Friedrich Wolf was most successful and is best known today as a writer of political plays that support communist causes. His plays are Zeitstücke (stage presentations that discuss social issues and provide clear answers); Agitationsund Kampfstücke (productions meant to incite civil disobedience and confrontations with the guardians of the status quo); and Lehrstücke (didactic dramas dealing with public concerns). This type of activist literature constituted a major innovation of German theater during the late 1920s, the waning years of the Weimar Republic. It was hardly ever performed on the stages of theaters supported by bourgeois subscribers or city and state subsidies. Its audience usually consisted of working-class people who accepted the dramas as re-creations of their daily lives. The messages of these plays are hardly ever complex or ambiguous; they were not intended to transcend their immediate sociopolitical context. Few of Wolf's...