Jakov Lind (1927–2007)

A tragic/comedic tale of the absurdity of war told from the prospective of Bachmann, a WW2 German soldier, the survivor of a devastating battle where almost his entire regiment was lost in the mud of the Eastern Front. He is declared mentally incompetent and is set for discharge. He runs away and tries to find his regiment. Strange adventures ensue with an assortment of odd characters: a poisoner/deserter, a homosexual officer, a deranged former schoolteacher turned double agent, Bachmann's large girlfreind, an odd judge, Gypsy musicians....
The introduction by Joshua Cohen is also a good read. Jakov lind's life is almost stranger than his fiction.… (more)

It's a bit hard to know exactly how to take this play. At first you think it's Ionesco meets Beckett, but the stock characters and overly broad characterization make it more commedia dell'arte. When I first got into it, I thought the stereotyping was overdone, but when I realized that this is a play that is mimicking an earlier style with the stock characters, it began to work better. In the end, it works rather well (though others are better) as a death of God play. I think one of the main problems is that there appears to be a lot of things that are symbolic that I wasn't able to catch on to, perhaps because the symbols of one culture may be incomprehensible to another.… (more)