Wolfgang Borchert

Who was Wolfgang Borchert?

Wolfgang Borchert was a German author and playwright whose work was affected by his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. His work is among the best examples of the Trümmerliteratur movement in post-World War II Germany. His most famous work is the drama "Draußen vor der Tür", which he wrote in the first days after World War II. In his works he never makes compromises in questions of humanity and humanism. He is one of the most popular authors of the German postwar period, also today often read in German schools.

Borchert was born in Hamburg, the only child of teacher Fritz Borchert, who worked also for the Dada magazine "Die Rote Erde" and author Hertha Borchert, who worked for the Hamburg radio and was famous for her dialect poetry. Borchert's family was very liberal and progressive, they operated in Hamburg's intellectual society circles. Far from being an enthusiastic Nazi, Borchert hated his compulsory time in the party's youth wing, the Hitler Youth, from which, after missing meetings, he was released. So long before he wrote his famous drama "The man outside", he rebelled against the NS-dictatorship in his prewar-works. In April 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo and then released. The same year he reluctantly took up an apprenticeship at a Hamburg bookshop. While at the bookshop, Borchert took acting lessons, without, at first, telling his parents. He left the apprenticeship early in 1941. Upon passing his acting examination on 21 March 1941, he began working at for the travelling theatre repertoire company Landesbühne Ost-Hannover based in Lüneburg. His nascent theatrical career was cut short, however, by his conscription into the Wehrmacht in June 1941.