Best known as one of Germany's three or four leading expressionist playwrights, Carl Sternheim was also a serious and successful writer of stories, essays, pamphlets, and one novel, all of which belong in the canon of German expressionist writings. He created an idiosyncratic prose style more dynamically expressive than that of any of his contemporaries as a vehicle for his radical, sometimes inconsistent views on the origins and catastrophic development of early twentieth-century Europe. Both his life and his works give unequaled insight into the mind and behavior of the middle classes, into the decay of Western culture, and into the causes of two world wars. He pillories his own bourgeois vices and cast of mind and, because of his fanatical honesty, often throws his ideological principles into question.

William Adolph Carl Francke was born in Leipzig to Rosa Marie Flora Francke, a Lutheran, on 1 April 1878, almost two...