Ernst Toller was a revolutionary, poet and playwright engagé, president for six days of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, best known for his Expressionist plays Hoppla! We’re Alive, Man of the Masses and Machine Breakers. In his day Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was as renowned as the young Bertolt Brecht. High profile persona non grata in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Toller fled to London, went on a lecture tour to the U.S. in 1936, and tried to make a go of it as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Dispirited, despondent upon learning that his brother and sister had been sent to a concentration camp, and convinced that the world as he knew it had succumbed to the forces of darkness, Toller was found dead by hanging, a presumed suicide, in his room at the Hotel Mayflower on May 22, 1939. Conceived in the German theatrical tradition of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s The Soldiers and Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Toller’s devastating tragedy Hinkemann is a painfully poetic plaidoyer for the overlooked vision and voice of the victim.

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