A landmark of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Toller's Hoppla, We're Alive! is one of the founding works of what would later be come to known as the epic theater and a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism. Karl Thomas, a participant in the failed Soviet-style revolutions of 1918, has spent the past eight years in a mental hospital. Released into the Germany of 1927, Karl Thomas encounters each of his former comrades in a world where all of the lessons of the first world war and the revolution seem to have been forgotten. Building to a powerful and tragic climax, Toller's play has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and awaken readers.
This translation, adapted from its performance at La Mama in the fall of 2019, is an attempt to reconcile the play's multiple extant drafts and divided meanings. I would like to thank the rest of the LUDZ collective (Lloyd Huber, set and projections designer, Ulrich Lehman, dramaturg, and Zishan Ugurlu, director) for their vision and faith in bringing Hoppla its first North American production. In the winter of 1939, 12 years after he had staged this play in Weimar Berlin, Piscator was invited to open the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, long a home for artists and intellectuals in exile. Under Piscator's leadership, the Dramatic Workshop would come to be perhaps themes influential theater school in the United States, instrumental in the careers of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Marlon Brando, and Judith Malina. Earlier that spring, Piscator met for coffee with Toller to discuss a future project. Two days later, on May 22, 1939, Toller hanged himself, in what was then the Mayflower Hotel off Central Park West.
Berlinica Publishing LLC is a multi-media publishing house based in New York City; with its sister company Berlinica Publishing UG based in Berlin. Berlinica offers English-language books from Germany, fiction and non-fiction, mostly about history, also as e-books. Upcoming is "Our West-Berlin" and "Springtime in America," by Roda Roda, the first book of a series by Weimar writers in the new world.
Berlinica titles include Kurt Tucholsky's books "Berlin! Berlin!," "Germany? Germany!," "Rheinsberg," "Hereafter," and "Prayer After the Slaughter," a series of dramas from the Weimar Republic, a book about Mark Twain in Berlin, "Berlin 1945" with historic black-and-white pictures from the Soviet Army archives and "Berlin in the Cold War" . Berlinica also offers the comprehensive history book "Jews in Berlin" as well as "A Place They Called Home," about the children of German Jews returning. We sell "The Berlin Wall Today," a full-color guide to the remnants of the Wall by Michael Cramer and "The Berlin Cookbook," a full-color collection of traditional German recipes.
Our program also includes the music CD "Berlin-mon amour," by chanteuse Adrienne Haan, and two documentaries on DVD, "The Red Orchestra," by Berlin-born artist Stefan Roloff and "The Path to Nuclear Fission," by New York filmmaker Rosemarie Reed. Berlinica also sells books beyond Berlin, namely a travel guide to Martin Luther and a book on the 1000-year anniversary of Leipzig.
