Georg Kaiser

Georg Kaiser , 1878-1945, German expressionist playwright. His early plays dealt with the erotic and the psychological. In maturity Kaiser turned to social themes, glorifying the ideal of sacrifice for the mass interest and attacking the brutality of the machine age. He fled Germany for Switzerland when the Nazis came to power. Among his many dramas are The Citizens of Calais (1914, tr. 1946), From Morn to Midnight (1916, tr. 1920), and the trilogy The Coral (1917, tr. 1929), Gas (1918, tr. 1924), and Gas II (1920).

Bibliography: See studies by R. Benson (1984) and P. Tyson (1984).

Kaiser, Georg (1878–1945), German dramatist, a major exponent of Expressionism. His early plays were satirical comedies directed against Romanticism, but the first of his works to attract attention was Die Bürger von Calais (written in 1913 but not performed until 1917). This is generally considered his best play, though not so well known as Von morgens bis mitternachts, seen later the same year. The latter, a sombre history of a bank clerk whose bid for freedom from the futility of modern civilization leads to suicide, was translated by Ashley Dukes as From Morn to Midnight, and was produced by the Stage Society in 1920. It was given its first public production in London in 1926, having been seen in New York in 1922. It was followed in Germany by the powerful trilogy Die Koralle (1917) and Gas, I and II (1918 and 1920), a symbolic picture of modern industrialism crashing to destruction and taking with it the civilization it has ruined. Except for the melodramatic Der Brand im Opernhaus (1919), Kaiser's later works—he wrote about 70 plays—made less impact, but he collaborated with the musician Kurt Weill in several operas; in 1938 he left Germany for Switzerland, where he died.