About the work
The Raft of the Medusa is a verse drama by the German playwright Georg Kaiser, written between 1940 and 1943 during his Swiss exile; its title alludes to Théodore Géricault's painting of the same name (1819). It was prompted by a newspaper report on the sinking of the British passenger liner "City of Benares" on 17 September 1940 by a German U-boat, which had been evacuating children from Britain to Canada. The premiere took place only after Kaiser's death, on 24 February 1945 at the Basel Stadttheater, directed by Robert Pirk with an all-student cast.
Plot
After a ship sinks, thirteen children drift for several days on a raft on the open sea, with dwindling supplies and growing fear. Under the pressure of this extreme situation, the group's solidarity breaks down: to escape their impending doom, the children drown the youngest among them.
Cultural significance
Described by Kaiser himself as a "dramatic legend of darkness", the play is regarded as one of the starkest works of his late period on the loss of humanity under extreme duress, and was not published in full until 1963. It should not be confused with the oratorio of the same name (1968) by Hans Werner Henze, based on a text by Ernst Schnabel, which draws on an entirely different source.