addition to being rich with naturalist action. This is expressionism to a tee: a poet's theatre also rich with the real and the grotesque.
Walter Hasenclever's Antigone: Tragedy in Five Acts is an Expressionist Antigone designed for a large arena presentation like something Max Reinhardt would put on, including horses and a giant chorus. This is an Antigone that focuses on Creon more than the eponymous heroine. It is, therefore, a portrait of a man who commits evil after evil for his own glory before finally understanding what he has done. It's worth noting, too, that this is a surprisingly Christianity-inflected Antigone. The Christian god appears throughout the text and is a central thematic, even when characters stake a claim to atheism.
Finally, the collection includes Erst Toller's Hinkemann: a Tragedy in Three Acts, and this is the most regularly Expressionist play of the group. This is a dark, dark tale, rather akin to (and probably somewhat based on) Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. It's filled with intriguing nightmare sequences and imagery, and the central character is concerned chiefly with existential questions of what it means to be a human being, what our relationship is to animals, what the purpose of life might be, and how we might act toward one another. It's a powerful, dark text.
I would call Carl Hauptmann's War: a Te Deum a bold Symbolist drama. It's more of an enormous pageant about the horrors of war than anything else, and the fact that Ritchie collects it here under the Expressionist rubric demonstrates only how capacious the category of Expressionism is. War: a Te Deum avoids any sense of the usual Expressionist dramatic structure and it has no central character whom it follows. What it does have is a hopeful ending. That is one version of (Tollerian) Expressionism, at least.
Reinhard Goering's Naval Encounter is a truly brilliant piece of theatre. It's a chamber drama of madness and action set in a gunboat turret. The play's debt to naturalism and, indeed, to the Grand-Guignol is quite clear, though the play doesn't do any of the narrative reversals that are so common in the Grand-Guignol or the comédies rosses from the period. Instead, Goering's play is poetic and language driven, in addition to being rich with naturalist action. This is expressionism to a tee: a poet's theatre also rich with the real and the grotesque.
Walter Hasenclever's Antigone: Tragedy in Five Acts is an Expressionist Antigone designed for a large arena presentation like something Max Reinhardt would put on, including horses and a giant chorus. This is an Antigone that focuses on Creon more than the eponymous heroine. It is, therefore, a portrait of a man who commits evil after evil for his own glory before finally understanding what he has done. It's worth noting, too, that this is a surprisingly Christianity-inflected Antigone. The Christian god appears throughout the text and is a central thematic, even when characters stake a claim to atheism.
Finally, the collection includes Erst Toller's Hinkemann: a Tragedy in Three Acts, and this is the most regularly Expressionist play of the group. This is a dark, dark tale, rather akin to (and probably somewhat based on) Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. It's filled with intriguing nightmare sequences and imagery, and the central character is concerned chiefly with existential questions of what it means to be a human being, what our relationship is to animals, what the purpose of life might be, and how we might act toward one another. It's a powerful, dark text.
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