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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Fortunes of Everyman in Twentieth-Century German Drama: War, Death, Morality

The Fortunes of Everyman in Twentieth-Century German Drama: War, Death, Morality

Murdoch, Brian

Hardcover

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, Book 227

Literary CriticismTheater HistoryPlays

ISBN10: 1640141170
ISBN13: 9781640141179
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
Published: Jan 14 2022
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction.

Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed the view of death, while in the Cold War the nuclear destruction literally of everyone became a possibility. Brian Murdoch traces the heritage of Everyman in the three plays in terms of dramatic effect, changes in the image of Death, and especially the problem of living with existential guilt. Death, now over-fed, still has to be faced, but Everyman has the harder problem of living with the awareness of human wickedness without the possibility of salvation.

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