Ernst Toller

Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was a German poet, playwright, politician, and revolutionary of Jewish origin.

Early Years

National in Spanish of if my mom's licon I'll go

from Spain, get permission from Frederick the Great to live in the city.

Jews, Catholics and Protestants cohabited in the province of Posen, a fact that deeply marked Toller's childhood, who from a very young age began to question the importance of faith or origin in the destinies, possibilities and poverty of the families of their friends. Already from his childhood he writes poems and short plays.

He studied high school at the Realgymnasium in Bromberg, the district capital, and from a very young age began to suffer from heart and nervous conditions. His poetry begins to take on a rebellious tone. Returning home for a vacation, he sends an anonymous letter to the local newspaper complaining about the mistreatment suffered by a deceased town worker, going so far as to accuse the local authorities of negligence. The mayor of the town initiates an investigation against the anonymous writer but Toller comes out of the situation with flying colors because his father, then a councilor, intercedes for him. This infuriates the young man even more because he understands that the social position of the individual is decisive in his future.

World War I

In 1914 he enrolled at the University of Grenoble, which he rarely attends. During this time he takes the opportunity to travel through Occitania and northern Italy. When the First World War broke out in August of that same year, he enlisted as a volunteer. He is ruled out due to his heart problems but finally manages to convince a doctor to give him the approval to go to the front.

In January 1915 he was assigned to Strasbourg as part of the Reserve Battalion of the First Pedestrian Artillery Regiment. In March he is finally transferred to the front where he finds himself with boring, dirty trench warfare and an officer who hates him so he asks for a transfer to the Infantry. It is then that Toller, as he describes in A Youth in Germany, encounters the rottenness and death of war and begins to consider the reasons that have led to it and its consequences. He asks for a new transfer, this time to Aviation but falls ill both in the stomach and in the heart, for which he is finally transferred to a hospital in Strasbourg and considered imbele.

End of the war, strike and psychiatric hospital

He enrolls at the University of Munich. He takes advantage of this time to attend all kinds of classes and educate himself, absorbs the literary criticism of the press and maintains a relationship with the intellectuals of the time such as Rilke or Thomas Mann, who even agrees to read his poems and help him with the work. of the.

Disappointed with the old intellectuals who seem incapable of acting to demand an end to the war, he decides to get more and more involved in young political movements that are looking for a new way to face the future of Germany and who dream of a lasting peace. The first of these groups will be the “German Political and Cultural Youth League”. Faced with their slogans, they are strongly attacked by extreme right parties, accusing them of being unpatriotic. He becomes a convinced anti-war.

He came into contact with the socialist Gustav Landauer who had formed a Socialist League as a libertarian alternative to the Social Democratic Party. A short time later he meets Kurt Eisner in Berlin, with whom he would soon join a great friendship and complicity. Toller decides to intensify his work in the workers' assemblies. He goes so far as to distribute war poems from his work The Transformation Among Women because he believes that his gruesome images are an open denunciation of the war that can contribute to a greater involvement of women in the demand for an armistice.

Faced with the imprisonment of Eisner and other strike leaders, Toller gains prominence in a movement that heads towards the prison to demand the release of the prisoners. Finally he too is imprisoned in the Leonrodstrasse military prison. He ends there his work The transformation. A prison doctor intercedes for him and declares that for health reasons he can no longer be imprisoned, so he is sent to the Neu-Ulm reserve battalion. Ernst Toller then believes that he has regained his freedom but by order of his mother, who does not understand that a man from a bourgeois family is involved in the workers' struggle, he is transferred to a psychiatric clinic.

In the summer of 1918 Ernst Toller fully regained his freedom.

Bavarian Republic of Councils

Ernst Toller

When the Kiel uprising began in November 1918 and after the abdication of the last king of Bavaria, Eisner was appointed prime minister of the Free State of Bavaria by the Workers' and Soldiers' Council. Toller is appointed Vice President of the Council. As an assistant to the Committee of Councils in Berlin, he is appalled at the idea of abandoning the workers' struggle in favor of a parliamentarism that has not been purged of its responsibilities regarding the war and the approval of the extraordinary credits that made it possible.

He and Eisner attended a meeting of the Second International in Bern. There, the Bavarian prime minister intones an anti-imperialist speech and against war crimes that inflames the spirits of German nationalists. A short time later, when he was going to the inauguration session of the new Bavarian Parliament that emerged from the 1919 elections, Eisner is assassinated. Said assassination alerts the Republic that fears, not without reason, a mass uprising in Bavaria since the exalted masses demanded revenge. The Central Council of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers assumes governmental power in Bavaria isolating the government elected by Parliament and chaired by Hoffmann who decides to move with all his ministers to the city of Bamberg.

In Munich, on April 7, 1919, the president of the Central Council resigns and elects Ernst Toller as his successor who tries from the beginning to put libertarian policies into practice. However, on April 12, he succumbed to pressure from the Communist Party, which until now had been contrary to and even bellicose with the Central Council, to take control of the situation.

In turn, the Hoffmann government organizes through Noske an offensive against Munich that returns control to the Social Democrats.

Prison

Ernst Toller can hardly evade the responsibility exercised in the Bavarian Republic of Councils for which, like many of his colleagues, he ends up being captured, tried and sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence says that he has committed a crime of high treason but for honorable reasons. He is imprisoned in the Niederschönenfeld prison.

He dedicates his stay in prison to writing, there he will culminate his most famous play, Hombre Masa, which will be followed by Los destructores de máquinas, Hinkermann and his collection of poems El libro de las golondrinas.

On July 15, 1924, he was released one day before the completion of his sentence, but he was transferred into custody to the Prussian border because he was denied to remain on Bavarian soil.

Exile

The world he found on his way out had changed. Realism had overwhelmed expressionism in theaters, so Humanity was no longer seen as an Ideal but was subject to a description. According to Toller himself: “the era of expressionism has been replaced by the 'new objectivity' and that form of art called reportage. I believe that the new objectivity […] does not approach men and things, but their photography”.

From then on, he began a tireless task as a lecturer that he would not abandon until his death and would make him travel through Germany, Palestine, England, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Austria, Italy, Mexico, Scandinavia...

In January 1927, he worked with Piscator in his play “Hoppla, wir leben!” [My, we live!] which was staged in Berlin the same year.

Deeply attracted by the social changes that the Second Spanish Republic was trying to implement, in October 1931 he made a first trip to Spain that he lasted until March of the following year.

In 1933 he was saved from being arrested after the Reichstag fire because he was in Switzerland, so he stayed to live in Zurich for a while. The Nazis withdrew his German citizenship and confiscated his assets.

In 1934, he decided to take refuge in London. In June, after having maintained relations with the PEN-Clubs of various countries, he participated in the founding of the German PEN-Club in exile. Between August and September he attended the First Congress of Writers of the Soviet Union in Leningrad because of his friendship with Iliá Ehrenburg who in his People, Years, Life wrote about him: “Toller fell in love, fell into despair, he made plans for plays and for the liberation of Germany; he seemed as if in his pockets he carried decks of cards with which he was always building cardboard houses ”.

On his return to England, he raced against time to raise money to help the wife of Carl von Ossietzky, locked up in the Esterwegen Lager.

The following year, in 1935, he participated in the International Congress of Writers in Paris and reaffirmed his commitment to the defense of freedom and Humanity and considered it necessary to adopt a belligerent position and not limit himself to the passivity of pacifism.

Between the months of March and April 1936, he returned from a trip to Spain with his wife Christiane Grautoff. From his return to the United States and until 1937 he combined work as a journalist and screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. He believed that as a playwright he could restart his task of developing an explicitly political theater, not a propaganda one. Only one of his scripts was accepted and made into the big screen, but it had been so altered that Toller disowned it.

The following year he began to suffer severe periods of depression, which ended his marriage in July 1938. Toller immediately returned to Spain. On this occasion, he focused on getting to know Madrid and Barcelona in depth. Devastated by the catastrophe that the bombings had caused among civilians, Toller began an intense diplomatic and propaganda activity based on his Spanish Relief Plan, which sought to channel food aid to the civilian population in the Republican zone. He came to meet with Eleanor Roosevelt but no relevant government, country or institution agreed to get involved in it.

The end of the Spanish Civil War, with the republican exodus into exile in France, was a severe blow for Toller who, in addition to being depressed, found himself ruined after devoting all his money to the aid plan for the Spanish.

On May 22, 1939, he committed suicide in his room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. He was 45 years old. The Nazi press mocked this, headlining the news: “Hoppla, wir sterben!” [Wow, we die!]

Writers such as Oskar Maria Graf or the Spanish politician Juan Negrín were present and spoke at his wake. Upon learning of his death, Klauss Mann wrote: “He died because he realized that there was no return, neither for him nor for the works he has written. That there is neither new nor old country to return to”.

Works

• Die Wandlung1919
• Masse Mensch, 1921
• Die Maschinenstürmer, 1922 (Machine destroyers, ADE, 1991; Alikornio, 2002, trad. by Dorothee Schmitz and Hors Rosenberger.
• Der entfesselte WotanKomödie, 1923.
• Das Schwalbenbuch (1923).
• Hinkemann, 1923 (Hinkemann, ADE, 1991, trad. by Rodolfo Halffter.
• Hoppla, wir leben1927.
• Justiz. Erlebnisse1927.
• Quer Durch1930.
• Feuer aus den Kesseln, 1930 (on line in Projekt Gutenberg-DE).
• Die blinde Göttin1933.
• Feuer aus den Kesseln1930.
• Eine Jugend in Deutschland, 1933 (A youth in GermanyContraScripture, 2016, trad. Nuria Molines Galarza; Muchnik, 1987 (discontinued), Pablo Sorozábal Serrano; Reedited by Pepitas de Calabaza ed. in February 2017).
• Briefe aus dem Gefängnis1935.