Man And The Masses Masse Mensch

Set during wartime, [this play] shows a workers’ committee deciding to strike to enforce peace and secure a fair society. Sonja Irene, wife of a disapproving bourgeois, has joined the committee and finds her strike call disputed by an anonymous opponent who insists that the utopia of lasting peace and social justice can only come through violent revolution. She is unable to prevent violence and the subsequent shooting of an enemy soldier. She is captured in the ensuing battle, refuses help from her husband and from her anonymous former opponent because she would have to kill a warden to escape, and is executed. This reveals, in Richard Dove’s words, "the strong vein of determinism increasingly evident in Toller’s work." The play is written as a vision containing "real" and "dream" scenes in which the banality of real-life situations is contrasted with the utopia of a new society to come. The problems of the political resolve needed for mass action are examined dialectically through the central character, who is portrayed both as a real-life person and as an abstract figure. All the central oppositions remain unresolved, with the reality of revolution in conflict with noble ideals expressed in abstract argument. Moral principle is set against revolutionary expediency, and expressed in a clash between ethical socialism and applied Marxism. The individual here has to show the way, the mass can only achieve ethical freedom through an act of limited violence. Despite many Expressionist features, the involvement with political argument lifts the play beyond propaganda and ideology. The central figure becomes a "new woman" and combines a hard-headed understanding of her companions with a vision for the future. --what-when-how.com.

This book is the fullest and most detailed study yet published in English of Ernst Toller's plays and their most significant productions. In particular the productions directed by Karl-Heinz Martin, Jurgen Fehling and Erwin Piscator are closely analyzed and the author demonstrates how, brilliant though they were, they obscured or even distorted Toller's intentions. The plays are seen as eminently stage-worthy while worth lies in Toller's use of language, both in prose and inverse. The neglected puppet-play The Scorned Lovers' Revenge is analyzed from a new perspective in the light, both of its language and its sexual theme, so important in Toller's writings as a whole. The reader is led to appreciate why Toller was regarded as the most outstanding German dramatist of his generation until, after his death in 1939 his reputation was overlaid by that of Brecht. This book should do much to restore Toller to his proper place in theatre history.

University Theatre, University of Maryland presents in cooperation with the Departments of Music and Dance, "Man and the Masses," by Ernst Toller, English translation by Louis Untermeyer, directed by Roger Meersman, setting and lighting designed by Philip Mosbo, costumes designed by Judith Slattum, music composed and conducted by Greg Steinke, choreography by Kari Steinke, technical direction by David K. Klann, choral coaching by Ionia Zelenka.

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism, fascism, and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as “the mass” during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson’s epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in A Brief History of the Masses, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989.

"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."