Jahnn, Hans Henny

(1894-1959)

   Playwright. Jahnn's Expres-sionistic plays in the early 1920s made sensational use of Freudian preoccupations; characters in his plays often resorted to violence, sexual perversity, or sado-masochism or in some other way failed to control their primordial urges. Among them were the title roles of Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1919), Die Krönung Richard III (The Coronation of Richard III, 1921), and Der Artz, sein Weib, sein Sohn (The Doctor, His Mistress, His Son, 1922). All of them featured extremes of behavior; his Richard III in particular was an attempt to depart from the Romanticism of the familiar August Wilhelm Schlegel translation and present Gloucester as a homicidal psychopath, though it was written, as one critic put it, "in a verse characteristic of schoolboys" (Hans Natonek, Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 11 February 1922). Jahnn was awarded the Kleist Prize in 1920.