Tankred DORST

Photo: Martin Kaufhold

Author of the 2003 World Theatre Day Message – 27th March

 Biographical Data                                     (Document en français)

Playwright, storyteller, film-maker, author of radio plays, translator

Tankred Dorst was born on December 12, 1925 in the Thuringian town of Oberlind. His father, an engineer and factory owner, died when he was six. Conscripted into the German army as a 17-year-old still at school, he was taken prisoner and remained in British and American hands until 1947. He completed his schooling in 1950, going on to study German literature, art history and theatre in Bamberg and Munich. In 1953, together with composer Wilhelm Killmayer, he founded Das kleine Spiel, a student marionette theatre for which he wrote his first plays. After breaking off his studies, he worked in various capacities in film, radio and publishing houses. His first plays were performed in 1960, among them "Die Kurve" (Lübeck), "Gesellschaft im Herbst" (Nationaltheater Mannheim) and "La Buffonata" (Heidelberg).
Since the early 1970s he has collaborated in his writing with Ursula Ehler. His many plays, which have been performed all over Germany and Europe, include "Toller" (1968), "Eiszeit" (1973), "Die Villa" (1976), "Merlin oder Das wüste Land" (1981), "Parzival" (1987), "Korbes" (1988), "Karlos" (1990), "Herr Paul" (1994) and "Die Legende vom armen Heinrich" (1997). "Die Kurve" (1960, in collaboration with Peter Zadek) and "Rotmord" (1969, adaptation of "Toller" directed by Peter Zadek) have been produced for television. The television film "Sand" (directed by Peter Palitzsch) aired in 1971. Dorst himself directed the film adaptations of "Klaras Mutter" (1978), "Mosch" (1980) and "Eisenhans" (1982).
Tankred Dorst has translated and adapted for the stage a number of works by Diderot, Moliere and O'Casey.
He received a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1962 and held visiting professorships at universities in Australia and New Zealand in 1973. Dorst's work has been recognized with many prizes and distinctions, including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize (1964), Prize of the City of Florence (1970), Literature Prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste (1983), Mülheim Playwright's Prize (1989), Georg Büchner Prize (1990), ETA Hoffmann Prize (1996) and the city of Zurich's Max Frisch Prize (1998).

Tankred Dorst lives and works in Munich. His farces, parables, one-act-plays and adaptations of the 1960s were inspired by the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco, Giraudoux and Beckett. His monumental drama, "Merlin oder das wüste Land," which premiered in 1981 at the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, relates from the perspective of those born after the war, according to Dorst, "a story of our times: the failure of the utopias." The work has been compared to Goethe's "Faust," with some critics seeing in it the first major drama of the 1980s. In his tribute to Dorst on the occasion of the conferment of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1990, Georg Hensel remarked, "Dorst's plays all have a direct connection to the present - from Toller to Hamsum, "Lehrstück" to myth and postmodern explosion. For 30 years Dorst's plays have responded to the great transformations. He has always been a companion to the times."