This thesis examines the development of the political outlook of the German author and revolutionary politician, Ernst Toller. It begins by looking at Toller's early years and explains how his experience as a front-line soldier during the First World war transformed his views, causing him to reject the conservative-nationalist ethos he had grown up with and to become, in his own description, a revolutionary pacifist. It then looks at his involvement in the revolutionary events which took place in Bavaria at the end of the First World War, the so-called Räterepublik, examines how they affected his understanding of social and political reality and traces their artistic reflection in the plays he wrote in the following period. A recurrent theme in Toller's political thinking throughout the years of the Weimar Republic was the idea of an Einheitsfront, a defence block of workers' organisations, which he advocated as the only means of halting the rise of National Socialism. Unfortunately, Toller's appeals to the main workers' parties to form such a block went unheard, yet they are significant all the same in that they reveal the acute political insight of a man whom many of his contemporaries dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Interestingly, and a point often missed in studies of his politics, Toller abandoned the Einheitsfront after he went into exile in 1933 and came to favour instead the creation of a Volksfront a broad, cross-party anti-fascist coalition which the Soviet Union vigorously promoted all through the 1930s until the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1940. Toller's support for this idea, in part a corollary of his support for the Soviet Union itself, had a profound impact on his political outlook in exile, and caused him to close his eyes to the repression suffered by the opponents of the Stalin regime both inside and outside Russia, and, most significantly, led him to ignore the nascent socialist revolution which flourished in Spain after the defeat of Franco's coup d'etat in 1936. This study examines in some detail, therefore, Toller's involvement in the Volksfront, redefines his attitude towards Communist Russia and shows how his efforts to suppress his revolutionary beliefs and to become instead a mere anti-fascist affected his creative spirit during his years of exile.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1960. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 325-339).

The novel Im Westen Nichts Neues first appeared in Germany in January 1929 and became an overnight success. Its author, Erich Maria Remarque, was a shy, quiet man who had not anticipated such success. His novel was written to be a fictitious account of the lives of a few students-turned -soldier and their comrades in the front -line trenches of World War I. This was a unique perspective on the war. The earlier books about the war had been mostly the published, factual memoirs of former officers and as such were written from an elitist and nationalist point of view. Remarque's fictional characters, conversely, were young privates doing their duty and suffering through the dehumanizing effects of their military training and life at the front. They lost touch with their past and came to be able to see nothing in their future except war. These soldiers found themselves lost between a past with which they were no longer able to identify and a future in which, because of the terror and daily life-and-death struggle they currently faced, they could not imagine being able to take anything seriously. Coming out in favor of the novel were the critics aligned with the liberal and left -liberal political arenas. This group of critics proclaimed that the novel portrayed the truth about the war in all of its horror. Having been written from the perspective of the unknown German soldier, it, unlike any other heretofore published work about the war, told the story of the every day, non-elitist soldier and his thoughts. The novel was pacifistic in nature and was therefore in line with the current world opinion, following closely on the heels of the international signing of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. On the other hand, the Communist left and the entire spectrum of the political right denounced Im Westen Nichts Neues as a lie and Remarque as an anti-German author bent on the degradation of the German national honor. The Communists decried the novel as being arbeiterfeindlich because it did not recognize the political- economic causes of the war and because it contained no call for the oppressed to revolt against the upper classes. They therefore deemed Remarque a member of the sterile-minded bourgeoisie. The rightists, in their denunciation of the novel, took exception to the lack of heroes and glorification of the war in the book. Kameradschaft was given the credit for heroism. This idea was repugnant to the nationalists, and in fact worked as a threat to their reason for existence. With Remarque further depicting the soldiers as acting instinctively to protect themselves from annihilation rather than fighting with thoughts of the glorious renewal of the fatherland, it was too much. They proclaimed the novel to be a lie which had been written by, among other descriptions of Remarque, a tender, pacifistic little soul who had never seen a battlefield in his life.

The author's Habilitationsschrift--Mainz, 1978. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 359-384.

Bibliography: leaves 29-340.

Bibliography: leaves 29-340 / 340 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, 1988