Georg Kaiser

The German playwright Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) was the most gifted and prolific dramatist of the expressionist school. Extremely skillful and inventive, he did more than any other writer, except perhaps Brecht, to transform German theater in the 20th century.

Georg Kaiser was born on Nov. 25, 1878, in Magdeburg, 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 1930s and 1940s 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.

Further Reading

The standard work in English on Kaiser is B. J. Kenworthy, Georg Kaiser (1957), an extremely thorough and informative study. There is an excellent chapter on Kaiser in Walter H. Sokel, The Writer In Extremis (1959). A useful general introduction may be found in Hugh F. Garten, Modern German Drama (1959). For background material see Richard Samuel and R. Hinton Thomas, Expressionism in German Life, Literature, and the Theatre, 1910-1924 (1939).

Kaiser, Georg (Magdeburg, 1878-1945, Ascona), a bookseller's assistant in Magdeburg, worked his passage to South America in a freighter in 1898, and tried to find congenial work in Buenos Aires. In 1901 he returned with malaria, taking years to recover and being supported for a time by his family. In 1908 he married a well-to-do woman, and until the early 1920s enjoyed a comfortable existence. When money ran short, he sold his wife's estate, lived in a rented villa, pawned its furniture, and was charged with theft. His defence in court, expressed in a notorious speech stressing the artist's privilege of immunity from the common cares of life, injured his cause and revealed the extent of his self-absorption. It perhaps provides the key to his anti-bürgerlich attitude, to his desire for another kind of man, and to his praise of the woman who is ready to sacrifice her life for a man. Kaiser was convicted and sent to prison for six months.

Kaiser began to write about 1904. His first play, Die jüdische Witwe (not published until 1911), is a Freudian interpretation of Judith's killing of Holofernes. König Hahnrei (1913) parodies Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Subsequently Kaiser made his name as an Expressionist writer whose work contains much that is noble, humane, and compassionate. His programmatic tract Vision und Figur (1918) is a résumé of his involvement (see Expressionismus). Die Bürger von Calais (1914) is generally regarded as his best work, though its quality was only perceived when it was first performed in 1917. Von morgens bis mitternachts (1916), a characteristic example of the Stationendrama, was performed in the same year, as was also Die Koralle (1917). Die Koralle was to develop into a trilogy (not so called by Kaiser) by the addition of the two plays entitled Gas, and generally referred to as Gas I and Gas II (1918 and 1920). Kaiser wrote with excessive facility, completing in all some 70 plays, not all of which have been published.

In 1918 appeared three plays, Rektor Kleist (an immature work written in 1905), the comedy Der Zentaur (retitled Konstantin Strobel in 1920), and Das Frauenopfer, which has the purifying power of sacrificed love as its theme, illustrated in a historical example drawn from France in Napoleonic times. Der Brand im Opernhaus (1919) has an analogous story of self-sacrifice. Further variations on this theme are contained in Gilles und Jeanne (1923, on Gilles de Rais and Joan of Arc) and Oktobertag (1928). Hölle Weg Erde (1919) continues the theme of the New Man, and sees him for once victorious, converting his fellows, who have lived as automata. Der gerettete Alkibiades (1920) presents a conflict between intellect and life, introducing Socrates as well as Alcibiades. Kanzlist Krehler (1922) repeats the formula of Von morgens bis mitternachts. Kaiser wrote Noli me tangere (also 1922) while in prison. Nebeneinander (1923) shows the hero ending his own life in the ecstatic awareness that he has done all he could to help another despairing human being. Kolportage (1924) reverts to cynical comedy, which was followed up in Die Papiermühle and Der Präsident (both 1927), and in Zwei Krawatten (1930). In Gats (1925) Kaiser presents the image of a Utopia which is to be realized by compulsory sterilization of a proportion of the population; the originator of this idea is murdered. Other exemplifications of Kaiser's aspirations are contained in Zweimal Oliver (1926) and Die Lederköpfe (1929), which has a repellent plot involving self-mutilation. Kaiser wrote the librettos for Der Protagonist (1926) and Der Zar läßt sich photographieren (1928) by K. Weill, who later composed music for Kaiser's Silbersee (1933).

In 1933 the first performance of Silbersee was the occasion for a disturbance created by National Socialists. Kaiser was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts and forbidden to write. He remained in Germany until 1938, when he emigrated to Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of his life. His family remained in Germany. In exile he was befriended by the writer C. von Arx. The works of the period of ‘inner emigration’ (see Innere Emigration) are not important, except for Rosamunde Floris (written in 1936, published 1940), another play of passion and purification. Kaiser is the author of two novels, Es ist genug (1932), on the theme of incest, and Villa Aurea (1940), set in Russia and Sicily. In 1940 he also published a notable pacifist play, Der Soldat Tanaka; Tanaka, a Japanese soldier, turns against war and is executed. Other plays, written at this time and later, were published posthumously. Klawitter (1949, written 1939-40) and Der englische Sender (1947, written 1941) endeavour to treat the National Socialist regime as a subject for satirical comedy. The theme of dictatorship is continued in the tragi-comedy Napoleon in New Orleans (1948, written 1937-41). In Das Floß der Medusa (1945, written 1940-3) thirteen evacuee children are in a lifeboat in the Atlantic after the ship taking them to Canada in 1940 has been torpedoed; eleven are saved, one, the weakest, is sacrificed, and Allan, the one who has tried to save him, refuses to be rescued. His total loss of faith in humanity which underlies his rejection of life reflects Kaiser's own deep scepticism. The title refers to the episode of 1816, which is the subject of Géricault's well-known picture Le Radeau de la Méduse (Louvre). Part of the play was published in the year of Kaiser's death, and the complete play in 1963. In his three Greek plays, Pygmalion, Zweimal Amphitryon, and Bellerophon, Kaiser reaffirms his self-confidence and his belief in regeneration. They were published in 1948. Werke (6 vols.), ed. W. Huder, appeared in 1970-2 and Briefe (vol. 7), ed. G. M. Valk, in 1980: Georg Kaiser in Sachen Georg Kaiser. Briefe 1916-1933, ed. G. M. Valk, in 1989.

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