A play of high caliber has finally ended [the postwar sterility of German Theater]. Time for unreserved applause arrived in May 1964 with the Berlin premiere of Peter Weiss' [Marat/Sade]. (p. 163)

Critics found themselves praising an author hardly expected to father the new masterwork of the German stage. They considered Peter Weiss a novelist….

The autobiographical novels Leavetaking and Flight-point had rendered in a calm, easy-flowing prose an individual's stormy un-shelling from society, family, and guilt-feelings, an exhausting tearing-loose from what is both wanted and rejected, as affiliation and chain, home base and prison…. What Weiss' novels of formation (Entwicklungsromane) describe realistically is also the core of "The Tower", his 1948 radio play. "The Tower" delineates Weiss' Huis Clos: family, fellow artists, and society are a circus in a tower—here the young and the animal are trained and will be enslaved unless they break away. The protagonists of...