One of the best-known German sculptors during the Weimar Republic, Ernst Barlach also achieved recognition as a playwright after World War I. Although audiences never responded with great enthusiasm to his plays, literary critics generally agree that Barlach's dramatic work counts among the most important of the expressionist period. His plays attracted such directors as Leopold Jessner and Jürgen Fehling and such actors as Fritz Kortner and Heinrich George, and his play Die Sündflut (1924; translated as The Flood, 1964) earned him the prestigious Kleist Prize. After World War II, despite the defamation and suppression of his work by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945, Barlach's plays were accorded repeated productions with long runs.

All of the plays center around men and women who are trying to leave their earthly and limited existence in search of new, unknown forms of being. The urge to break out of the...