Makers of Madness: A Play in One Act and Three Scenes

The year is 1914. A king sits in his court, surrounded by ministers hungry for war. His Republic to the west has insulted the nation, they cry, and only blood can wash away the dishonor. But the king sees clearly what his advisors refuse to acknowledge: that the machinery of war, once set in motion, cannot be stopped, that nations rush toward slaughter like sleepwalkers toward a cliff. Hermann Hagedorn's forgotten masterpiece burns with urgent relevance, a one-act drama that captures the precise moment when reason loses to rhetoric, when diplomats fail, when the makers of madness seize control of history. The king's moral qualms are dismissed as weakness. His attempts at negotiation are treated as betrayal. As the drums of war grow louder, the play exposes how easily peace is sacrificed to the gods of national honor. This is theater that understands war's terrible momentum and the small, trapped men who cannot stop it.