Biography
Wolfgang Borchert was born in Hamburg in 1921, the son of a schoolteacher, and initially trained as an actor. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, he served on the Eastern Front, was wounded, and was repeatedly imprisoned for remarks critical of the regime. He returned from captivity gravely ill in 1945 and, writing largely from his sickbed between 1946 and 1947, produced a small but influential body of short prose and the drama 'Draußen vor der Tür'. He died on 20 November 1947 in a Basel clinic from the liver disease he had contracted during the war, one day before his best-known play's stage premiere. Borchert is now regarded as one of the defining voices of German post-war 'rubble literature'.
On Stagelog
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