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.
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