Tankred Dorst (19 December 1925 – 1 June 2017) was a German playwright and storyteller.
Dorst lived and worked in Munich. His farces, parables, one-act-plays and adaptations were inspired by the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco, Giraudoux and Beckett. His monumental drama Merlin oder das wüste Land, which was premiered in 1981 in Düsseldorf, has been compared to Goethe's Faust. Some critics see it as the first major drama of the 1980s. In his tribute to Tankred Dorst on the occasion of the conferment of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1990, Georg Hensel remarked that Dorst's plays all have a direct connection to the present: "For 30 years Dorst's plays have responded to the great transformations. He has always been a companion to the times."
Dorst first directed the Ring of the Nibelung in Bayreuth in 2006.
Biography
Tankred Dorst was born in Oberlind in Thuringia, Germany. Through the 1950s he wrote his first plays for the marionette theatre Das Kleine Spiel, (some together with composer Wilhelm Killmayer). After breaking off his studies, he worked in various capacities in theatre, film, radio and publishing houses.
His first major plays were performed in 1960 in Lübeck, Mannheim and Heidelberg. Since then, his plays have been performed in the whole world. Dorst's work has been recognized with many prizes and distinctions, including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize (1964), Prize of the City of Florence (1970), Literature Prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste (1983), Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis (1989), Georg Büchner Prize (1990), E.T.A. Hoffmann Prize (1996) and the city of Zürich's Max Frisch Prize (1998). In 2006, he was awarded the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize. He was awarded the European Prize for Literature (2008). Dorst held visiting professorships at universities in Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
Dorst died on 1 June 2017 in Berlin.
Major works
- Die Kurve (1960)
- Toller (1968)
- Rotmord (1969, television film adaptation of Toller produced in collaboration with Peter Zadek)
- Sand (1971, television film directed by Peter Palitzsch)
- Eiszeit (1973)
- Die Villa (1976)
- Klaras Mutter (1978, television film )
- ' (1980, television film adaptation)
- Merlin oder das wüste Land (1981)
- ' (1982, movie adaptation)
- Parzival (1987)
- Ich Feuerbach (1987)
- Korbes (1988)
- Karlos (1990)
- Herr Paul (1994)
- Die Legende vom armen Heinrich (1997)
- Kupsch (2001, monologue)
- Die Freude am Leben (2001)
- Othoon (2002)
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A variety of Tankred Dorst plays have been translated into English, the last being his adaptation of Unamuno's NOTHING LESS THAN A MAN, which he called FERNANDO KRAPP WROTE ME THIS LETTER [Translator Michael Roloff]. The American version premiered in 1996 in Seattle to near uniform, typically Seattleish stupid reviews, except for a visiting critic from New York who had a brief stint at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. It is published in Carl Weber's GERMAN DRAMA CONTMPORARY, Johns Hopkins University Press.-->