Ernst Toller (1 December 1893 – 22 May 1939) was a German author, playwright, left-wing politician and revolutionary, known for his Expressionist plays.

He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the armed resistance by the Bavarian Soviet Republic to the central government in Berlin.

He decreed that citizens could withdraw only 100 marks per day from the banks, and issued reassurance to the workers that these measures were directed against the major capitalists who were attempting to take money abroad.

For instance, the Foreign Affairs Deputy Dr. Franz Lipp (who had been admitted several times to psychiatric hospitals) informed Vladimir Lenin via cable that the ousted former Minister-President, Johannes Hoffmann, had fled to Bamberg and taken the key to the ministry toilet with him.

[7] The noted authors Max Weber and Thomas Mann testified on Toller's behalf when he was tried for his part in the revolution.

It tells of a revolutionary discharged from a mental hospital after eight years, who discovers that his former comrades have grown complacent and compromised within the system they once opposed.

Their sense of immediacy was gone: the first play was related to the First World War and its aftermath, and the second an earlier period of the rise of the Nazis.

[10] Suffering from depression, separated from his wife and struggling with financial woes (he had given all his money to Spanish Civil War refugees), Toller committed suicide on 22 May 1939.

Payne continued: "He hanged himself with the silk cord of his nightgown in a hotel in New York two years ago.

[15] The literary rights to the works of Ernst Toller were the property of the novelist Katharine Weber until the copyright expired on 31 December 2009.