Drama in World War I

World War I Drama in

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

- Siegfried Sassoon (1947, p.71)

World War I was the first war in human history to demonstrate Humankind's

immense capability of destruction. It cost, beside the psychical, social and political scars

and a ten-million lives, in addition to the unbelievable material casualties. It demolished

the optimism in humanity that was sparked in the renaissance, confirmed in the

enlightenment and refined in the beginning of the modern age. The pessimism that the war

caused pervaded throughout Europe triggered the historians' apocalyptic prognostications.

The satirist Karl Kraus denouncing the war wrote a reportage entitled The Last Days of

Humanity. Huge numbers of the literary works that were produced in wartime were

fraught with melancholic and pessimistic themes. One of the particularities of this war is

that it was not concerned only with soldiers but reached also the layman. It was a war that

put on the same footing different social classes, genders and age groups. Thus the

pessimism transcended the soldiers, men of letters and haunted all the components of the

European society. The politicians' idealistic rhetoric, chiefly that it was the war to end all

wars, did not succeed to eradicate people's cynicism. David Lloyd George expressing his

1skepticism in regards to t political rhetoric stated " This war, like the next war, is war to

end war"(Stimpson 195). These depressive circumstances of the war made people

desperately look for outlets to release their anxieties. Consequently, The theater became a

perfect outlet that all the components of the European societies frequented more often.

In this context, Dramatic works were selectively approached, very few forms of

drama were accepted by the mass, only ones