From the time he was invited as a young student to attend a conference called by the publisher Eugen Diederichs during World War I until his suicide in 1939, the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller was rarely off the front pages of German or foreign newspapers. His first play, Die Wandlung (The Transformation, 1919), performed while its author was in prison for his role in the Munich revolution, was such a theatrical sensation that it prompted public agitation for Toller's pardon--an offer he refused. Toller's works were translated into languages ranging from Bulgarian and Esperanto to Gujarati and Japanese, and his plays were performed in Moscow, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Riga, Copenhagen, Tokyo, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, Urbana, Brooklyn, Berkeley, Princeton, and Poughkeepsie.

Toller was born in Samotschin, Germany (now Szamocin, Poland), on 1 December 1893. His maternal great-grandfather, the first Jew to settle in the town, had been granted certain civil rights under...