Georg Kaiser, ‘After Expressionism. Five Plays

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After Expressionism had run its feverish course, its foremost exponent Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) The Burghers of Calais, From Morn to Midnight, Gas proved equally adept at the lighter fare demanded by post-war audiences. Of some nine hundred comedies premiered in the Weimar era, his Pulp Fiction was an early triumph, often revived and played now as parody of a contagious literary genre, now as critique of Old World pieties. The New Woman emerged even more clearly towards the end of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in Clairvoyance though now also as antagonist, from whose vampish sophistication the loving wife emancipates both self and wayward husband. Between these two comedies, in One Day in October (acclaimed especially in Gustav Grundgens’s gripping production) focus shifts to psychological wrestling in deadly earnest over the parentage of a child. A parallel dilemma underlies the compelling plot, rising tension and searing climax of Agnete an uncanny precursor of the ‘Heimkehrer’ literature inspired by soldiers and captives returning home after 1945. This was indeed a fitting play to mark the rebirth of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. Kaiser had died in exile, though not before taking leave, like Prospero, with another wry comedy, The Gordian Egg.