Johst, Hanns

(1890-1978)

   Playwright, dramaturg. Johst was a significant Expressionist playwright, but he is best remembered as a fervent National Socialist and devotee of Adolf Hitler. His Schlageter was a highly effective treatment of the first Nazi "martyrs," premier-ing on Hitler's birthday in 1933, soon after he had been named chancellor; Schlageter went on to be performed hundreds of times in the 1930s. His earlier work, such as Der junge Mensch (The Young Man, 1916), Stroh (Straw, 1916), and Der Einsame (The Lonely One, with Christian Dietrich Grabbe as the central character, 1917), employed many of the ecstatic outbursts and fragmented scenarios characteristic of Georg Kaiser, Walter Hasenclever, and Reinhard Johannes Sorge; Johst's Thomas Paine (1927) was a return to realism and traditional structure. Schlageter was a curious combination of both Expressionistic and melodramatic techniques; some of the lines in Schlageter became oft-repeated Nazi aphorisms, for example, "When I hear the word 'culture,' I unholster my Browning!" and "We stand by Schlageter, not because he is the last soldier of the world war, but because he is the first soldier of the Third Reich!"