Memorial Page for Tankred Dorst

Tankred Dorst (born 19 December 1925 in Oberlind near Sonneberg; died 1 June 2017 in Berlin) was a German playwright, storyteller, screenwriter and director. His theatre ranged from farce and parable to political material, myth, fairy tale and medieval narrative forms.

Thuringia, war and study

Dorst grew up in Oberlind in Thuringia. While still a schoolboy he was drafted into the German army and was taken prisoner near the end of the Second World War. After his release in 1947 he came to the West, completed his schooling and from 1950 studied German literature, art history and theatre studies in Bamberg and Munich. In Munich he encountered marionette theatre, which influenced his early work.

From marionette theatre to contemporary drama

In the 1950s Dorst wrote first pieces for the Munich marionette theatre Das Kleine Spiel. From 1960 onward he wrote plays for actors, including Die Kurve and Gesellschaft im Herbst. His plays worked with situations in which people take on roles, lose them or speak against them. Farce, grotesque and narrative theatre became forms through which he examined history and the present.

Toller, Merlin and Ursula Ehler

With Toller in 1968, Dorst placed the writer Ernst Toller and the relation between art and politics at the centre of a play. From the 1970s he worked closely with Ursula Ehler; many later texts grew from this shared working life. His works include Merlin oder Das wüste Land, a wide-ranging play based on Arthurian material. Dorst repeatedly took older stories and reshaped them into open, many-voiced stage forms.

Stage, opera and honors

Dorst wrote plays, radio works, television and film scripts, libretti, translations and adaptations. In 1990 he received the Georg Büchner Prize. Further honors and memberships followed; the University of Bamberg awarded him an honorary doctorate on 5 February 2009. At the Bayreuth Festival, Dorst staged Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen together with Ursula Ehler from 2006 onward.

Berlin

Dorst spent his last years in Berlin. In 2016 Das Blau in der Wand, a late play by Dorst and Ehler, was premiered. Tankred Dorst died in Berlin on 1 June 2017. He was 91 years old. His work remains connected with a theatre that brought storytelling, performance, political experience and old material into flexible forms.