SOURCE: Furness, Raymond. “The Religious Element in Expressionist Theatre.” In Expressionism Reassessed, edited by Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, pp. 163-73. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Furness presents an overview of Expressionist drama and its treatment of religion, noting that its main theme may be summed up as “the revolt of the spirit against reality.”

In Reinhard Sorge's The Beggar, a play written in 1910 and performed some five years later, a discussion between various literati in the obligatory coffee-house turns upon a recent dramatic work which is regarded as trivial, typical of an age whose writers lack, ‘the intense confirmation from the Beyond’ and ‘the Spiritual’; the third critic puts forward the following categorical statement: ‘We are waiting for someone to interpret our destiny anew—this is a dramatist whom I would call truly great. Our Haupt-Mann, you see, is impressive as...