Wolfgang Borchert

Wolfgang Borchert (born May 20, 1921, Hamburg, Ger.—died Nov. 20, 1947, Basel, Switz.) was a playwright and short-story writer who gave voice to the anguish of the German soldier after World War II.

As a young man Borchert wrote several plays and a large number of poems, but he was determined to be an actor. In 1941 he was drafted into the army. The rigours of his army service resulted in jaundice, frostbite, malnutrition, and progressive liver degeneration. He spent much of his military career in jail, accused of self-mutilation (he lost a finger). From his cell he wrote anti-Nazi letters and mocked propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Borchert returned to Hamburg after the war, but ill health forced him to leave an acting troupe he had cofounded. He began writing short stories in January 1946 and, though bedridden, produced most of the body of his work in the remaining two years of his life. He died the day before his most famous work, the play Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the Door”; Eng. trans. The Man Outside), was first staged. It presents a wounded former prisoner’s attempt to discover a reason to keep on living.

Many of Borchert’s stories, first collected in Die Hundeblume: Erzählungen aus unseren Tagen (1947; “The Dandelions: Tales of Our Days”), are based on personal experience. They include boyhood memories as well as the war and prison stories for which he is best known. The heroes of his stories, who are victims and are often in physical pain, seek meaning but find death and ruin.