Hoppla, We're Alive

Ernst Toller was a revolutionary, poet and playwright engagé, president for six days of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, best known for his Expressionist plays Hoppla! We’re Alive, Man of the Masses and Machine Breakers. In his day Ernst Toller (1893-1939) was as renowned as the young Bertolt Brecht. High profile persona non grata in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Toller fled to London, went on a lecture tour to the U.S. in 1936, and tried to make a go of it as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Dispirited, despondent upon learning that his brother and sister had been sent to a concentration camp, and convinced that the world as he knew it had succumbed to the forces of darkness, Toller was found dead by hanging, a presumed suicide, in his room at the Hotel Mayflower on May 22, 1939.