Ernst Toller

Toller was born in 1893 into a Jewish family in Samotschin, Germany (now Szamocin, Poland). He was the son of Ida (Kohn) and Max Toller, a pharmacist. His parents ran a general store.[1] He had a sister and brother. They grew up speaking Yiddish and German, and he later became fluent in English.

At the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered for the German Army. After serving for 13 months on the Western Front,[2] he suffered a complete physical and psychological collapse. His first drama, Transformation (Die Wandlung, 1919), was wrought from his wartime experiences.

Ernst Toller (center) and Max Weber (foreground, bearded) in May 1917 at the Lauensteiner Tagung

Karlheinz Martin's production of Transformation in Berlin with Fritz Kortner as the war returnee, 30 September 1919

Together with leading anarchists, such as B. Traven and Gustav Landauer, and Toller's party, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), Toller was involved in the short-lived 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic. The communists are against the founding of a communist republic at this point.[3] He served as President from April 6 to April 12.[2] Communists agitated against Toller and his councils and sent speakers into soldiers barracks to announce that the Council Republic did not deserve to be defended.[4] He issued numerous decrees, the press was socialised, the mining industry was socialised, and the eight-hour working day made legally binding. He decreed that citizens could withdraw only 100 marks per day from the banks, and issued reassurance to the workers that these measures were directed against the major capitalists who were attempting to take money abroad. A decree was made against exorbitant rents.[5] His government members were not always well-chosen. For instance, the Foreign Affairs Deputy Dr. Franz Lipp (who had been admitted several times to psychiatric hospitals) informed Vladimir Lenin via cable that the ousted former Minister-President, Johannes Hoffmann, had fled to Bamberg and taken the key to the ministry toilet with him. On Palm Sunday, April 1919, the Communist Party seized power, with Eugen Leviné as their leader.[6] Shortly after that, the republic was defeated by right-wing forces.

The noted authors Max Weber and Thomas Mann testified on Toller's behalf when he was tried for his part in the revolution. He was sentenced to five years in prison and served his sentence in the prisons of Stadelheim, Neuburg, Eichstätt. From February 1920 until his release, he was in the fortress of Niederschönenfeld, where he spent 149 days in solitary confinement and 24 days on hunger strike.[7]

His time in prison was productive; he completed work on Transformation, which premiered in Berlin under the direction of Karlheinz Martin in September 1919. At the time of this work's 100th performance, the Bavarian government offered Toller a pardon. He refused it out of solidarity with other political prisoners. Toller continued writing in prison, completing some of what would be his most celebrated works, including the dramas Masses Man (Masse Mensch), The Machine Breakers (Die Maschinenstürmer), Hinkemann, the German (Der Deutsche Hinkemann), and many poems. These works established him as an important German expressionist playwright, and they used symbols derived from the First World War and its aftermath in his society.

Not until after his release from prison in July 1925 was Toller able to see any of his plays performed. In 1925, the most famous of his later dramas, Hoppla, We're Alive! (Hoppla, wir Leben!), directed by Erwin Piscator, premiered in Berlin. It tells of a revolutionary discharged from a mental hospital after eight years, who discovers that his former comrades have grown complacent and compromised within the system they once opposed. In despair, he kills himself.[8] The most recent biography of Toller is by Robert Ellis "Ernst Toller and German Society: Intellectual as Leaders and Critics" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,2013).

In 1933, after the Nazi rise to power, Toller was exiled from Germany because of his work; the Nazis did not like modernist arts of any form. His citizenship was nullified by the Nazi government later that year. He travelled to London with 16-year-old Christiane Grautoff; they married in London in 1935, the same year he participated as co-director in the Manchester production of his play Rake Out the Fires (Feuer aus den Kesseln).

In 1936 and 1937, Toller went on a lecture tour of the United States and Canada, settling in California. Fluent in English, he wrote screenplays but could not get them produced. In 1936 he moved to New York City, where he joined a group of artists and writers in exile, including Klaus Mann, Erika Mann (at one time married to the poet W.H. Auden, who was also in the US), and Therese Giehse. He earned some money from journalism.

Two of his early plays were produced in New York in this period: The Machine Wreckers (1922), whose opening night in 1937 he attended, and No More Peace, produced in 1937 by the Federal Theatre Project and presented in New York City in 1938. Their sense of immediacy was gone: the first play was related to the First World War and its aftermath, and the second an earlier period of the rise of the Nazis. Their style was outmoded for New York, and the poor reception added to Toller's discouragement.[9]

Suffering from depression, separated from his wife and struggling with financial woes (he had given all his money to Spanish Civil War refugees), Toller committed suicide on 22 May 1939.[10] He hanged himself in his room[2] at the Mayflower Hotel,[11] after laying out on his hotel desk "photos of Spanish children who had been killed by fascist bombs".[12]

The English author Robert Payne, who knew Toller in Spain and in Paris, later wrote in his diary that Toller had said shortly before his death:[13]

"If ever you read that I committed suicide, I beg you not to believe it." Payne continued: "He hanged himself with the silk cord of his nightgown in a hotel in New York two years ago. This is what the newspapers said at the time, but I continue to believe that he was murdered".

W. H. Auden's poem "In Memory of Ernst Toller" was published in Another Time (1940).

Poster for the Federal Theatre Project production of No More Peace in Cincinnati, Ohio (1937)

• Transfiguration (Die Wandlung) (1919)
• Masses Man (Masse Mensch) (1921)
• The Machine Wreckers (Die Maschinenstürmer) (1922)
• Hinkemann (org. Der deutsche Hinkemann), Uraufführung (19 September 1923) Produced under titles of The Red Laugh and Bloody Laughter (US)
• Hoppla, We're Alive! (Hoppla, wir leben!) (1927)
• Feuer aus den Kesseln (1930)
• Mary Baker Eddy (1930), play in five acts, with Hermann Kesten

After exile:

• Eine Jugend in Deutschland (A Youth in Germany) (1933), autobiography, Amsterdam
• I Was a German: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary (1934), New York: Paragon
• Nie Wieder Friede! (No More Peace) (1935)[9] First published and produced in English, as he was living in London, but it was written originally in German.
• Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (1935) (Letters from Prison), Amsterdam
• Letters from Prison: Including Poems and a New Version of 'The Swallow Book' (1936), London

In 2000, Alan Pearlman published his translation into English of several of Toller's plays.[14] The literary rights to the works of Ernst Toller were the property of the novelist Katharine Weber until the copyright expired on December 31, 2009. His works have now entered the public domain.

• The English dramatist Torben Betts has reworked Hinkemann; his play Broken was produced in the UK in 2011.
• Toller was a central character in the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel All That I Am by Anna Funder.
• Paul Schrader's 2017 film First Reformed centers on a troubled, although Protestant, character named for Toller.
• A poem of Miklos Radnoti (Radnóti Miklós) Hungarian poet, writer and translator was published as "Thursday" (Hungarian title: Csütörtök) on 26 May 1939.[15]

• Tankred Dorst (1968). Toller (suhrkamp ed.). Suhrkamp Verlag. ISBN 3-518-10294-X.
• Dove, Richard (1990). He was a German: A Biography of Ernst Toller. Libris, London. ISBN 1-870352-85-8.
• Fuld, Werner; Ostermaier(Hrsg.), Albert (1996). Die Göttin und ihr Sozialist: Gristiane Grauthoff - ihr Leben mit Ernst Toller. Weidle Verlag, Bonn. ISBN 3-931135-18-7.
• Ossar, Michael (1980). Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller: The Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom. State University of New York Press, Albany. ISBN 0873953932.
• Mauthner, Martin (2007). German Writers in French Exile, 1933-1940. London. ISBN 978-0853035411.
• Ellis, Robert; Toller, Ernst; German Society (2013). Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914-1939. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ernst Toller.

• Ellis, Robert (10 June 2013). Ernst Toller and German Society: Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914–1939. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9781611476361. ...it is Toller the social critic rather than Toller the dramatist with which this book is concerned, his ideas, his visions for Germany and Europe as transmitted in his works of fiction and prose. (Ebook)
• "The Society: About us". Ernst-Toller-Gesellschaft e.V. Neuburg an der Donau. (Ernst Toller Society)
• "Collection: Ernst Toller papers". Archives at Yale (MS 498).
• "Archive for the 'Ernst Toller' Category". Red Yucca. 18 December 2010.
• Works by Ernst Toller at Faded Page (Canada) (Online version of Eine Jugend in Deutschland)
• Ernst Toller Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin (archived link containing many links to other sites and works about Toller)
• Ernst Toller at Find a Grave
• Newspaper clippings about Ernst Toller in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW