About the work
Wolfgang Borchert wrote the drama within a few days in late autumn 1946, shortly after returning gravely ill from Soviet captivity. Northwest German Radio first broadcast it as a radio play on 13 February 1947. The stage version premiered on 21 November 1947 at the Hamburger Kammerspiele — one day after the 26-year-old Borchert had died in a Basel clinic from the illness he had contracted during the war.
Plot
Returning soldier Beckmann comes home from a Siberian POW camp to find no place left for him: his wife has taken another man, a former superior disclaims any responsibility, a cabaret director rejects him as a performer, and a stranger now living in his parents' old flat tells him they took their own lives. Only the personified river Elbe and a doubting alter ego called 'the Other' accompany him through a night that ends without resolution.
Cultural significance
The play is considered a key text of German post-war 'rubble literature' and remains among the most frequently performed German-language dramas of its era. Borchert's death on the eve of the premiere turned him and his work into a symbol of the returning soldiers' 'lost generation'.