Hoppla, We're Alive! (German: Hoppla, wir leben!) is a Neue Sachlichkeit (or "New Objectivity") play by the German playwright Ernst Toller. Its second production, directed by the seminal epic theatre director Erwin Piscator in 1927, was a milestone in the history of theatre. The British playwright Mark Ravenhill based his Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) on Toller's play.
Contents
Characters
Prologue
Time: 1919
Main play
This piece takes place in many countries, eight years after the crushing of a people's uprising.
Time: 1927
Reception
According to theatre critic Eric Bentley’s book The Playwright as Thinker, when Erwin Piscator directed the premiere of Hoppla, We’re Alive! in 1927 and Frau Meller, the mother in the play, said "There’s only one thing to do: either hang one’s self [sic] or change the world," the youthful audience burst spontaneously into the Internationale.
Hoppla, We're Alive! was one of the books burned in the infamous Nazi book burning, along with 20,000 other left-wing and Jewish books.