Working With Der Mann auf der Strasse
The Man Outside is a one-act play written by Wolfgang Borchert in 1947, shortly after he returned from the Russian front during World War II. It runs about eight minutes when performed. The full original title in German is "Der Mann auf der Strasse." It centers on a shell-shocked soldier who wanders the streets of postwar Hamburg at night, unable to return home because he believes he must keep walking or he will collapse. A police officer stops him, not to arrest him, but to try to understand what is wrong. I've directed and staged this piece multiple times over the years, and the main problem people run into is that they treat it as a straightforward anti-war statement. It's not. That reading works in a high school literature class, but on stage it falls flat because the play operates on a much more specific psychological and theological frequency. Borchert was deeply influenced by existential guilt and the idea that survival itself can feel like a betrayal. The soldier isn't just traumatized. He's carrying the weight of every person who didn't come back.
Understanding the Structure of Wolfgang Borchert The Man Outside
The play opens with an offstage voice reciting a poem. That poem is "Draussen vor der Tuer" (Outside the Door), which Borchert actually wrote first as a standalone poem. The poem became so well known that Borchert built the entire play around it. When you're staging this, you need to decide whether the opening poem is narrated by an unseen character or delivered as a voiceover. I prefer having an actual actor stand in the shadows and recite it, because it grounds the abstract opening in human presence right away. If you just play a recording, the piece loses its teeth in the first thirty seconds. The soldier's condition is depicted through repetition and fragmented dialogue. He keeps saying he has to keep walking. The police officer's responses are measured and increasingly desperate. There's no grand resolution at the end. The officer ultimately decides the soldier needs psychiatric care, but the final image is the man still walking outside, literally and symbolically. That ambiguity is what makes the piece difficult to stage properly. Audiences want closure. Borchert refuses to give it to them. One practical issue I hit repeatedly during productions: the actor playing the soldier often overplays the madness. They add shaking, stammering, visible distress in every line. This is wrong. The power of the performance comes from the soldier's strange calm. He's not hysterical. He's detached. The horror is in how steady he is while describing something unbearable. I've found that asking the actor to play the scene as if they're trying very hard not to break, rather than already broken, produces a much stronger result. The audience does the emotional work instead of being pushed.
The police officer is equally tricky. Beginners tend to play him as either a cold authority figure or a sympathetic parent. Neither works. He's somewhere in between. He's genuinely concerned but also confused and slightly irritated that he can't categorize this situation. His professional framework doesn't apply here, and the play is sharpest when that frustration shows through. In one production I worked on, the actor playing the officer kept a clipboard and occasionally glanced down at it during the soldier's monologues. It was a small choice that communicated exactly how out of his depth the man in uniform was, without a single line of dialogue saying it. The language in the original German carries rhythmic and poetic qualities that get flattened in translation. If you're performing in English, you're working with a prose adaptation, which loses some of the musical tension Borchert built into the German lines. I recommend keeping the English text as close to the original sentence structure as possible rather than smoothing it into natural conversational English. The slightly stiff, formal quality of the dialogue is intentional. It mirrors the soldier's fractured relationship with ordinary language. Words no longer function the way they used to for him. Theatrical staging of this piece is fairly minimal. You don't need elaborate sets. What you need is effective use of light and sound. The night setting is essential, and the ambient noise of a city at night should be present throughout. I usually layer in distant traffic, a train, maybe a dog barking, anything that suggests the world continues normally while this one person exists outside of it. The lighting should stay cool and blue-tinted, with the police officer in a slightly warmer pool of light whenever they're on stage together, visually reinforcing their different relationship to the world around them.
Get the Full Details
There's a common misconception that this play belongs only in a German literature or history context. It has been translated into many languages and performed worldwide. The themes of alienation and institutional failure after trauma are universal enough that the play works in contemporary productions set in different countries. I've seen it staged in a modern urban setting with the soldier dressed in civilian clothes instead of a uniform, and it actually strengthened the piece for audiences who might otherwise dismiss it as a period war drama. The question isn't about soldiers specifically. It's about what happens to people after systems fail them. If you're looking for performance materials or the full script, the text is in the public domain in Germany and many other jurisdictions since Borchert died in 1947. Original German editions are available through various academic publishers and online archives. English translations appear in several collected works and anthologies of postwar German drama. For a reliable translation, the one by Ritchie Robertson and others in the Columbia Anthology of German Literature is solid. Some free versions online use older translations that compress or alter Borchert's phrasing, so I'd recommend checking against the German original if your production budget allows for a properly vetted text. The piece remains relevant because institutions still struggle with the same problem Borchert identified in 1947: the gap between what systems are designed to handle and what actual human suffering looks like. The police officer wants to file a report. The soldier needs something that has no form in any paperwork. That disconnect hasn't changed. The play's endurance comes from that specific observation rather than from any particular historical detail.
