Outside the door:radio play 75 years ago for the first time on the radio

The drama "Outside the Door" from 1947 is considered Wolfgang Borchert's greatest success. It was first broadcast on the radio 75 years ago - on February 13, 1947 - nine months before it hit the stage.

by Marc-Oliver Rehrmann

The Hamburger Kammerspiele are showing the world premiere of "Outside the Door" by Wolfgang Borchert on November 21, 1947. The play will make him world-famous and shape the era of so-called rubble literature. It is the drama about a war returnee named Beckmann, who cannot find his way in the devastated city of Hamburg. However, the author himself does not live to see the first stage version of his play. The day before he died after a serious illness in Basel - at the age of 26.

"The audience was dead silent for minutes"

The premiere is a moving evening for the audience in the Hamburger Kammerspiele. First director Ida Honor comes on stage and informs the theatergoers about Borchert's death. "The audience stood up. We spent a few minutes in silence before the performance began," the actress and theater director, who died in 1989, later recalled. And the reaction to the staging? "At the premiere, after the curtain fell, the audience sat dead still in the hall for minutes," says leading actor Hans Quest in an interview with NDR in 1985. "Only then did the applause start, which wouldn't stop."

Siegfried Lenz also admired Borchert

Since its premiere in 1947, the play has been performed in more than 180 productions on German stages alone. Most recently, "Outside the Door" premiered in Hamburg's Ohnsorg Theater in February 2018 as "Buten vör de Döör" - a successful Low German production by Ingo Putz, which won awards at the following private theater days.

But Borchert's short stories such as "The Dog Flower" or "The Kitchen Clock" and his poems are still popular. "Borchert is the Hamburg post-war author who is still read the most today," says Hans-Gerd Winter. He is chairman of the International Wolfgang Borchert Society, a kind of Borchert fan club with around 200 members from all over the world - including Helmut Schmidt (1918 - 2015), Hamburg's long-standing mayor Henning Voscherau (1941 - 2016) and writer Siegfried Lenz (1926 - 2014).

"Borchert was a role model for many German writers"

"Borchert was a role model for many German writers," says Winter. "Siegfried Lenz said that his own short stories would have been unthinkable without Wolfgang Borchert, they had influenced him a lot." According to Lenz, Borchert was the first to regain the language after the catastrophe of the Second World War. When Lenz heard the radio play "Outside the Door" for the first time, he was completely devastated, reports Winter.

Incredible echo after a radio play

Many Germans were like Lenz at the time. Nine months before "Outside the Door" is premiered as a play, the play is already running as a radio play in the program of the NWDR, the predecessor of the NDR. When it was broadcast on February 13, 1947, it had a tremendous impact on listeners. To this day, the Wolfgang Borchert archive at the University of Hamburg contains hundreds of letters that listeners sent to the broadcaster:some enthusiastic, others simply appalled.

"The whole world felt at the time that here is the young man who expresses what concerns us all," says the journalist Axel Eggebrecht (1899-1991), who knew Wolfgang Borchert personally. "The effect was so great because Borchert spoke as a witness to the terrible events in the war - without any antics. That had an incredible effect on people so shortly after the war," said Eggebrecht.

"Outside the door" - synopsis

The play describes the day on which the soldier Beckmann returns to Hamburg.

Beckmann fought in Stalingrad and was a prisoner of war. He is scarred by war, one knee is broken. His wife now has another. Beckmann wants to drown himself in the Elbe, but it spits him out again in Blankenese. He learns that his parents have committed suicide. There is no place for him in society. Many questions torment him. The piece ends with the accusation:"Doesn't anyone, no one answer?"

"Outside the door" written in the sickbed

Borchert wrote "Outside the Door" in autumn 1946 on his sickbed - in the Borchert family's apartment on Carl-Cohn-Strasse in Hamburg-Alsterdorf. "Borchert himself said he wrote the play within a week," says Winter from the Wolfgang Borchert Society.

At the time, writing was an emergency solution for Borchert because he was no longer able to pursue his dream job due to severe jaundice. "Actually, Borchert wanted to be an actor," says Winter. Borchert himself, a trained bookseller, spoke of a "theatrical mania" and had had private lessons.

Borchert writes Hitler parody "Cheese" at the age of 18

Before he was drafted into the army in 1941, he joined a traveling group of actors at the East Hanover State Theater for a few months. Borchert's passion for the stage is evident early on. In 1939, at the age of 18, he and a friend wrote the play "Cheese". "A Hitler parody," explains Borchert expert Winter. It tells the story of a cheese merchant who conquers the world. Borchert sends the text to theater icon Gustaf Gründgens. "But at the time, a performance was out of the question," says Winter. "Thank God the text didn't fall into the hands of the Gestapo." Borchert would later have enough problems with the Nazi regime.

Borchert escapes the death penalty

Borchert is considered a Hamburger through and through. He goes to school there. In 1939 he began an apprenticeship in the Boysen bookshop in Hamburg, but dropped out at the end of 1940. In 1941, at the age of 20, he was sent to the Russian front. A gunshot wound in February 1942 loses a finger. He will then be put on trial. The accusation:he self-inflicted the injury. Two more trials followed for derogatory remarks about the Nazi regime. Borchert escapes the death penalty but spends many months in prison during the trials.

In the spring of 1945, the soldier Borchert was captured by French troops near Frankfurt and managed to escape. On foot he makes his way around 600 kilometers to Hamburg. He arrives there on May 10, 1945, two days after the end of the war.

The last two months in a Swiss sanatorium

Borchert does not recover from his suffering from the war years. Several months of hospital stays in Hamburg bring no improvement. For a long time he received his visitors from his sickbed - severely marked by jaundice:"His face was quince yellow," reported Eggebrecht later. And yet Borchert wrote his most important works during this time. Two months before his death, he travels to a sanatorium in Switzerland. But even the doctors there can no longer help him.

Hero of the Peace Movement

German professor Winter is certain that Borchert will continue to be read in the future - the short stories at school, his complete works by lovers of his zest for life and his "young" language. And as an anti-war author of opponents of war - also because of the depicted traumata of victims and perpetrators. The people of Hamburg in particular are unwaveringly loyal to Borchert. Readings and performances of Borchert's works are always a guarantee that the event is well attended, reports Winter.

Borchert box shows life, work and sick room

On the occasion of Borchert's 100th birthday, numerous events were planned for 2021 under the title "Hamburg reads Borchert". There was also a large glass Borchert box called "Dissonances" in the Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library in Hamburg that will be made publicly accessible beyond 2021. It presents the life and work of the writer as well as his sickroom in real and digital form.