Word: hebbel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Friedrich Hebbel, 19th century German dramatist, perhaps put his finger on why Compulsion fails to be large and liberating drama when he said that in a good play everyone must seem in the right. For the two killers this is impossible, less because of how hideous their crime is than how gratuitous: it lacks an understandably human motive. Clinically, the crime can be explained: given a lawless Jazz Age, two badly spoiled, rich men's sons, a homosexual neurosis and a Nietzschean intellectual arrogance, and such a chemical mixture may explode into murder-for-a-thrill. But the case...