Hoppla, We're Alive! (play)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source:
Ernst Toller
 Plays One
 Transformation, Masses Man, Hoppla, We're Alive!
Edited and Translated with and introduction by Alan Raphael Pearlman
Oberon Books Ltd. 2000


Contents

[edit] Prologue Characters:

Time: 1919

Karl Thomas Eva Berg Wilhelm Kilman
Albert Kroll Frau Meller Warder Randrow
Lieutenant Baron Friedrich Soldiers

[edit] Play Chararcters:

This piece takes place in many Countries.
Eight years after the crushing of a people's uprising.

Time: 1927

Karl Thomas Eva Berg Wilhelm Kilman
Frau Kilman Lotte Kilman Rand
Professor Lundin Albert Kroll Frau Meller
Rand Professor Lundin Fritz
Grete Count Lande Minister of War
Banker Banker's Son Pickel
Baron Friedrich Ministry Official Madhouse Orderly
Student 1st Worker 2nd Worker
3rd Worker 4th Worker 5th Worker
Examining Magistrate Head Waiter Porter
Radio Operator Busboy Police Chief
1st Policeman 2nd Policeman 3rd Policeman
Chairman of the Union of Intellectual Brain Workers Philosopher X Poet Y
Critic Z Election officer 2nd Election Officer
1st Electioneer 2nd Electioneer 3rd Electioneer
Voter Old Woman Prisoner N
Journalist Ladies, Gentlemen People

[edit] Synopsis

Excerpt from "Performance and Politics in Popular Drama" 
By David Bradby, Louis James, Bernard Sharratt / Cambridge University Press 1980

From Edwin Piscator's 1927 Production of Hoppla, Were Alive Toller's Play explores the fate of Karl Thomas, a revolutionary of 1918-19 who, after eight years in a mental institution, is released into a totally changes world in which he can establish no point of contact. Although "the play takes place in many countries" and "Eight years after the suppression of a people's uprising", this attempt to lend it universal significance is contradicted by the main characters who clearly mirror the broad spectrum of Political opinion in the Weimar Republic. The lines of demarcation are draw from the prologue in which we see a group of prisoners who have been condemned to death for their part in an abortive revolution. In the young romantic revolutionary Karl Thomas, the class-conscious worker Albert Kroll and the petite bourgeois socialist Wilhelm Kilman are represented in the main faction of the left in German 1919 - the Independent Socialists, the Communists and the Social Democrats.


[edit] Public, Historical and Media Responses

According to theater critic Eric Bentley’s book The Playwright as Thinker, when Piscator directed the opening of Ernst Toller’s German play Hoppla, wir leber (Hoppla, we’re alive) in 1927: When the mother character (Frau Meller) said, "There’s only one thing to do: Either hang one’s self [sic] or change the world,’ the youthful audience bursts spontaneously into the [French socialist anthem] ‘Internationale’ and kept it up til the end of the play. (http://www.thetartan.org/2007/10/15/pillbox/robert)

Hoppla, We're Alive! was one of the books burned in the famous May 10th, 1933 Nazis book burning of 20,000 left wing and Jewish books ("Plays One", Alan Pearlman, Oberon Books 2000)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links