Wolfgang Borchert

Worldwide acclaim greeted a radio and stage play on World War II and its aftermath written by a former German soldier and anti-Nazi dissident, Wolfgang Borchert, in 1947. The play, Draussen vor der Tür [The Man Outside], evoked a flood of mostly positive resonance after the initial broadcast by Northwest German Radio on 13 February 1947. The author, mortally ill after years of privation on the Russian front and in German prisons, died at age twenty-six, one day before the play's stage premiere in his native city of Hamburg. The play, published in English translation in 1952, along with several slim volumes of moving autobiographical short stories, earned Borchert renown as the voice of the maladjust