Totentanz

Strindberg's "Dance of Death," which appears here in a new translation, is considered the archetype of all marriage dramas. On the occasion of a performance in Berlin, Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1913: "What happens when a man and a woman are solely dependent on each other, living, let’s say, in a round fortress tower on an island? What happens? 'Perhaps it is our mission to torment each other,' the man says at one point, and this is worse than a rivalry between men; here, they hate past each other. And they will kiss and spit at each other for 25 years, scream and wrestle in the same hour, cry and laugh, hate and turn their children into party fighters... This is the Dance of Death.".