About the work
Gerhart Hauptmann began drafting this eleven-scene verse drama in 1908, shaped by the experience of the First World War. Max Reinhardt and Karlheinz Martin directed its premiere on 28 March 1920 at Berlin's Großes Schauspielhaus, with Alexander Moissi as Montezuma and Emil Jannings as Cortez.
Plot
The play depicts the Spanish conquest of Mexico around 1520. The Aztec ruler Montezuma awaits the prophesied "white saviour" and initially takes the conqueror Cortez for a divine messenger. Instead of salvation, his people meet betrayal and violence; forced to move against his own nobles, Montezuma loses his people's support and is finally shot dead by his own subjects.
Cultural significance
Alfred Kerr praised the play's moral reversal of roles ("his savage is a Christian, his Christians are savages"), and later readings saw it as a reckoning with the horrors of war. Even so, it fell into neglect: between 1944 and a 2012 revival in Greifswald, according to nachtkritik.de, it received only four productions.