Paul Kornfeld (playwright)

Paul Kornfeld (11 December 1889—25 April 1942) was a Czech-born German-language Jewish writer whose expressionist plays and scholarly treatises on the theory of drama earned him a specialized niche in influencing contemporary intellectual discourse.

A native of Prague, Paul Kornfeld came to adulthood in the city which, as the capital of Bohemia, was, at the time, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a major center of culture and learning. In 1913, at the age of 23, he formulated a thesis elucidating his philosophy of dramaturgy, Der beseelte und der psychologische Mensch [The Spiritual and the Psychological Person, also translated as The Inspired and the Psychological Being] and wrote the first draft of his most-renowned play, Die Verführung [The Seduction]. His circle of young friends and compatriots included some of the most renowned German-speaking Jewish literary figures of the era, Oskar Baum, Max Brod, Rudolf Fuchs, Willy Haas, Franz Janowitz, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Otto Pick, Hermann Ungar, Johannes Urzidil and Franz Werfel.

In 1916, amidst the chaos of World War I and, with ultimate birth of the future republic of Czechoslovakia only two years away, Kornfeld moved to Germany where, during the Weimar period, he experienced his most intense period of creativity. In 1918, during the final months of the war, he published a revised version of his thesis and oversaw the first production of Die Verführung. An expressionist work, which put forth abstract and revisionist ideas, it attempted to encapsulate the universality of human aspiration. Character development and plot details were eschewed in favor of an atmosphere of hopeless inability to cope, which defeated the play's tragic protagonist. A subsequent expressionist drama, Himmel und Holle [Heaven and Hell] presented even more abstract ideas, but in a vein that was, to a greater degree, lyrical and ecstatic.

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