The quotation in my title — “And must I cease to speak of Dante if Italy marches against us?” — is taken from Carl Sternheim's adaptation of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's drama Das leidende Weib. Its sentiment was to acquire a curious poignancy, in that when the play was written (October 3– 18, 1914) Italy was not one of the belligerent powers. Nor indeed was Italy at war when the first private performance, in a Max Reinhardt production for the Kammerspiele des deutschen Theaters in Berlin, was permitted by the censor on March 31, 1916. But by the time the play was first performed for a public audience on October 30, 1916 the issue had only historical significance: on August 29, 1916 Italy had declared war on Germany.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 was a personal and professional disaster for Carl Sternheim. From 1911 onwards he had established a major literary reputation with his comedies Die Hose, Bürger Schippel, and Der Snob, in effective collaboration with Max Reinhardt. But his difficulties with the censor, initially on moral grounds, began to give him the reputation of a liability on the German stage, and this fact, combined with his decision to move to Brussels in 1912, made his position in 1914 highly precarious. His personal experiences in Belgium on the outbreak of hostilities were harrowing. Having set out for Germany from the family home, La Hulpe, south of Brussels, Sternheim was briefly arrested as a potential German spy and then kept in protective custody.