The author who made the Germans like the short story: Who is Wolfgang Borchert?

(1921-1947) German storyteller, playwright, and poet. He gave successful examples of the short story genre, which was not common in German literature until after World War II. He was born on 20 May 1921 in Hamburg. He was the son of a teacher father and a writer mother. He dropped out of high school and worked as a bookstore apprentice. Then he started acting in theater in Lüneburg, and when the war broke out, he was drafted into the army. He was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941. He was imprisoned for three months on charges of intentionally injuring himself. In the end, he was acquitted, but this time he was prosecuted again for saying sarcastic remarks about the state and the National Socialist Party in his letters and speeches. After four months in prison, he was deported to the Eastern Front in the winter of 1942-43. He was sentenced to nine months in prison for the political anecdotes he told while he was about to be discharged from the military because of jaundice in the fall of 1943. When the war was over, he returned to Hamburg and started working in a theater despite being sick all the time. He was hospitalized as his illness progressed. He died on November 20, 1947, in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he went with the help of his friends.

Wolfgang Borchert (20 May 1921 – 20 November 1947) was a German author and playwright whose work was strongly influenced by his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. His work is among the best-known examples of the Trümmerliteratur movement in post-World War II Germany. His most famous work is the drama Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside), which he wrote soon after the end of World War II. 

Borchert, who started his writing life at the age of seventeen with expressionist poems, had to fit his works, which made him one of the classics of German literature, two years after the war, when he was constantly struggling with illness. In his short stories, he passionately expressed the anger and despair that the war aroused in young people. He presented all the horrors of the war and the post-war period in short, striking scenes without any commentary. In his play, Draussen vor der Tür (Out of the Doors), he described how a man returning from war was left indifferent to the suffering of the world. This play, which was staged in Hamburg the day after his death, It is the first German theatrical play to express the fate of the man returning from World War II. In all his works, he reflected the uneasiness of his generation, which he described as "a generation without a homeland, without bonds, unhappy, lonely, with a dark future, thirsty for love, unable to live its youth".

Wolfgang Borchert Works

Story:

An diesem Dienstag, 1947, (This Tuesday);

Hundeblume, 1947;

Die traurigen Geranien,(d.s.), 1962, (“Sad Geraniums”).