Hoppla, We're Alive!: Drama

A landmark of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Toller's Hoppla, We're Alive! is one of the founding works of what would later be come to known as the epic theater and a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism. Karl Thomas, a participant in the failed Soviet-style revolutions of 1918, has spent the past eight years in a mental hospital. Released into the Germany of 1927, Karl Thomas encounters each of his former comrades in a world where all of the lessons of the first world war and the revolution seem to have been forgotten. Building to a powerful and tragic climax, Toller's play has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and awaken readers. This translation, adapted from its performance at La Mama in the fall of 2019, is an attempt to reconcile the play's multiple extant drafts and divided meanings. In the winter of 1939, 12 years after he had staged this play in Weimar Berlin, Piscator w