
The Man Outside
1947
First Published
4.08
Average Rating
106
Number of Pages
Wolfgang Borchert died in 1947––the twenty-six-year-old victim of a malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day after the premier of his play, The Man Outside, which caused an immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine. As a Wehrmacht conscript, he twice served on the Russian front, where he was wounded, and twice was imprisoned for his outspokenness. His voice speaks plainly and powerfully from out of the war’s carnage all the more poignantly for its being cut short at so young an age.
Avg Rating
4.08
Number of Ratings
6,376
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author

Wolfgang Borchert
Author · 8 books
German author and playwright whose work was affected by his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. His work is among the best examples of the Trümmerliteratur movement in post-World War II Germany. His most famous work is the drama "Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside)", which he wrote in the first days after World War II. In his works he never makes compromises in questions of humanity and humanism. He is one of the most popular authors of the German postwar period, and today his work is often read in German schools.