Death comes to everyone, and in the late medievalmorality play of Everyman, the familiar skeletal figurewith the scythe forces the universalized centralfigure to come to terms with what this means, andeventually he repents of his sins, makes a gooddeath, and is redeemed. The morality play itself wasre-worked in German early in the twentieth century,but several important later German plays echo it,although perspectives both on death itself and onthe possibility of salvation have shifted. Thenumbers of military and civilian deaths in the Firstand Second World Wars (and in later conflicts) havebecome almost unimaginable, while in the Cold Warthe prospect of the nuclear destruction of theentire world became a possibility.

In this book I look at the heritage of Everyman in plays by ErnstToller, Wolfgang Borchert, and Max Frisch, in termsof theater and dramatic effect; of changes in theimage of Death, who is no longer skeletal butoverfed; and of the problem of living withexistential guilt in an age where the idea ofredemption has faded to a very large extent, so thatEveryman now has a different and perhaps harderphilosophy to deal with. The aim here is tostimulate interest in the theme as such and in thethree modern plays, which are all part of world,rather than just German, drama.

There are published translations of all the non-Englishworks used or cited here, and I have providedreferences to those translations; how-ever, alltranslations in the text itself are my own. Althoughconventions now vary, I have spelt God throughoutwith an initial capital, except where the concept ismeant generally, since the designation refersfrequently to a single character in a play, asindeed does Death, who thus also merits a capitalletter most of the time. I have retained lower casefor their personal pronouns, however, and used maleones for both. Even though represented as a sexlessskeleton, and although mors is a feminine noun in Latin, Deathis most often regarded as male, as is God, althoughboth might equally well be, and indeed sometimesare, played by a woman.