Biography
Ernst Toller was born on 1 December 1893 in Samotschin (then in Prussia, now Szamocin, Poland). He volunteered for the First World War in 1914 but, shaken by the Battle of Verdun, turned into an opponent of the war and a socialist. In 1918/19 he was one of the leading figures of the Munich Soviet Republic and, after its suppression, was sentenced to five years' fortress imprisonment, during which he wrote his best-known expressionist dramas, including "Die Wandlung," "Masse Mensch" and "Der deutsche Hinkemann." With "Hoppla, wir leben!" (1927) he became the most widely performed German playwright of the 1920s. Stripped of his citizenship by the Nazis in 1933, he went into exile in London and, in 1936, the United States, where he campaigned against Nazism but could not match his earlier success; he took his own life in a New York hotel on 22 May 1939.
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