In the remarkable constellation of literary personalities, including Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Gustav Meyrink, that was known collectively as the Prague Circle, Paul Kornfeld, if not the most celebrated, was one of the most seminal of thinkers and for a brief period one of the most popular writers. In 1920, when his reputation was at its zenith, Kornfeld was the most discussed author in the German language next to Georg Kaiser and Carl Sternheim. At that time he had been writing for only a few years and had three plays and a handful of essays to his credit. Albeit short-lived, Kornfeld's fame was based equally on his theoretical and practical contributions to expressionist aesthetics, particularly in the area of drama. Of particular importance for historians of drama is his notion of ecstatic dramatic art. The theory was set forth in...