Abstract

Post-war German Drama

Did the war really cause decisive change in German drama? Not at all. It is strikingly confirmed today, after ten years, that the present tendencies in the drama began their development years before the war, and that since then they have simply been in more rapid eruption. The struggle between the generations, the father-and-son problem, the fight between compromise and directness, between bourgeois and anti-bourgeois, had stirred young intellects before the war made a reality of what they had prophetically seen coming. During the war very little got to the public through the strict censorship. But after the collapse, every day brought new works from the newly liberated minds. The form which this art took was called expressionism. It was just as much reaction as it was synthetic and creative action. It tuned against that tendency in art which was satisfied merely to set down impressions, one after the other, without troubling to question their essential nature, justification, or the idea involved. The expressionists were not satisfied simply to photograph.