BETWEEN FIGHTING SPIRIT AND DESPAIR: THE GROWING DISTRUST OF LANGUAGE IN ERNST TOLLER'S WORK IN EXILE

Abstract

It was only by a lucky coincidence that Ernst Toller escaped arrest in National Socialist Germany. The author understood his own survival as an obligation to stand up for the victims of National Socialism and to fight against fascism. He dedicated his whole life to this task. Until his suicide in May 1939, Toller was mainly acting as a public speaker on the situation in Nazi Germany. Although Toller wrote two plays as late as 1939, he was still struggling with the English language. He wrote in German and depended on the help of others to translate his plays. As he said himself, he felt imprisoned in the German language. In addition, the audience he actually wanted to reach and stir up was the German population. Whereas Toller had experimented with form and expression in his plays of the Weimar era, searching for ever-new ways to capture political commitment in contemporary literary form, his works written in exile were much more conventional. What influence did the exile experience and the language barrier have on Toller's dramatic writing, and how did this change his self-image as an author and his conceptions of literary theory? These questions will be addressed in this article.