Ernst Toller was born on December 1, 1893. He was the youngest of three children in a middle-class Jewish merchant family in Samotschin – which was then part of the former Prussian province of Posen, and now is located in present-day Poland. His parents, Max (Mendel) Toller and his mother Ida Toller (neé Cohn) ran a grain store in the small town’s market square. After graduating from secondary school in Bromberg, Toller enrolled in the University of Grenoble to study Philosophy and Law. When the news of the outbreak of the First World War reached him, he returned to Germany immediately and reported to the First Royal Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment in Munich. Despite his lack of military experience, he arrived the front at the beginning of 1915 and fought at Verdun and in Priesterwald.
After suffering a mental and physical breakdown, Toller was discharged as unfit for military service in 1916. He resumed his studies in Munich. In the circle of the famous theatre scholar Artur Kutscher, he made his first contacts in the literary scene, meeting authors including Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. In September 1917, Toller was invited as a youth representative to the Second Lauenstein Conference at Launstein Castle in the Thuringian Forest. There, he met Max Weber, who made a strong impression on him. Toller followed Weber to Heidelberg, where he enrolled for the university’s winter semester of 1917/18. It was there that his interest in politics began. He joined a pacifist group centered on Austrian socialist Käthe Leichter (neé Pick) and also founded a cultural-political federation in opposition to the war and the policies of the German Fatherland Party. His authorship of many leaflets and appeals provoked his first conflicts with law enforcement. He joined the Berlin strike movement in 1918. At the same time, he also wrote his first play, Die Wandlung.
In May 1918, Toller was arrested for attempted treason and drafted back into the army. When the monarchy collapsed in November, Toller fought on the side of the revolution in Munich and took part in the foundation of its Soviet Republic – in which he held numerous offices and functions. In 1919, he was declared (together with Andreas Fendl) as the Chairman of the Munich USPD in 1919. In this role, he was selected to represent the improvised Soviet Republic for a few days in April as the chairman of its Provisional Revolutionary Central Council.
After the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Toller was arrested for high treason and sentenced to five years in prison in July 1919. He was detained in various places – Munich’s Stadelheim prison, in Neuburg an der Donau, and in Eichstätt – before being transferred to Niederschönenfeld in 1920. While imprisoned, he wrote the plays Masse Mensch (1921), Der deutsche Hinkemann (1923) and Der entfesselte Wotan (1923), which were produced with huge success and helped him break through internationally as a playwright. In addition, Toller wrote two volumes of poetry, Gedichte der Gefangenen (1921) and Das Schwalbenbuch (1924), as well as additional works: the puppet play Die Rache des Verhöhnten Liebhabers (1920), the mass festivals Bilder aus der großen französischen Revolution (1922) and Krieg und Frieden (1923), as well as the choral works Requiem den erschossenen Brüdern and Tag des Proletariats (both ca. 1920).
After his release from prison in 1924, Toller began a period of strong political and cultural engagement. He worked in the German League for Human Rights, campaigned for political prisoners, took a stand in controversies, gave numerous lectures and speeches, went on reading tours, and continued his work as a writer as the author of plays, including Hoppla, wir leben! (1927), Bourgeois bleibt Bourgeois (1929, with co-author Walter Hasenclever), Feuer aus den Kesseln (1930), Wunder in Amerika (1931, with co-author Hermann Kesten) and Die blinde Göttin (1932).
Journalism and other nonfiction writing also became part of Toller’s work in this period, and he produced numerous reports and essays, travelogues, and political commentary, as well as in the radio plays Berlin – letzte Ausgabe! (1930) and Indizien (1932). Perhaps most important of all these works is Justiz-Erlebnisse (published in 1927) in which Toller documents the treatment of left-wing political prisoners in Bavaria.
Toller undertook numerous journeys to locales including Egypt and Palestine (1925), the Soviet Union (1926 and 1930), France (1926), England (1925, 1928 and 1929), Austria (1927), Denmark, Sweden and Norway (1927 and 1928), and the United States (1929). Toller published some of his impressions gathered during this time in 1930 in Quer durch: Reisebilder und Reden.
In February 1933, Toller took a trip to Switzerland. Events in Germany prevented his return to that country. On the night of the Reichstag fire, SA members looted the Berlin apartment that he shared with publisher Fritz Landshoff. His plays were banned, his books burned, and his name was placed on the first expatriation list of the German Reich.
Toller stayed with Emil Ludwig in Zurich for a few months, where he completed his autobiography, Eine Jugend in Deutschland – which was published in 1933 by the newly founded exile publishing house Querido Verlag. He moved to London in 1934 and became one of the co-founders of the German Exile P.E.N. He delivered passionate, appealing speeches, spoke on the radio, gave lectures at international congresses to union representatives and workers, and initiated and supported refugee aid projects during his time in Great Britain. He also continued his travels, including to Russia (1934), France (1935), and Spain (1936), increasingly consolidating his leading literary and political role in the German-speaking exile community. At the same time, Toller wrote a new play, Nie wieder Friede (1934–1936).
In May 1935, Toller married 18-year-old actress Christiane Grautoff, and she accompanied him to the United States in October of the following year. Toller’s main public activity there was a nationwide lecture tour on culture and politics, during which he sometimes spoke several times a day – especially about the situation in Germany. He signed a highly lucrative one-year contract with MGM as a screenwriter in February 1937 and moved to Los Angeles. He worked on unsuccessful screenplays for a film on Lola Montez (tentative title: Heavenly Sinner) and Der Weg nach Indien about the creation of the Panama Canal.
Disappointed by Hollywood, Toller returned to New York in February 1938; he also separated from Grautoff at this moment. His journey to Spain near the end of its Civil War led him to initiate an international aid project for that country’s starving population. He worked tirelessly for months, visiting representatives of the governments of all non-fascist Western states to collect declarations of support and pledges of assistance. This political work failed with Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and his creation of a fascist dictatorship there. Toller also worked on his last play, Pastor Hall, for which he used material provided by the exiled author Hermann Borchardt, and then ended up in a legal dispute.
On May 22, 1939, Toller took his own life in his room at the Mayflower Hotel.
Literature
Recent Translations of Works by Ernst Toller into English:
A Youth in Germany Translated by Eoin Bourke and Eva Bourke. Edited by Christiane Schönfeld and Lisa Marie Anderson (Broadview, 2024)
Hoppla, We’re Alive! Translated by Drew Lichtenberg (Berlinica, 2023)
Vormorgen: The Collected Poems Translated by Mathilde Cullen (Operating System Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts, 2021)
Hinkemann. A Tragedy. Translated by Peter Wortsman (Berlinica, 2019)
Toller Plays Two: The Machine Breakers, The German Hinkemann, The Revenge of the Lover Scorned, Wotan Unbound, Day of the Proletariat and German Revolution. Edited and translated with an introduction by Alan Raphael Pearlman (Oberon Books, 2019)
Toller Plays One: Transformation, Masses Man, Hoppla, We’re Alive! Edited and translated with an introduction by Alan Raphael Pearlman (Oberon Books, 2001)
Works About Toller in English:
He Was a German: A Biography of Ernst Toller Written by Richard Dove. (Libris, 1990)
Ernst Toller and German Society: Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914–1939 Written by Robert Ellis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017)
The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation Written by Cecil Davies (Routledge, 1996)
Key Reference Works in German (with some English language content):
Collected Works / Organized by the Ernst Toller Gesellschaft:
Ernst Toller: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe. [5 in 6 Bänden] (Wallstein, 2015.)
Collected Letters / Organized by the Ernst Toller Gesellschaft:
Ernst Toller: Briefe 1915–1939. Kritische Ausgabe [in 2 Bänden] (Wallstein, 2018 and also avaliable at www.tolleredition.de).