Two Plays of Weimar Germany: Youth Is a Sickness and Criminals - Couverture souple

Bruckner, Ferdinand

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0810137720 ISBN 13 : 9780810137721

Editeur : Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

If a theater-goer in Weimar Berlin were asked to name the best living German playwright, the answer would not be Bertolt Brecht or Georg Kaiser or Arnolt Bronnen.  It would be Ferdinand Bruckner.  And if asked, who is this Bruckner?, the Berliner would be at a loss to give you any information.

In the late 1920s, the first two plays attributed to Bruckner, Youth Is a Sickness and Criminals, were “hot tickets,” but only gradually was the pseudonymous author identified.  Bruckner continues to be an understudied figure in the Weimar figure, and this updated translation of two of his most well-known plays will be the definitive version for scholars and readers interested in better understanding his legacy.

Youth Is a Sickness (1924) is an important document of the “lost generation” that grew up during the first World War, born in the aftermath of cataclysm, devoid of hope and ideals, lost in sex and drugs.

If Youth is a compact, claustrophobic study in juvenile derangement, Criminals (1926) is a panoramic survey of social interaction and legal injustice in the Weimar Republic.  Its format is highly original: a three-story apartment building and a Palace of Justice with four courtrooms, in which simultaneous action allows for ironic comment on the various cases.  The central example is a murder case in which fate allows a slick “lady’s man” to go to the gallows.  Others involve homosexual blackmail (the first commercially successful play to be so explicit), a failed double suicide, theft,  and abortion.

With an introduction and annotation by renowned theater and German scholar, Lawrence Senelick, these two plays will position Bruckner as a prime example of what we now call a “public intellectual,” a man whose life was devoted to reflecting on the fate of Germany, humane values, and the past, present, and future of a troubled century.  Like many of his contemporaries, he was excited by the possibility of the stage to address issues of war and peace, social and political problems, and the fate of contemporary youth with its lack of ideal and eternal nostalgia.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

FERDINAND BRUCKNER, born Theodor Tagger in 1891, was an Austro-German poet, playwright, and theater manager. In 1922, he founded the Berlin Renaissance Theater. He immigrated to Paris in 1933, from there to the United States in 1936, and eventually returned to Berlin, where he worked as an adviser to the Schiller Theater.

LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. He is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being The Soviet Theater: A Documentary History (with Sergei Ostrovsky); Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters; The American Stage: Writing on the American Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner; and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Northwestern University Press
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0810137720
• ISBN 13: 9780810137721
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 184
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slovaquie