Background
Georg Kaiser was born on November 25, 1878, in Magdeburg, Germany; the son of a businessman.
(This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five...)
This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five plays ranging from his early work through the time of his prolific maturity in the 1920s to his last period as an exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1945. David and Goliath is set in Denmark and deals with the power of money over men. The President, set in France, is ironical in tone and revolves around a lottery and, once again, the power of money. The Flight to Venice was written at the height of the Expressionist movement in 1922, and is one of the principal plays of the period. One Day in October is highly complex, using nineteenth-century French literary personalities to make points about literary creation and the relationship between art and life. The final play, The Raft of the Medusa, takes its title from Gericaults painting, and concerns the regeneration of man overlaid with the pessimism of the European struggle.
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(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 book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008MUS26E/?tag=2022091-20
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008O3FEX8/?tag=2022091-20
(Format Paperback Subject Drama)
Format Paperback Subject Drama
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Georg Kaiser was born on November 25, 1878, in Magdeburg, Germany; the son of a businessman.
He himself entered business and worked from 1898 to 1901 in Buenos Aires. Then, during years of ill health and unemployment, he turned to writing plays-Rektor Kleist (1905) and Die jüdische Witwe (1911; The Jewish Widow) - but attained wide recognition only with Die Bürger von Calais (1913; The Burghers of Calais). This play, ostensibly historical, dramatizes Jean Froissart's tale of the six Calais burghers who were to be surrendered to the English king so that he would spare the city. The play illustrates Kaiser's faith in the emergence of a "New Man, " a truly altruistic human being. 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. The trilogy Die Koralle (1917; The Coral), Gas I (1918), and Gas II (1920) is perhaps Kaiser's greatest achievement. The Coral portrays the spiritual transformation of a billionaire who attempts to escape his conscience by exchanging his identity for that of his secretary and double, whom he kills. 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. Gas II is a futuristic play in which the world appears totally mechanized and man is the permanent victim of machines and war. In his many plays Kaiser returns again and again to the same themes: hostility to war, militarism, and industrialism; fear of dehumanization; yearning for spiritual regeneration. Later, such dramas as Rosamunde Floris (1937) stress the need for sacrifice and love. During the 19306 and 19406 Kaiser's work becomes even more intense and inward. Constantly innovative, he was experimenting at the end of his career with "Greek" plays in iambic verse (Zweimal Amphitryon, Pygmalion, and Bellerophon, published posthumously in 1948) that again assert the need for love and devotion to truth in a vicious world. Kaiser left Germany in 1938 and died in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1945.
(These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kai...)
(This second volume of plays by Georg Kaiser contains five...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
(Format Paperback Subject Drama)
