Friedrich Wolf

• Born: December 23, 1888
• Birthplace: Neuwied, Germany
• Died: October 5, 1953
• Place of death: Lehnitz, East Germany

Other Literary Forms

Friedrich Wolf is best known as a playwright and film writer, but he produced a considerable amount of long and short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as well.

Achievements

Friedrich Wolf was a remarkably prolific writer. After initial attempts in expressionism, he achieved extraordinary success and fame as a socialist playwright, an effective anti-Nazi agitprop writer, and an author of film exposés. Together with Bertolt Brecht, Wolf belongs to the pioneers of new directions in the development of dramatic art and stagecraft. When, between 1960 and 1968, Else Wolf and Walther Pollatschek prepared the collected works of the author, the large body of his literary corpus, much of which had been previously published in various forms, resulted in sixteen volumes of about four hundred pages each.

Many of Wolf’s plays were translated into a number of foreign languages and performed in theaters in many countries, particularly in the Soviet Union. In the 1970’s, his dramas remained in the repertoire of theaters in the German Democratic Republic, especially in Leipzig, Weimar, and Dresden. Works such as the anti-Fascist drama Professor Mamlock or the provocative tragedy Cyankali, Paragraph 218 (cyanide, the abortion law) are still significant in the modern world.

Biography

Friedrich Wolf was born on December 23, 1888, in Neuwied on the Rhine, the son of a Jewish merchant. After completing elementary school, he continued his education in 1899 at the Königliche Gymnasium, a preparatory school in Neuwied. His lasting interests included the outdoors, sports, and later the youth movement Wandervogel. In 1903, he ran away from home, traveling to Holland as a cabin boy on board a barge on the Rhine. His family succeeded, however, in persuading him to complete his high school education. Wolf was graduated in 1907, then briefly served in the military in Heidelberg. He then began to study painting in Munich but changed majors and continued to study philosophy and medicine at the universities of Tübingen, Bonn, and Berlin. His main interests were psychiatry, methods of natural healing, and public health policies. In 1912, Wolf completed his preliminary examinations and then wrote his dissertation on multiple sclerosis in children. He then spent a year practicing medicine in Meissen and in Jena. In 1913, he obtained his state license to practice medicine and became an assistant physician, at first at a hospital in Dresden, then in Bonn. In 1914, he became a naval doctor on an ocean liner with the Canada line of the Norddeutscher Lloyd. His earliest drama dates back to this time.

When World War I broke out, Wolf was drafted as a battalion medical officer on the western and eastern fronts. Having experienced the brutality of war and a number of personal hardships, he became a pacifist, although he was obligated to continue his service as a medical officer. In 1917, while trapped in the fierce combat in the trenches in Flanders, Wolf began to write his first significant dramatic work. In 1918, he became chief physician at a military hospital near Dresden; at this time, he joined the revolutionary workers’ movement. During the November revolution in Germany that helped to bring World War I to an end, Wolf was a member of the Central Workers and Soldiers Council in Saxony. He also became a member of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) and of the Socialist Group of Intellectual Workers in Dresden. In 1919, one of Wolf’s plays was first produced on the stage.

In 1920, Wolf accepted the position of municipal medical official in Remscheid. His duties included—besides matters of public health and medical family practice—social work and family counseling and brought him into closer contact with the working class and the revolutionary labor leaders. When the reactionary “Kapp” uprising broke out, Wolf again became active in the workers’ movement. In 1921, he joined the communal estate Barkenhoff, which was owned by the well-known artist and socialist Heinrich Vogeler and was located in Worpswede near Bremen; Vogeler had opened his estate to jobless workers and their families for communal settling and experimental living. Wolf served there as a physician and peat cutter. A more conventional situation was needed, however, for the care of his wife, daughter, and son, so he opened a private medical practice in the small Swabian town of Hechingen. Soon, however, his first marriage was dissolved by mutual agreement, and he married Else Dreibholz of Hechingen. Two sons resulted from this second marriage, Markus and Konrad; the latter was to become as famous as his father. A renowned filmmaker, Konrad Wolf served for many years as the president of the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic; he died in 1982.

The medical practice did not keep Friedrich Wolf from his political activism. He had already been studying Marxism, Leninism, and the political goals of the Communist Party for a number of years. In 1926, he moved to Höllsteig, near Lake Constance, where he concentrated his efforts on completing a major medical work, Die Natur als Arzt und Helfer (1935; nature, your physician and helper), a sort of family medical guide. In 1925, he moved to Stuttgart, dedicating his medical practice to homeopathy and progressive methods of natural healing, a trend followed by a number of German physicians of that time.

The year 1928 marked a turning point in Wolf’s life. He officially joined the Communist Party, became a member of the Arbeiter Theaterbund (workers’ theater association), the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller (association of proletarian revolutionary writers), and the Arbeiter-Radio-Bund (workers’ radio association). He was also a founding member of the Stuttgart Chapter of the Volksfilmverband (people’s cinema association). In his famous address Kunst ist Waffe (1928; art is weapon), delivered at a convention of the Arbeiter Theaterbund Deutschlands (workers’ theater association of Germany), Wolf set forth his ideas on contemporary drama. In 1931, he was questioned on a charge of abortion, but nationwide protests on his behalf prevented his being imprisoned. Wolf became more and more involved in lecturing in favor of a revision of the abortion laws and similar matters of concern in public health policy. Later in 1931, Wolf visited the Soviet Union. In 1932, he began an association with the Spieltrupp Südwest, a socialist theater group, under the auspices of which he made his most important contributions to the agitprop movement. During this year, he paid his second visit to the Soviet Union, where Wolf attended the fifteenth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution.

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, Wolf emigrated to France via Austria and Switzerland. At the end of the year, he traveled once more to the Soviet Union. In 1934, he went to Warsaw in order to assist in the last stages of the production and to be present at the first night of the performance of his successful anti-Fascist drama Professor Mamlock in the Yiddish language. In the same year, he was delegated to the first Soviet Writers Congress. In 1935, he accepted an invitation to lecture on a tour through the United States and participated in the first American Writers Congress in New York City. A successful lecture tour through Scandinavia followed in 1936. Wolf traveled to France once more in 1938, planning to join the international Communist brigades in the Spanish Civil War, but he failed to get to Spain. When World War II broke out in 1939, Wolf was taken into custody by the French and detained at the French internment camp Le Vernet, later in two other camps in southern France. In 1941, Wolf was granted Soviet citizenship, for which he had applied earlier, and rescued from French detention by the Soviet authorities. In the Soviet Union, he was first employed in the Soviet anti-Fascist and information services; he later joined the Soviet army and was sent to the front lines, receiving the Red Star in 1943. One of the founders of the national committee of Freies Deutschland (free Germany), an organization of German emigrants, Wolf also participated in other organizational activities on behalf of Germans living in exile. He continued his anti-Fascist information and propaganda work in prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union.

In 1945, after the end of the war, Wolf returned to Germany and settled in Berlin, where he immediately became one of the most prominent cultural leaders in the Soviet occupied zone (after 1949, the German Democratic Republic), working with the media, with various theaters, and with some of the publishing houses. He was the cofounder of the East German film company DEFA and of the newly organized Volksbühnen (Association of German Theater Workshops). During the immediate postwar years, Wolf was one of the most prolific contributors to the critical periodical Ulenspiegel, in which he published many satiric pieces. In 1948, he became the president of the Association of German Theater Workshops, chief editor of the important periodical Volk und Kunst (the people and art), and cofounder of the German PEN center. He participated in the International Peace Congress in Wroclaw, Poland, and received the honorary title of professor from the Government of Brandenburg. Toward the end of that year, he moved to a new home in Lehnitz near Oranienburg. In 1949, Wolf led the first German writers’ delegation to Czechoslovakia; in that same year, after Germany was divided into the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, Wolf was appointed by the former as ambassador to Poland. He also received the highest honor of the GDR, the Nationalpreis, for his most famous play, Professor Mamlock. In 1951, Wolf became a member of the German Academy of Arts, was elected to the executive committee of the German Writers Association, and again won the national prize for his film Der Rat der Götter (1950; the council of the gods). In failing health, Wolf asked to be relieved from his ambassadorial post. The Polish government bestowed on him the Polonia Restituta (with star), a medal of high honor. During the same year, Wolf was elected president of the Deutsch-Polnische Gesellschaft für Frieden und Gute Nachbarschaft (German-Polish society for peace and good neighborhood). In October, 1953, Wolf died of a heart attack. A museum and archives were established in his home in Lehnitz.

Analysis

H. G. Wells described the early twentieth century as an “age of confusion.” He was thinking of the political and social turmoil of the time, but considering the vast artistic output, the swift succession of aesthetic currents designated by so many “isms,” the numerous contradictory theories existing side by side, and the fanaticism with which each movement set out to regenerate humankind, one would be inclined to extend Wells’s statement to include literature and the arts. Friedrich Wolf’s works, too, encompass some of these “isms.” His early writings were strongly influenced by expressionism —in the visual and literary arts, a tendency that strives for the expression of subjective feelings and emotions rather than the objective depiction of reality or nature. When Wolf began his career as a playwright, this movement was at its peak, with plays such as Georg Kaiser’s Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (pb. 1916, pr. 1917; From Morn to Midnight, 1920), Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch (pr. 1920, pb. 1921; Masses and Man, 1924), Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (pr. 1920), and others. In a later period, expressionism was marked by the disillusionment of World War I, which prompted a new concern for social truths. In literary expressionism, the characters and scenes are presented in a stylized manner with the intent of producing an emotional shock, sometimes through grotesque humor. Expressionist drama also gave rise to a new approach to staging, scene design, and directing. The objective of prominent contemporary stage directors such as Erwin Piscator, for example, was to create a unified production as perceived by the audience, a legacy of German Romanticism. It is within this framework that Wolf wrote his early plays: Mohammed in 1917, Das bist du in 1918, Der Unbedingte in 1919, Die schwarze Sonne in 1920, and Tamar in 1921. The author later rejected expressionism and what it represented, and he rewrote some of his earlier plays in an attempt to adapt their structure and message to the principles of socialist realism.

Der Löwe Gottes

One of the few books which the army doctor Wolf carried in his backpack during his service in World War I was a German translation of the Qur՚an. Amid the agonizing battles in the trenches of Flanders, Wolf wrote a typically expressionistic “scream play,” Der Löwe Gottes (the lion of God). The work, specified as an “oratorium,” consists of a succession of bold images, monologues, and dialogues; its key word is “heart.” By means of a messianic figure, the author intended to depict the path of humankind. The play deals with the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, until his flight from Mecca to Medina. Its focal point is the Prophet’s vocation to action. The work has strongly pacifistic overtones, and Leo Tolstoy’s “doctrine of nonviolence” forms an important element in the drama. In 1922, the play was published in K. Lorenz’s book Die rote Erde (red earth), and again in 1924 under the title Mohammed: Ein Schauspiel (Muhammad: a play). When Wolf rewrote the play, he tried to concentrate the plot on the social issues in Mecca at the time of Muhammad’s life and on the clashes between the ruling classes and the slaves. The new version, however, published in 1960 in the edition of the collected works, lacks the energy and immediacy of the original version, which Wolf had created “with the stroke of a pen.” This should come as no surprise. Wolf had tried to adapt the play to the principles of socialist realism, which demand a faithful, concrete representation of historical truth in its revolutionary development—that is, as it should be according to Marxist doctrine—and these requirements are diametrically opposed to the expressionistic aesthetic that informed the original version.

Das bist du

Although the expressionists believed that the decisive change in the life of modern people had to be accomplished by the individual, not by any social program, even in the original version of Mohammed, Wolf implicitly alluded to problems of his own time as well. This dimension is more clearly evident in Das bist du (that are you), produced in 1919, which was the first of a great number of Wolf’s plays to be produced on the stage. The title refers to an ancient Indian saying. The prelude presents several as-yet-unformed “beings” in the process of metempsychosis. In the main action, they return as woman, youth, ax, cross, and bench, while the central characters, the Tolstoy-like figure of Andreas and the symbolic figure of evil, the blacksmith Lukas, have already experienced earthly incarnation. On earth, the “things” and “humans” meet. While the humans remain in a passive state, initially incapable of action, the things (symbols of the antihuman) demand action: The ax wants to kill and seduce death; the cross, tired of the burden of love, wants to be an instrument of martyrdom again; and the bench wants to be a prop for the sinful deed.

The gardener, Andreas, lives in Utopia, a pure, Christian world of ideals, protected against temptation. Ruled by her desire, his wife, Martha, is a prisoner of her unquenched longing for love. The gardener’s helper, Johannes, vacillates between the two of them, and the demoniac, evil nature of Lukas the blacksmith meets with no response from the woman. This state of human existence, devoid of all potential for development, remains eternally the same and is, therefore, sterile. Finally, however, it is transformed by willful action into tragedy: The wife seduces the youth, who in turn allows himself to be seduced. The blacksmith then pushes, tempts, and rouses the jealous husband, Andreas, to the bloody deed. The ax in Andreas’s hand presses itself forward, and as Andreas sees his wife and the youth embracing on the bench, he fells the cross with the ax, and the falling cross strikes the youth dead.

In the epilogue, which is set on a glacier on another planet, the “humans” and “things” are transformed back into “beings” who find themselves in the next highest stage of metempsychosis. Now the “being” Andreas willingly chooses the woman, and with her, life. Johannes, who through his death has been purified, liberates the “beings” from the night of eternal sameness, a symbol for the rigid resistance of matter, and flares up into the radiant flame of the will, in which all beings merge and disappear: “We wanted to annihilate ourselves, but have been transformed.” Elements of Indian and Christian religious philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea, 1883-1886), and Wolf’s own, still awkwardly articulated worldview are here compressed into a problematical transformation play. The primitive earthly action comes across much more effectively than the vague framework of reflection, abstract poetry, and thought.

Der arme Konrad

Most of Wolf’s early plays carry strong autobiographical overtones and suggest ideas stemming from the Wandervogel youth movement. By the early 1920’s, however, as the nationalist, conservative forces in Germany were growing more articulate, the left-wing writers felt the need to deal with problems of practical interest; they could no longer find their criteria in abstract aesthetics. Wolf, along with many left-wing writers, began to adopt a style associated with the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity ), frequently using material that was readily accessible in German life, past and present. Der arme Konrad (poor Konrad) illustrates this shift in Wolf’s approach. A historical drama focusing on an episode from the year 1514 during the German peasants’ uprisings, it is accompanied by extensive stage directions; Wolf had supplied his works with such annotations before, but in the case of Der arme Konrad, he added an afterward with information on his sources and extensive suggestions for the smaller theaters and drama workshops so popular with the socialists and Communists. A later edition carries a report by the author on former performances, specifically on open-air stages.

Kolonne Hund

Kolonne Hund (Hund’s troop) deals with Wolf’s experiences of 1920 in Worpswede, where the artist Heinrich Vogeler had placed some land at the disposal of a group of former servicemen and unemployed workers. It was one of a number of similar veterans’ rehabilitation colonies that sprang up all over postwar Germany, where these men and their families endeavored to overcome the economic difficulties bequeathed by the war. Though the government promised its support, the success of this venture depended on a favorable solution of the question of land reform. The play portrays the struggle of the settlers and the refusal of the government to give them the needed support and authority. The remarkable success of this drama in many parts of Germany shows that Wolf was dealing with a problem of wide and burning contemporary interest.

Cyankali, Paragraph 218

Cyankali, Paragraph 218 has never lost its appeal and significance. Wolf, who was developing his own version of a new theory of drama, especially in his famous speech (later printed as an essay) Kunst ist Waffe, wrote a special essay on Cyankali, Paragraph 218, which he updated several times. During his lifetime alone, the play was performed two hundred times at the Berlin Lessing-theater. The national radio network produced its own version, Twentieth Century-Fox made a film, and many other theaters in German and foreign cities such as Moscow, Amsterdam, Zurich, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Shanghai produced performances, some of which provoked a scandal. For example, in Stettin, Catholic youths stormed the stage with beer bottles and clubs, and in Basel, protestors threw tear-gas bombs on the stage and into the audience.

The theme of the controversial work harks back to similar themes from familiar earlier literature, such an Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin (child murderess), the Gretchen-theme in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, pb. 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1828), Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena (pb. 1844; Maria Magdalene, 1935), Gerhart Hauptmann’s Rose Bernd (pr., pb. 1903; English translation, 1913), and others. Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code is the section forbidding a physician to perform an abortion, on pain of imprisonment. To Wolf, this problem appeared as a question directly involving the social realities of a capitalist society, rather than one of abstract morality. He felt that the effect of the regulation was to penalize the poor because those who had the necessary financial resources could always find the means to circumvent the law. It is the tragedy of Hete, the main protagonist in the drama, whose fiancé, Paul, is out on strike, that unable to pay the high fee demanded by doctors who were nevertheless willing to perform the operation, she feels forced to resort to unqualified quackery and dies of the consequences. Poverty and unemployment are the major reasons why she is compelled to prevent her child from being born. Set in the working-class milieu of Berlin and a large industrial conglomerate there, the play exposes the social and economic injustice tolerated by the government and the hypocrisy and corruption hidden, as the author sees it, behind the social respectability of a capitalist society.

The Sailors of Cattaro

The Sailors of Cattaro, depicting in 1930 the events of 1917, was another very popular play. In the style of the New Objectivity, Wolf employed a historical incident—the revolt of sailors on an Austrian battleship in the Bay of Cattaro—to create a rousing piece of socialist agitation. In the text, Wolf incorporated one of Lenin’s most telling statements, written on November 6, 1917, amid the Russian Revolution: “Once it starts you must follow it through to the end.” The author researched the court-martial records and talked with some of the witnesses who had been in the Bay of Cattaro at the time of the mutiny. The names used in the drama are not fictitious but are the real names of those involved. The record reads: “On February 11, 1918, at 6 a.m. the following ringleaders of the naval revolt are to be shot in Skaljari near Cattaro, according to paragraph 156 of the Austrian Manual of War and the decision of the Court-Martial: Boatswain Mate Franz Rasch, Able Seaman Anton Grabar, Gunner’s Mate Maté Jerko Sisgoric, and Gunner’s Mate Bernicevic.”

What led to this court-martial and the execution of these men? As Wolf sketches the scene, the crew, battle-weary and starving, are handing out the prohibited Workers’ Newspaper from Vienna, which carries reports about worker unrest on the Continent. The Dalmatians and the Slovakians are suffering bitterly from ethnic discrimination. The revolt is finally triggered by an overzealous lieutenant’s punitive drilling and his misappropriations in the officers’ mess hall. Led by shipmate Franz Rasch and gunner Jerko Sisgoric, a sailors’ council takes over the ship’s command and takes the officers prisoner. The entire fleet joins the mutiny and hoists the red flag. After a few days, however, the uprising is undermined by disunity, egotism, intoxication with power, senseless excesses, and fear of court-martial, and it collapses under the fire of coastal regiments. The majority of the men turn over their leaders to receive the death penalty, thus buying their own rehabilitation. The play illuminates the aspirations of the rank and file, the men who must fight the world’s wars. It insightfully depicts their officers as well. This antiwar play vividly recaptures the action behind the lines of the Central Powers. As early as 1935, it was translated into English and performed in New York City, where some of the witnesses of the events saw the play and reportedly wept and laughed, calling out, “Yes, that is what happened.” East German critics consider this work to be the first significant drama of socialist realism in German literature.

Professor Mamlock

When Hitler seized power in Germany, Wolf emigrated and intensified his anti-Fascist struggle in his writings and stage productions in exile. Professor Mamlock, written in Switzerland and France at the beginning of Wolf’s years in exile, is perhaps his most enduring work. It deals with the illusions of the Jewish surgeon Mamlock, who tries to remain detached from political life. His convictions, however, are shattered when, in the end, he is destroyed by the very forces that he had tolerated because he thought it no part of his job to bother with them. Under the pressure of events and the influence of his Communist son, who is active in the underground student movement, Mamlock discovers that duty requires him to take part in organized political resistance, but this insight comes too late for him.

The action of the play begins in 1932 and ends in 1933, the year in which Hitler seized power. Professor Mamlock, chief surgeon in a university hospital, a Jew by birth and at the same time a conservative German citizen who loves his country, is a veteran of World War I and votes for the war hero Paul von Hindenburg as president of the Republic. When fire destroys the Reichstag building and the anti-Semitic persecutions by the Nazis begin, Mamlock is told to leave his position as chief surgeon. Abandoned by his colleagues, he faces alone the powerful National Socialist party member and his successor in the clinic, Dr. Hellpach. Mamlock’s insistence on a strict separation of professional life from politics provokes conflict in his own family. He naïvely believes the government’s reports that the fire was an action of Communist terrorists and disagrees with his son Rolf, who has joined the underground movement of young dissidents. A new regulation permits Mamlock to return once more to his work as a surgeon but not as the department head. The new chief surgeon, Hellpach, pressures the clinic’s personnel into opposing Mamlock’s stay at the clinic. Finally Mamlock must face the truth. He exhorts his assistant, Dr. Inge Ruoff, who loves Rolf, to join his son in the political struggle. Feeling totally abandoned by both his colleagues and family, Mamlock commits suicide. Despite the tragic fate of the hero, there is some hope for the future in the figure of Dr. Inge Ruoff and her ethical commitment.

The playwright intended to entrust the first performance of this play to the well-known company of actors Truppe 31 under the leadership of Gustav von Wangenheim. The entire group and their director had emigrated to Switzerland, but, as a result of financial difficulties, the group was forced to dissolve. Therefore, Wolf sent the manuscript of Professor Mamlock to New York, where a progressive group of actors, the Theatre Union, took an interest in producing it. Again, however, to the deep disappointment of the author, the play was not produced, but another opportunity presented itself. The drama was translated into Yiddish and, in 1934, was performed in Poland at the Warsaw Kaminski Theater, with a prominent émigré, the German-Jewish actor Alexander Granach, in the title role. During the same year, the original German version of Professor Mamlock was performed in Zurich. This performance immediately gained international attention and marked the beginning of a very successful history of reception, with productions in many countries throughout the world. The work was first published in the exile press in Zurich and Moscow, and has been translated into a number of languages. It has been filmed twice, the second time in 1960 by Wolf’s son Konrad Wolf.

The author reported that he and other refugees from the Hitler regime were often asked how the victory of the Nazis was possible in the country of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, a highly developed culture, the “land of poets and thinkers.” The plot of Professor Mamlock and its underlying meaning try to answer such questions, and more: Wolf also attempted to make visible the forces which eventually would be able to “wipe the brown disgrace from the face of the German nation.” Three important topics of the 1930’s are powerfully presented in Professor Mamlock: the problem of the intellectual’s life under an oppressive, authoritarian regime; the problem of the persecution of Jews, and, implicitly, discrimination against any minority group made scapegoat; and the beginning of the intensive anti-Fascist information and propaganda struggle by those exiled from Germany and even by small groups in Germany.

Postwar Works

In 1945, Wolf returned to a hungry, shivering, physically and mentally shattered, chaotic Germany occupied by foreign military forces. In the immediate postwar years, Wolf was occupied with the reconstruction of his nation, both in his writing and in his many other activities. He was particularly concerned with the condition of young people traumatized and disillusioned by the war, and it was to them that he dedicated the play Wie Tiere des Waldes (like animals in the forest). In this drama about the confusion, love, persecution, and death of young people, written right after the end of the war, Wolf already warned of the dangers of new wars. At the same time, he completed a drama that he had begun when he was still in Moscow. Die letzte Probe (the last rehearsal), the plot of which begins in Vienna, not only is a tragedy of love, but also was intended to be a tragedy of western emigration as seen by leftist political activists and writers. In Bürgermeister Anna (Mayor Anna), a comedy set in a village where the women manage affairs very well while the younger men are out fighting the war, Wolf exposes the nature of male gamesmanship in politics and the working world. The women, who focus their efforts on tasks for the common good, such as building a village school with their own hands and the help of a few cooperative men, gradually learn about those realities of the paternalistic working world. Under the leadership of their capable young mayor, Anna, however, they manage well in the end, when the new order of society is tested by the homecoming soldiers who, in turn, must also learn to adapt to the new ways.

Thomas Münzer

Before his sudden, unexpected death, Wolf completed one more major drama. The theme of Thomas Münzer: Der Mann mit der Regenbogenfahne (Thomas Münzer, the man with the rainbow banner) was not new to the author, who for more than thirty years had maintained a keen interest in the history of the German peasant revolts during the sixteenth century. In his first historical drama written in the realistic style, Der arme Konrad, he had depicted one of the earliest peasant revolutionaries, and now, after more extensive studies on the subject, he chose as his main protagonist Thomas Münzer, a Thuringian theologian and leader of a group of rebellious peasants. There is, however, an important difference between the treatment of the two heroes in these plays on the German peasants’ revolutions. In Der arme Konrad, the hero and main protagonist is in fact the people as a collective entity, which Konrad represents, but in Thomas Münzer, the complex leader figure is himself the main protagonist of the play. Wolf did not live to be present at the premiere of this, his last work for the stage.

Bibliography

Burns, Rob, ed. German Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995. This general work on German culture in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century covers Wolf in its discussion of socially critical art. Provides understanding of the world around Wolf.

Fetz, Gerald A. “From Der arme Konrad (1923) to Thomas Münzer (1953): Friedrich Wolf and the Development of the Socialist History Play in Germany.” German Studies Review 10 (May, 1987): 255-272. A look at the development of the socialist history play in Germany through the works of Wolf.

Heizer, Donna K. Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996. Heizer compares and contrasts the works of Jewish writer Wolf with those of Else Lasker-Schüler and Franz Werfel. Bibliography and index.