Bertolt Brecht   Plays (Eyre Methuen/Random House). Brecht's short but fruitful collaboration during the Weimar Republic with the composer Kurt Weill - The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins - show him on top form, though the music is an essential component in these works. Of his other plays, the "parables" - The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Woman of Setzuan - are generally more successful than those with a more overtly political tone.

 

Georg Büchner   Complete Plays (Penguin). Büchner died in 1837 at the age of 23. Two of his three plays are masterpieces - Danton's Death is a political statement about the French Revolution, while the astonishing unfinished Woyzeck , a tragedy based on the life of an insignificant soldier, must be the tersest drama ever written, with not a word wasted in the telling. This anthology also includes his only major prose work, the unfinished novella Lenz .

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe   Faust Part One (Penguin/OUP), Faust Part Two (Penguin/OUP). Goethe made the completion of this vast drama - which examines the entire gamut of preoccupations of European civilization - the major task of his life, and he duly finished it just before his death, having worked at it for around sixty years. All his other important works for the stage are collected together in Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays (Princeton UP) and Verse Plays and Epics (Princeton UP).

Georg Kaiser   Plays Vol. 1, Plays Vol. 2 (John Calder/Riverrun). These contain a selection of the vast output of the leading dramatist of the Expressionist movement, typically using very stark language and stressing ideas at the expense of characterization - the players are typically denoted by their worldly function, rather than their name. Another piece by Kaiser features in Seven Expressionist Plays (John Calder/Riverrun), which also contains works by two dramatists better known as artists - Ernst Barlach and Oskar Kokoschka.

Heinrich von Kleist   Five Plays (Yale UP). Ranges over Kleist's varied output, from German theatre's finest comedy, The Broken Jug , to the patriotic drama, Prince Frederick of Homburg .

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing   Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm and Other Plays (Continuum). The first of these plays is unusual in German literature in having a Jew as the hero; the second is one of German theatre's earliest examples of middle-class comedy, using contemporary eighteenth-century events as a backdrop.

Friedrich Schiller   The Robbers, Wallenstein (Penguin). This pairs an early Sturm und Drang drama (which established Schiller as the leader of that movement) with one of his later historical plays, set against the background of the Thirty Years War. William Tell (Chicago UP) is the playwright's last work.

Ottmar Weiss and Alois Daisenberger   Oberammergau: A Passion Play (Dedalus). A complete translation of the classic nineteenth-century text of the play.