Because circumstances worked against him, Carl Sternheim's preeminent position among German expressionist playwrights was not established until after World War II, more than a decade after his death. The Berlin police office of theater censorship, critics ill equipped to appreciate plays not conforming to their expectations concerning comedy, actors and directors who sometimes distorted his work to soften its satiric bite, and a wartime mentality that sought to ban any public utterance threatening solidarity on the home front all stood in the way of proper recognition of Sternheim by audiences, theater people, and the reading public--especially during the period 1910 to 1920, when he was at the height of his productive powers. Political tensions and agitation by right-wing groups to discourage performance of "un-German" plays interfered seriously with his reception during the 1920s. And with the National Socialists' accession to power in 1933 his plays disappeared altogether from German theaters and...