Ernst Toller

After his July 1919 sentence of five years for high treason, Toller was held at Munich’s Stadelheim prison and detention facilities in Neuburg an der Donau and Eichstätt before being transferred to Niederschönenfeld in 1920. During this imprisonment he wrote plays including Masse Mensch (1921), Der deutsche Hinkemann (1923), and Der entfesselte Wotan (1923), as well as two volumes of poetry. These works reached the stage to strong acclaim and established his international reputation as a playwright. Toller began putting Masse Mensch on paper in October 1919 at Niederschönenfeld. In its 1921 preface, he described the influence on its form of his unsettled memories of the revolution and of scenes he had witnessed from prison. The play represented collective social forces and individual experience through an interplay of reality and vision. Another work of the prison years, Die Maschinenstürmer, premiered in 1922 days after Walther Rathenau’s assassination and became a political demonstration against enemies of the republic. Toller sought a revolutionary drama centered on workers and social conflict; the plays he wrote while imprisoned established his reputation.