In midwinter 1947 a bedridden actor emerged from near obscurity to become the leading voice of postwar literature, his cry of existential despair a play entitled Draußen vor der Tür (Outside the Door; published, 1947; translated as The Man Outside, 1952). Its broadcast by the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Radio) on 13 February aroused public acclaim and the interest of producers and publishers throughout Germany. The author, terminally ill from deprivations suffered at the Russian front and in Nazi prisons, died nine months later in Basel, Switzerland, one day before the play's stage premiere in Hamburg. He was twenty-six.

Wolfgang Borchert was born in Hamburg on 20 May 1921, the only child of Fritz and Hertha Salchow Borchert. His father, a public-school teacher in the middle-class Eppendorf quarter, was cultured and reserved, an enlightened and permissive parent. Hertha Borchert, author of popular stories in the dialect of the north German...