Georg Kaiser

Dramatist

• Born: November 25, 1878
• Birthplace: Magdeburg, Germany
• Died: June 4, 1945
• Place of death: Ascona, Switzerland

Other Literary Forms

Georg Kaiser published film scripts, essays, and two novels: Es ist genug (1932; it is enough), an autobiographical work whose plot unfolds in an imaginary setting, and Villa Aurea (1940; Vera, 1939), which is—like many of Kaiser’s plays—based on an abstract thought or thesis: Humankind is afraid of nothingness; it knows that nothingness is the only truth, but it does not want to acknowledge it.

During his exile in Switzerland, Kaiser wrote several short stories. Many of them draw their inspiration from political events, such as the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops (“Lieutenant Welzeck”) or the rise of Adolf Hitler and his hypnotic power over the German masses (“Nach einem verlorenen Krieg”). Like many (former) expressionists (such as Ernst Barlach, Reinhard J. Sorge, and Alfred Döblin), Kaiser used the fairy-tale genre to express his philosophical and theological views (humanity as the devil’s creation in “Die Ausgeburt”; love as a purifying force in “Das Märchen des Konigs”). Kaiser’s poetry, especially the poems written during his exile, shows the strong influence of Rainer Maria Rilke. The film scripts, essays, novels, stories, and poems have been collected in the fourth volume of the 1971 edition of Kaiser’s collected works, edited by Walther Huder.

Achievements

Georg Kaiser was one of the most prolific playwrights in the history of German drama. He wrote approximately seventy plays, many of which were performed throughout Germany in the 1920’s. Among all the expressionist dramatists, he developed the most progressive antinaturalistic dramaturgy. His influence on younger playwrights both inside and outside Germany was considerable. Bertolt Brecht, a major and influential dramatist himself, has acknowledged that he learned much from Kaiser’s dramatic techniques, particularly from Kaiser’s views about the role of the audience. Kaiser did not want his audience to adopt an attitude of passive empathy. Spectators were not supposed to forget themselves by means of uncritically identifying with the protagonist onstage. Kaiser’s abstract style was devised to counteract such an attitude and foster an alert and critical mental disposition on the part of spectators. The fact that many of Kaiser’s plays have been translated into English and other languages attests his international reputation.

Biography

Georg Kaiser was born on November 25, 1878, in Magdeburg, Germany. He attended elementary school in Magdeburg from 1885 to 1888 and then entered a Lutheran monastery school, which he left in 1895. During his years in the monastery school, he frequently attended concerts, operas, and plays. In 1895, he worked as an apprentice in a Magdeburg bookstore but gave up after a few weeks because his lofty ideas about literature and books were shattered by his experience of the commercial aspects of the book trade. In 1896, Kaiser worked for a commercial firm and began to study foreign languages. Three years later, he traveled to Buenos Aires, where he found employment as a clerk in the branch office of the General Electric Company (AEG) of Berlin. During that time, he contracted malaria. He returned to his parents in 1901. After having suffered a nervous breakdown, he was treated for half a year in a Berlin sanatorium.

During the years from 1903 to 1907, Kaiser wrote several plays. In 1908, he married Margarethe Habenicht, the daughter of a wholesale merchant. Kaiser was not drafted during World War I because of a nervous disorder. He volunteered, however, to work for the Red Cross in Weimar. The years from 1916 to 1918 brought Kaiser fame as a playwright; many of his plays were performed in German cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin.

In November, 1918, Kaiser moved to Munich, where he befriended the expressionist writer Ernst Toller, who was one of the leaders of the short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria. Because of financial problems, Kaiser pawned and sold some furniture and art objects belonging to the owner of a house he had rented in Tutzing, Bavaria. This led, in October, 1920, to Kaiser’s arrest in Berlin. Kaiser was charged with embezzlement. In February, 1921, he was sentenced to one year in prison but was released in April of the same year and placed on probation for six months. In the following years, Kaiser’s plays were staged in major cities all over the world. In 1926, Kaiser became an elected member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Letters.

The rise of National Socialism meant the end of Kaiser’s career as a playwright in Germany. Publication and performances of his plays were forbidden by the new regime, and his books were burned along with those of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Lion Feuchtwanger, and others in May, 1933. For a while, his plays could still be performed in Austria (before the “Anschluss” in 1938) and other countries.

In 1938, Kaiser fled to Switzerland via the Netherlands after a search warrant for his home near Berlin had been issued. Until his death in 1945, Kaiser lived in Switzerland, where he continued to write plays, novels, poetry, and film scripts. He wished to emigrate to the United States, but Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann failed in their efforts to obtain a visa for him. On June 4, 1945, Kaiser died in Ascona, Switzerland. Most of the plays that he had written after he left Germany were performed on German stages after the end of World War II.

Analysis

Many of Georg Kaiser’s plays are, in both form and content, part of literary expressionism , a movement in central European countries that can be regarded as an integral part of the revolutionary trends stirring literature and art in Europe around 1900. This movement, supported by the young generation of artists and writers, was a reaction against the passive reproduction of reality by the artists and authors of impressionism and naturalism. To be sure, the expressionists also intended to show certain aspects of a society shaped by industrialism and technology, but they also wished to conjure up a vision of a better world and of a “new man.” This vision necessitated a new style disregarding the rules of mimesis and realism, a style that abstracted from observable actions and events what was taken to be their “essence” underneath an often misleading “appearance.” Expressionist aesthetics prescribe that the primary impulse of the creative act should originate in the author’s or artist’s subjective creative intuition. The observable real world serves as material to be shaped according to the creator’s “vision.”

This is why in Kaiser’s plays, as well as in those of his fellow expressionists, the characters have been reduced to “types” representing an idea or a typical social function. They no longer speak and act according to psychological role models. Indeed, they are highly artificial creatures whom one would presumably never meet in real life. Nevertheless, they embody the flaws of society or the Utopian hopes of the author for a new society. Kaiser’s plays also reduce naturalistic detail to a minimum of essential props. Light and color frequently assume a symbolic function. Most of Kaiser’s plays have a highly intellectual quality. Their antithetical and dialectical structure is based on an idea or a thought that is carried to its conclusion, even though in the process, the plot may take a turn toward the absurd and paradoxical. Just as Kaiser’s plots often assume an utterly unrealistic quality, the characters in his expressionistic plays speak a language that is as artificial and abstract as they themselves are. This is no longer the language of the naturalists, who strove to copy as faithfully as possible the way certain human beings talk in real life, right down to the shades of local dialects. Kaiser’s language is one of typification and condensation. Its function is, once again, to reveal the essence behind the mask of appearance. Adjectives are used sparingly, and verbs and articles are frequently omitted.

If there is one common thematic denominator in most of Kaiser’s plays, it is his deep concern about the quality and dignity of human life in a changed socioeconomic environment. Kaiser exposes the shortcomings of his characters (and of the societies in which they live) when he depicts individuals as well as entire groups of humans as victims of war, selfishness, hatred, greed, or technological “progress.” These are the forces that militate against a better form of life that has not yet advanced beyond the stage of a Utopian dream. Yet Kaiser offers a glimpse of this better world, of a nonrepressive and just society ruled by the “new man” who achieves (often through personal sacrifice) a morally superior form of existence. This new life will not be the result of revolutions or political maneuvers but will—such was Kaiser’s hope—eventually spring from an inner metamorphosis of the individual.

The Citizens of Calais

One of Kaiser’s best-known expressionistic plays is The Citizens of Calais. Kaiser based the plot of the play on the historical siege of the French city of Calais by English troops under Edward III in 1346. The king promises to spare the city and its recently completed harbor if six citizens present the city’s key to him and are willing to be executed. The elder citizen Eustache de Saint-Pierre offers himself and asks for other volunteers. When six others volunteer, Eustache first proposes to draw lots in order to eliminate one of the seven volunteers. Having second thoughts about this procedure, however, he changes his mind and makes all seven lots equal. Then he declares that he who appears last on the market square the next morning will go free. The next morning, all the others appear except Eustache. They accuse him of deception. Moments later, his corpse is brought to the square on a stretcher. It is revealed that Eustache killed himself in order to spare any of the other six the embarrassment and shame of arriving last. Presently, a messenger from the English king appears, announcing that the king will not demand the sacrifice of the six, since that night a son was born to him. Eustache’s father praises his son as the “new man” who leads the way toward a new ethic. Like Christ’s death on the cross, Eustache’s supreme sacrifice has set a noble example that inspires those who survive him.

The seventh volunteer and the construction of the harbor are Kaiser’s inventions. They are not found in the well-known chronicle by Jean Froissart (1337-1410) that tells of the historical siege of Calais and of the king’s stipulation. It is likely that Kaiser consulted Froissart’s work.

The play can also be read as an antiwar text. There are those who urge the defenders of Calais to continue the hopeless fight against the English troops to the bitter end, but they do not prevail. The new harbor takes on a symbolic significance as an achievement of humanity, which has conquered the irrational—symbolized by the ocean—in itself. The old values of martial heroism, honor, and power will be replaced by love and humility.

Hölle Weg Erde

In 1919, Kaiser published the play Hölle Weg Erde, in which the expressionistic call for a new, morally superior human being and a new society cleansed of all the inequities and injustices of capitalist society is heard in a contemporary setting. In typical expressionistic fashion, the play blends a relatively realistic portrayal of society with a presentation of a Utopian world of love in which greed, crime, and egotism are superseded by brotherhood.

The artist Spazierer tries to raise money for a friend in need who threatens suicide. He approaches Lili, a rich lady who is about to purchase some costly earrings from a jeweler. Spazierer wants to sell his drawings to her, but she refuses. Enraged, he stabs the jeweler, whom he holds responsible for a society in which a man in need does not get help. Spazierer also plans to sue Lili for the “murder” of his needy friend. The attorney whom he approaches declines to take the case. Spazierer then agrees to go to prison for the stabbing. His fellow inmates claim that they—as human beings, disconnected from the socioeconomic structures imposed on them—are not guilty: It is the social structure that breeds crime. At this point in the play, a miraculous change in the entire society takes place. This is where the Utopian vision begins to replace the relatively realistic mode of presentation. As a reflection of humanity’s predicament in modern industrial society, all confess their “guilt” and at the same time plead innocent. Lili, the attorney, and the jeweler now recognize that they wronged Spazierer. The gates of the prison are opened, never to be closed again. The prison guards refuse to work and join the inmates in a proclamation of the new humanity and a new society. This proclamation condemns the notion of “achievement” calling it an enslaving social norm. A sense of purification pervades all classes of society, coupled with a belief in a new beginning (“Aufbruch”) that characterizes many of Kaiser’s works. In the last scene of the play, there emerge the vague outlines of a new social order in which all are equal. Spazierer is asked to accept the position of a leader but refuses, since he wants to be nothing more than an anonymous member of the crowd.

The play demonstrates Kaiser’s belief that modern industrial society perverts the basic goodness of humanity. It fails, however, to provide a blueprint for a new society. The change that takes place in society happens abruptly and without any apparent motivation. If there is a general weakness or flaw in expressionist literature, it lies in its attempt to give artistic shape to a vision that—in spite of its sincerity—lacks the expertise and factual knowledge of the politically inspired social reformer. Nevertheless, Kaiser’s Utopia remains a moving document of the social plight of his time and of his yearning for a better world.

From Morn to Midnight

Kaiser’s play From Morn to Midnight uses a dramaturgical structure typical of many expressionistic dramas: a mode of presentation that shows the protagonist in a sequence of selected stages or exemplary situations in his life (the German term for this mode is Stationendrama). A scene or an act of the play no longer follows logically or psychologically from the preceding one. Instead, their nexus is based on an underlying idea common to all the scenes, which thus become variations of a theme. The scenes and acts still constitute an ordered string of events, but there is no stringent adherence to sequentiality.

The protagonist of the play is a petit bourgeois cashier who feels stifled by the monotony of his uneventful life. He embezzles a large sum of money in order to buy for himself the excitement and the deep inner satisfaction that life has withheld from him. He quickly learns, however, that money cannot buy true love. At a bicycle race, he attempts to stir up the passions of the racers and of the spectators by offering exorbitant sums for the winners. The appearance of the emperor, however, drowns the aroused passion of the spectators in sudden silence and in an attitude of devout subservience. Deeply irritated and disillusioned, the cashier leaves the arena. He ends up at the Salvation Army, where he hopes that a complete confession of his sins, the radical gesture of laying bare his soul and its most intimate desires, will bring him a long sought for and yet elusive sense of fulfillment. He is disappointed again when a girl denounces him to the police. When he throws the remainder of his money on the floor, pandemonium breaks loose. Everybody greedily rushes forth to pick up the bills and coins. Religious feelings succumb to primitive instincts and drives. Acknowledging his fiasco, the cashier shoots himself. His body slumps into a curtain onto which a cross has been sewn. “Ecce homo” are the last words he utters. The Christ symbol is—as so often in the writings of the expressionists—secularized and stands for the sufferings endured by humanity.

The Coral, Gas, and Gas II

Kaiser develops an equally pessimistic view in his trilogy The Coral, Gas, and Gas II. This time, he focuses on the working class and its struggle, not only against capitalists and their allies the politicians, but also against the anonymous powers of technology and industrialization. In The Coral, the protagonist, a billionaire, owes his riches to the horror with which he remembers his poverty-stricken youth. He has worked his way up in order to forget his past. The memories of his working-class background still haunt him so much that he kills a man who looks exactly like him in order to assume this man’s identity (he had a happy, sheltered childhood). The billionaire’s son decides to become a worker in his own plant, although he still maintains a position of spiritual leadership. The plant produces gas. Its profits are shared among the workers according to a scheme based on seniority and age. Once again, Kaiser projects a Utopian image, this time of a socialist system that allows for equal distribution of wealth (without truly enhancing the quality of life of the workers). A giant explosion caused by a mistake in the production formula (a mistake that is beyond detection) forces the workers to interrupt their relentless work for seventeen days. This break gives the billionaire’s son a chance to persuade his workers to start a new life, to leave the plant in shambles and to become farmers. This move “back to nature” is supposed to generate a spiritual renewal. Technology and industrialization are rejected by the humanist and idealist as a misguided effort in humanity’s struggle with nature.

The workers, however, reject the billionaire’s son’s proposal. They know no life other than work in the factory. Besides, the leading industrialists of the country urge the billionaire’s son to rebuild the plant. In the meantime, the workers begin to realize to what extent they have become merely an extension of their machines. Their lives have been reduced to the function of a hand that pulls a lever, eyes that watch a sight-tube, or a foot that presses down a pedal. Their existence is indeed a fragmented one. Technology deprives them of the wholeness and the potential richness of human life. For a brief moment, they decide to abandon the plant. Their chief engineer, however, talks them into returning to work by conjuring up a heroic and glorious image of technology and by downgrading the life of a “peasant” proposed by the billionaire’s son. Furthermore, the military high command and the government of the country simply order the reconstruction of the plant because a war seems imminent.

The last play of the trilogy is set in the plant, where the production of gas has resumed while war has indeed broken out. Once more, the workers have the opportunity to evaluate their lives critically when a mechanical failure in the system causes a brief interruption of production. For the second time, the workers realize that they are slaves, and they begin to envisage a better life that would allow them to control their own destiny as free men. These dreams come to an abrupt end, however, when the enemy takes over the plant. While the workers continue to slave in their plant (profits are no longer shared), their chief engineer reveals that he has invented a deadly poisonous gas that he wants to use against the enemy. When the workers enthusiastically embrace the idea of revenge, the billionaire worker exhorts them to refrain from any act of violence. They should, so he argues, willingly accept the rule of the enemy and yet be free in spirit. This new inner sense of freedom is the freedom of the martyr based on the Christian virtue of humility. Once again, the workers reject the lofty proposal of their idealistic leader. At this point, the billionaire worker feels entitled to take fate into his own hands. He snatches the capsule with the poisonous gas from the engineer’s hands and smashes it to the ground, destroying himself and all his fellow workers. Even the enemy is drawn into total annihilation. Technology and war have brought about the self-destruction of a humankind lacking the desire and the maturity to break out of its self-imposed prison (industrialized society). The “new man” remains a noble specter whose realization seems remote if not impossible.

This trilogy shows Kaiser at the height of his expressionistic skill. Its characters are types, not individuals (“The Daughter,” “The Officer,” “The Engineer,” “First Workman,” “Second Workman,” and so on). The two parties at war are distinguished by color (“Figures in Blue” versus “Figures in Yellow”). Kaiser’s language is abstract and highly metaphorical. Furthermore, he revives and refines the ancient tradition of the chorus. Groups differentiated by profession, age, or sex (“The Workmen,” “The Girls,” “The Women,” or simply “Voices”) speak in alternate order to individuals who in turn represent a collective or group. In some scenes, the dramatic dialogue approaches the form of the liturgy. Certain lines are repeated over and over again, as in a responsory or an oratorio. Such collective speeches conform with the antimimetic aesthetics of expressionism. The characters speak according to preestablished patterns and not in a quasi-spontaneous fashion because they represent ideas or typical social positions and are therefore stripped of individualistic psychological features.

Kaiser’s trilogy can also be interpreted as a portrayal of the antagonism between the masses and the leader. It is one of the ironies of German cultural history that many expressionists struggled with this problematic theme long before National Socialism provided its own answer to the question: How do the leader and the masses relate to one another? In the Gas trilogy, the masses repeatedly refuse to follow their leader, who seeks no elevated social status but merely stands apart intellectually from his fellow workers. In the end, the leader annihilates himself as well as those who would not be led.

In a brief sketch entitled “Die Erneuerung: Skizze für ein Drama” (the renewal), written in 1919 for a planned (but never completed) play, Kaiser deals once more with the problematic relationship between the leader and the masses. On one hand, the leader figure of this sketch wishes to abandon his role. His aim is to become totally absorbed into the anonymous collective. On the other hand, the masses need the leader. They insist on giving a “name” to the one they have chosen for this elevated social position. The designated leader argues that the individual, once he emerges from the collective, becomes utterly self-centered and egotistical and loses all instincts of brotherly love. Man can be good only if he fuses with the masses. Because the collective insists on giving the leader a “name” and thus sets him apart from all the others, the only way out of the dilemma for the individual is to commit suicide and thus initiate the spiritual “renewal” of the collective. The most striking issue in Kaiser’s abstract dialectical sketch is his positive image of the masses, in stark contrast to the views of Friedrich Nietzsche or Gustave Le Bon, who described the masses as dangerous plebeians who lack a sense of responsibility, as a herd with the potential for destruction (although Le Bon also counted dedication and self-sacrifice among the virtues of the masses). Kaiser, like many of his fellow expressionists, interpreted the masses as ethically superior to the individual. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich expressed similar views in some of his writings of the early 1920’s.

As far as the fate of the masses is concerned, the contrast within Kaiser’s own work between the Gas trilogy and “Die Erneuerung” is quite obvious. The workers in the trilogy intermittently glimpse a more dignified and humane life, but they fall prey to the instincts of greed and violence. Their leader, the billionaire worker, who does not attempt to relinquish his role as a leader, finally destroys the masses as well as himself in an act of both supreme despair and punishment. He fails to bring about a “renewal,” and the workers fail to understand his vision of a better life (regardless of its practicality and validity). In “Die Erneuerung,” however, the designated leader sacrifices himself, thus bringing about a positive ethical transformation of the collective.

Noli me tangere

Kaiser takes up the theme of renewal once more in his play Noli me tangere. The play has two protagonists, both prisoners, identified by numbers only. Prisoner “16” has been imprisoned by mistake. As soon as his innocence is established, he is told that he can leave, yet he decides to help his fellow inmate “15” escape by giving him his coat so that “15” (whom the prison guards now take to be “16”) is able to regain his freedom while “16” stays behind. Before the escape takes place, however, “16” and “15” have a highly significant conversation. Prisoner “15” declares that he is the prophet and forerunner of a new humankind. Like Spazierer and the billionaire worker, he proclaims the dawn of a new (yet undefined) social order and a “new man.” Prisoner “16,” however, criticizes the flaming rhetoric and the revolutionary impetus of “15” by telling him that he wants too much too fast. History, so “15” is told, moves at a much slower pace than he anticipates. It will not be accelerated by untimely prophets but advances at a slow pace, controlled by God. Thus, a Christian philosophy of history takes the place of a pseudoreligious revolutionary concept of historical change. Indeed, prisoner “16” turns out to be Christ himself, who shows “15” the wounds on his hands while speaking the words: “Noli me tangere.” It seems as though Kaiser, in this play, found fault with the all-too-stormy prophetic thrust of the social philosophy of expressionism and created in the character of prisoner “15” almost a caricature of the expressionistic leader-prophet. Far from abandoning the ideal of a social and moral renewal, Kaiser’s message in Noli me tangere is that no revolutionary fervor (least of all one inspired by Marxism) will force into existence the new order. God as the supreme social engineer will—in the course of history—bring about the desired change. Kaiser’s play is one of the few texts within German expressionism that presents Christ as a truly divine being—as the Son of God. In most expressionist texts, Christ (or a Christ-figure) is a secular symbol for the sufferings of man, as in the last scene of From Morn to Midnight.

Die Lederköpfe

In some of his postexpressionist plays, Kaiser takes up once more the theme of war. Plays such as The Citizens of Calais and the Gas trilogy had already denounced war as a cruel, inhuman, and meaningless endeavor. World War I demonstrated to the young generation of artists and writers in Germany that war was the ultimate expression of a social and economic system that cultivated greed, national megalomania, and brutality.

In Die Lederköpfe, Kaiser launched his strongest attack against the ruthlessness of the military authorities and the degrading impact of war on human beings. The city commander is supposed to recruit a new army for his general, The Basilius, but the mutinous soldiers threaten to kill the commander, who evades death only by offering them The Basilius’s daughter. At that moment, The Basilius himself returns after having taken a city that belonged to the enemy. He owes this victory to a spectacular ruse. One of his soldiers mutilates his face, slips into the enemy’s camp, and pretends that The Basilius disfigured him and that he is therefore offering his services to them in order to avenge the cruel treatment he received at the hands of his general. His plight seems to vouch for his honesty, and the enemy believes him. At night, this soldier opens the city gates so that The Basilius can take the city. The general rewards his soldier by appointing him field commander and giving him his daughter. The new field commander has to wear a leather hood over his head to hide his disfigured face. When The Basilius learns of the mutiny, he decides to punish the mutineers by having their faces disfigured in the same manner in which the field commander mutilated himself. He wants to build an entire army of faceless human beings wearing leather hoods. The field commander (who is deeply shocked by his general’s preposterous hubris and by his extreme brutality) offers to execute the proposed punishment himself. His true intention, however, is to incite his troops to kill The Basilius. Before the general is whipped to death by his outraged troops, he kills the field commander who has refused to mutilate his soldiers. The play ends, though, on a hopeful note: The destroyed city taken earlier by The Basilius will be rebuilt.

A grim picture of war is painted by the characters who are involved in it. The city commander calls war an all-devouring monster with “the mouth of a crocodile.” The sole purpose of war is the expansion of power of those who are already in power. Humankind becomes a faceless animal in war—this is the meaning of the symbolism of disfigurement and of the leather hood. Once a human being wears the hood, he is “everybody and nobody”; he loses his individuality and with it his human dignity. Even The Basilius seems to realize that war brings out in him only the faceless destroyer and the raging animal. He knows that there are “voices” in the depth of his soul to which he must not listen if he wants to be an effective general. He must look on his soldiers as if they were a swarm of ants.

The Raft of the Medusa

One of Kaiser’s last plays, The Raft of the Medusa, also known as Medusa’s Raft, focuses once again on the theme of war. The setting is a lifeboat on the ocean. During World War II, a passenger boat has been sunk by enemy torpedoes, and thirteen children, ranging in age from ten to twelve years, are crammed into the lifeboat. The youngest and weakest child of the group is a red-haired boy whom the others name “little fox.” Out of superstition, many of the children think that one of them must be sacrificed because the number thirteen spells doom. The leader of the group, Allan, finally agrees that they all draw lots in order to determine who will have to leave the boat. When Allan realizes that the girl Ann, whom he loves, will draw the lot that calls for her death, he quickly snatches up all the lots and throws them into the water. There is a happy interlude during the grim voyage of the shipwrecked children: Allan and Ann celebrate their “wedding” with imaginary pomp and circumstance. They place a report about the wedding in a bottle that is then committed to the waves. While Allan is asleep, the others throw the “little fox” (who has been protected by Allan) into the water just before a rescue seaplane arrives (a patrol boat found the bottle). Outraged because of the fate of the “little fox,” Allan refuses to board the plane. He stays in the lifeboat and is later killed by an enemy airplane that makes a strafing attack on the boat. As so often occurs in Kaiser’s plays, the figure of Christ is evoked to demonstrate the ideal of the supreme sacrifice. Allan’s death in this case atones for the sin of the other children, just as Christ atoned on the Cross for all the sins of humankind.

Bibliography

Benson, Renate. German Expressionist Drama: Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. New York: Grove Press, 1984. A study of German expressionist drama, focusing on the works of Kaiser and Ernst Toller. Bibliography and index.

Henn, Marianne, ed. Bibliography of the Georg Kaiser Collection at the University of Alberta. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1998. A bibliography of the Kaiser collection at the University of Alberta, Canada. Index.

Lambert, Carole J. The Empty Cross: Medieval Hopes, Modern Futility in the Theater of Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, August Strindberg, and Georg Kaiser. New York: Garland, 1990. A scholarly study of the influence of medieval thought, particularly the concepts of futility and frustration, on the works of Kaiser, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, and August Strindberg.