The late Wilhelmine and Weimar eras are notable for the fascination they continue to hold for historians of art, literature and, particularly, the theatre. One reason for this is the distinct relationship between forces of socio-political change and revolutions in aesthetic philosophy and artistic form moving through these periods. From the turn of the century until the outbreak of world war a spirit of artistic revolution waxes in German culture. The general result thereafter is that the arts – again, notably the theatre – are prepared as never before in German history to articulate the experience of historical change. German society – particularly from the end of the war through the brief “revolutionary” period, 1918–19 – is in such a state of turmoil that one can accurately speak both of a culture in transformation and of a crucial role for the arts in the process.

Among various artistic strategies active in this historical situation Expressionism was the most prominent. Yet the exact nature and specific features of this new and undeniable “movement” in the arts eluded definition. The artists who acknowledged and embraced it debated its aesthetics and struggled over its goals to such a degree that in the end it seemed, as one scholar has written, that there was “not one Expressionism but a number of loosely connected and subtly – or not so subtly – differentiated Expressionisms.”