Background
Georg Kaiser was born on November 25, 1878, in Magdeburg. He was the son of a businessman.
(These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kai...)
These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kaisers vision of the regeneration of man, which he illustrated in his works by a total paring down of detail, penetrating to the core of the matter and revealing mans true potential. In From Morning to Midnight the cashier, downtrodden victim of the capitalist system, turns bank robber in order to test the power, freedom and happiness that money can bring. His grand gesture of setting himself and others free turns into an odyssey of disillusion and ends in his violent death. The unique stage technique employed by Kaiser is as challenging today as it was when the play was first performed. The Burghers of Calais has always been considered Kaisers greatest play and the classic of Expressionist drama. In it, Kaiser exploits the non-naturalistic technique of Expressionism. The play embraces vast expansiveness and total concentration, stylized gesture and lengthy monologues.
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(This volume in The German Library includes the following ...)
This volume in The German Library includes the following authors and plays, which best represent the Expressionist movement of the early 20th century:
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(Format Paperback Subject Drama)
Format Paperback Subject Drama
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Georg Kaiser was born on November 25, 1878, in Magdeburg. He was the son of a businessman.
In choosing the themes of his early dramas, Die jüdischejudische Witwe (1911; "The Jewish Widow") and Konig Hahnrei (1913; "King Cuckold"), Kaiser was influenced by Frank Wedekind, whose dramas were concerned with man's sexual frustrations.
Kaiser strove to free his plays from objective reality in order to communicate the emotional nature of the subconscious world.
His trilogy of plays, Die Koralle (1917; The Coral), Gas I (1918), and Gas II (1920), also deals with the regeneration of man, and in it a socialist utopia is destroyed by the dehumanizing effects of machines on man.
He also wrote two novels, Es Ist Genug (1932; "It's Enough") and Vera (1939).
Kaiser is a great formalist, and The Burghers is a finely chiseled drama full of splendid diction—a series of carefully composed and patterned tableaux. Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (1916; From Morn till Midnight), an equally famous play, depicts a sequence of stages in the evolution of a man, a bank cashier, through the course of a single day that he begins with a theft.
In Gas I Kaiser shifts the emphasis to society and its regeneration; the billionaire's son is destroyed by those very workers at the gas plant whom he would save from enslavement to machines.
Other plays, such as Von Morgen bis Mitternachts (1916; From Morn to Midnight) and Hölle, Holle, Weg, Erde (1919; "Hell, Road, Earth") portray man's struggle against the drabness of life and the heartlessness of his fellow men. Kaiser's many other plays include Der Brand im Opernhaus (1919; The Fire in the Opera House), Der gerettete Alkibiades (1920; "Alcibiades Rescued"), and Der Soldat Tanaka (1940; "The Soldier Tanaka").
(These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kai...)
(This volume in The German Library includes the following ...)
(Format Paperback Subject Drama)
