Toller was a leading Expressionist playwright who briefly headed the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919.

After the republic's fall, he was imprisoned for five years, during which he wrote several of his best-known plays.

• Forced into exile after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he died by suicide in New York City in 1939.

His bibliography includes: • Transformation (1919) • Masses and Man (1921) • The Machine Wreckers (1922) • Hoppla, We're Alive! (1927)