Hans Henny Jahnn is probably the least known among the great German-speaking writers of the first half of the twentieth century, in his own country as well as elsewhere. He is rejected by many of those who do know of him because his ideas, presented in powerful dramatic and narrative prose, are provocative and disturbing; they explode the accepted bourgeois order of things and are offensive to a conventional mode of thinking. But one is hard put to deny their validity: Jahnn persistently preached pacifism, feared man's barbarism and opposed it with love of mankind, and fought materialism and a utilitarian life. His aim was to be absolutely truthful, but the truths he sought are not to be found on the surface of man but in his abysses, his errors, his suffering. And so he came to be known as the writer of the "Hölle des...