DORST, TANKRED

(1925- )

   Playwright. Dorst is one of the few German playwrights whose first plays were written for the puppet theater. By the early 1960s he was writing for life-size actors, beginning with Die Kurve (The Curve, 1960). In 1968 he wrote Toller, a biographical treatment of Ernst Toller, a playwright with Marxist revolutionary sympathies, largely because Dorst had by that time so strongly identified with Toller as a politically engaged idealist. In Eiszeit (The Ice Age, 1973), Dorst identified with Norwegian writer and playwright Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), who had supported Adolf Hitler and the German occupation of his native Norway. Dorst's best-known efforts were adaptations from other sources, particularly Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, What Now?), based on the novel by Hans Fallada (Rudolf Ditzen, 1893-1947) with Peter Zadek in 1972.