Ernst Toller

born Dec. 1, 1893, Samotschin, Ger.
died May 22, 1939, New York, N.Y., U.S.
dramatist, poet, and political activist,
who was a prominent exponent of Marxism
and pacifism in Germany in the 1920s.
His Expressionist plays embodied his
spirit of social protest.
Toller studied at Grenoble University
in France but went back to Germany in
1914 to join the army. Invalided after
13 months at the front during World War
I, Toller launched a peace movement in
Heidelberg. To avoid arrest he fled to
Munich, where he helped lead a strike of
munition workers and was finally
arrested. In 1919 Toller, an Independent
Socialist, was elected president of the
Central Committee of the revolutionary
Bavarian Soviet Republic. After its
suppression he was sentenced to
imprisonment for five years. A scheme to
get him shot in the prison yard was
frustrated by a kindly old guard, who
routed him away from the gunmen.
In confinement Toller wrote
Masse-Mensch (1920; Man and the Masses,
1923), a play that brought him
widespread fame. Books of lyrics added
to his reputation. In 1933, immediately
before the accession of Hitler, he
emigrated to the United States. Also in
that year he brought out his vivid
autobiography, Eine Jugend in
Deutschland (I Was a German, 1934).
In Hollywood Toller had a brief,
unhappy stint as a scriptwriter.
Impoverished, convinced that his plays
were passé, and separated from his young
wife, he committed suicide in his
Manhattan hotel.