Hans Henny Jahnn wrote plays that bear a strong affinity to those of German expressionism: they deal with such themes as the rejection of civilization for nature; deviant sexual practices; sadistic murderous relations in society and the family; impotence; alienation; and despair. Yet Jahnn, despite his kinship with the expressionists, the early Bertolt Brecht, and such authors as Ernst Barlach and Alfred Döblin, remains a unique, idiosyncratic outsider, whose visions and obsessions were private and pathological.

His plays range from early ecstatic tragedies of doomed adolescents to dramas about artists, protests against racism and nuclear war, and adaptations of Shakespearean historical plays and Greek tragedies. All are marked by those obsessive visions and rituals that are at once a major element of his message and a sign of his personal vulnerability.

Jahnn was born on 17 December 1894 to Elise Petersen Jahnn and William Jahnn in Stellingen, near...