Wolfgang Borchert died in 1947--the twenty-six-year-old victim of a
malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day
after the premier of his play, The Man Outside, which caused an
immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed
revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the
police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and
physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine. As a
Wehrmacht conscript, he twice served on the Russian front, where he was
wounded, and twice was imprisoned for his outspokenness. His voice
speaks plainly and powerfully from out of the war's carnage all the more
poignantly for its being cut short at so young an age.