Hoppla, We’re Alive!

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.

A landmark of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Toller's Hoppla, We're Alive! is one of the founding works of what would later be come to known as the epic theater and a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism. Karl Thomas, a participant in the failed Soviet-style revolutions of 1918, has spent the past eight years in a mental hospital. Released into the Germany of 1927, Karl Thomas encounters each of his former comrades in a world where all of the lessons of the first world war and the revolution seem to have been forgotten. Building to a powerful and tragic climax, Toller's play has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and awaken readers.This translation, adapted from its performance at La Mama in the fall of 2019, is an attempt to reconcile the play's multiple extant drafts and divided meanings. In the winter of 1939, 12 years after he had staged this play in Weimar Berlin, Piscator was invited to open the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, long a home for artists and intellectuals in exile. Under Piscator's leadership, the Dramatic Workshop would come to be perhaps themes influential theater school in the United States, instrumental in the careers of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Marlon Brando, and Judith Malina. Earlier that spring, Piscator met for coffee with Toller to discuss a future project. Two days later, on May 22, 1939, Toller hanged himself, in what was then the Mayflower Hotel off Central Park West.