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Expressionist drama, which flourished in Germany between about 1910 and 1924, was characterized by its intensely subjective expression of the writer’s deepest feelings (a quality that caused it to be described as Seelendrama, “drama of the soul”), usually through a leading character who acts as the dramatist-poet’s alter ego; by its rebellious protest against the structure of society; and by its stress on language, often profoundly lyrical, at the expense of plot and psychologically drawn characters. The society against which the German Expressionists protested— and which was effectively destroyed by World War I—was based on a patriarchal family system, which tended to smother the development of youthful individuality. At a political level, the pattern manifested itself as rigid totalitarianism. Most Expressionist plays have a scene or scenes in which children assert their individuality by upbraiding their parents, often doing them violence, sometimes to the exof rape and murder. The leading character (or author-hero) in an Expressionist play often pours out his soul in long monologues, usually couched in an elliptical language that is not so much framed to carry statements as to permit what is called the Expressionist Schrei (scream) to be heard, Secondary characters are seldom more than puppet figures— representatives of the family or of those who conform to the ideals of society.
The German Expressionist playwrights included Carl Sternheim, Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Reinhard Goering, and Fritz von Unruh. Outside Germany, playwrights who made use of Expressionist dramatic techniques included, in the U.S., Eugene O’Neill (The Emperor Jones; The Hairy Ape) and Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine); the English poetic dramatists Ronald Duncan (This Way to the Tomb) and W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (The Ascent of F 6; The Dog Beneath the Skin); and the Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey (The Silver Tassie).
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Linguistically, German Expressionist drama was heavily influenced by August Stramm, a poet killed in World War I, who had experimented with language, cutting it to the bone and forcing monosyllabic utterance to act as a barometer of feeling and emotion. The German playwrights, though they did not use language as radically as Stramm had done, like him avoided descriptive analysis of emotion or situation. Expressionist drama is therefore essentially different from the Naturalistic drama of such playwrights as the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. Both kinds were critical of society, but whereas the Naturalist playwrights had pointed to specific ills and had suggested specific cures, the Expressionists cried out against the evil of society in general and, with a kind of desperate optimism, called for the spiritual rebirth of the “new man.”
Dramatic antecedents of Expressionism included the later work of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, especially his Dream Play, with its device of presenting the drama from the point of view of one central character; and the play Fruhlings Erwachen (1891; Eng. trans., Spring’s Awakening, 1909) by the German Frank Wedekind. The atter influenced Expressionism thematically, through his attacks on the family, and linguistically, through his use of heightened speech. The decline of Expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longings for a better world, and the movement lost impetus in the disillusioned society of the mid- 1920s. Expressionist techniques continued to be used, however, though plays, especially those by Ernst Toller, began to take a less self-absorbed view of man in society. Spectacular staging became a feature of production, particularly in the work of such exuberant directors as Erwin Piscator and Leopold Jessner. Dramatic experimentation in form and technique in Germany culminated in the socially committed epic theatre evolved by Bertolt Brecht from the late 1920s onward.
