If a theater-goer in Weimar Berlin were asked to name the best living German playwright, the answer would not be Bertolt Brecht or Georg Kaiser or Arnolt Bronnen. It would be Ferdinand Bruckner. And if asked, who is this Bruckner?, the Berliner would be at a loss to give you any information.

In the late 1920s, the first two plays attributed to Bruckner, Youth Is a Sickness and Criminals, were “hot tickets,” but only gradually was the pseudonymous author identified. Bruckner continues to be an understudied figure in the Weimar figure, and this updated translation of two of his most well-known plays will be the definitive version for scholars and readers interested in better understanding his legacy.

Youth Is a Sickness (1924) is an important document of the “lost generation” that grew up during the first World War, born in the aftermath of cataclysm, devoid of hope and ideals, lost in sex and drugs.

If Youth is a compact, claustrophobic study in juvenile derangement, Criminals (1926) is a panoramic survey of social interaction and legal injustice in the Weimar Republic. Its format is highly original: a three-story apartment building and a Palace of Justice with four courtrooms, in which simultaneous action allows for ironic comment on the various cases. The central example is a murder case in which fate allows a slick “lady’s man” to go to the gallows. Others involve homosexual blackmail (the first commercially successful play to be so explicit), a failed double suicide, theft, and abortion.

With an introduction and annotation by renowned theater and German scholar, Lawrence Senelick, these two plays will position Bruckner as a prime example of what we now call a “public intellectual,” a man whose life was devoted to reflecting on the fate of Germany, humane values, and the past, present, and future of a troubled century. Like many of his contemporaries, he was excited by the possibility of the stage to address issues of war and peace, social and political problems, and the fate of contemporary youth with its lack of ideal and eternal nostalgia.

About the Author

Ferdinand Bruckner (born Theodor Tagger on 26 August 1891 in Sofia, Bulgaria) was an Austro-German writer and theatre manager. His father was an Austrian businessman and his mother a French translator. After the separation of his parents, he spent time in Vienna and Paris, and in Berlin where he began to study music. However, impressed by the Expressionist literary scene in Berlin, in 1916 he moved away from music and devoted himself to poetry. In the following years, he published several poetry collections and in 1917 he began the literary magazine Marsyas with texts from authors like Alfred D�blin and Hermanne Hesse. In 1922, he founded, in his real name, the Berlin Renaissance Theater, whose leadership he gave to Gustav Hartung in 1928. In 1929 and 1930 he released the pieces Krankheit der Jugend (Pains of Youth) and Elisabeth von England (Elizabeth of England) using the pseudonym Ferdinand Bruckner. After the success of these works, he revealed their authorship, although he changed his name permanently to Bruckner in 1946. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris and worked on the anti-fascist play Die Rassen. In 1936, he moved to the USA, although he achieved little success there. Twenty years after his flight from Germany in 1953 he returned to Berlin where he worked as an advisor to the Schiller Theater. He died in Berlin on 5 December 1958.

Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. His expertise is in Russian theatre and drama, history of popular entertainment, gender and performance, visual studies, history of directing, classical theory. Prof. Senelick is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History; Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters; The American Stage: Writing on the American Theatre (Library of America) and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre.

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