Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts is the division of The New School university dedicated to solely educating traditional college-age undergraduates in their late teens and early twenties. All other university divisions offer graduate degrees. Although The New School began granting undergraduate degrees in 1944 to serve veterans, the origins of the contemporary Eugene Lang College date to the 1970s.

The program that was to become Lang College originated in 1972 as "Freshman Year at The New School.” In this program, high school students enrolled in first-year undergraduate classes to explore different topics and disciplines, and were then expected to transfer as sophomores to another institution for degree completion.

The New School established a four-year, bachelor of arts granting Seminar College in 1975 or 1976. In 1978, the Freshman Year Program and the Seminar College were combined. First year students could then either continue their New School education in the Seminar College or transfer to another institution of higher education.

A substantial donation from philanthropist Eugene Lang precipitated the renaming of the Seminar College to Eugene Lang College in 1985. From 2005 until 2015, the college was renamed as, "Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts." In 2015, the college name changed to "Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts" following a university-wide rebranding.

References Larrimore, Mark. "The New School's Long Road to a Four-Year College." In Realizing the New School: Lessons from the Past, edited by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore, 80-89. New York: Public Seminar Books, 2020.

The New School for Social Research, 1981. "Self-Study Report: New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Design." https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS010105_000007

Hoppla, We're Alive! is a 1927 play written by Ernst Toller. The play, directed by Erwin Piscator, debuted in September that same year as the inaugural play at Piscator’s new theater, called the Piscator-Bühne, in Berlin.

The play follows Karl Thomas, a failed socialist revolutionary, after his release from prison and an asylum. Disappointed in his former co-revolutionary, Kilman, becoming a Social Democrat government minister, Thomas plots to assassinate Kilman. He fails and is arrested. Unable to face returning to prison, Kilman hangs himself.

A socialist and pacifist, Toller had written the play following his own stint in prison from 1920 until 1925 for his involvement in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918-1919. Toller, a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), had been elected President of the Republic, but only served for six days. He was deposed after a failed coup attempt by Weimar forces was met with a counter-coup by the Red Army-backed Communist Party of Germany. During his imprisonment, Toller wrote several other plays that had successful runs in the United States and Britain. Upon his release, Toller was one of Weimar Germany’s foremost playwrights.

A critical success, Hoppla, We're Alive! is considered a landmark work in the development of epic theater, a term Piscator himself coined. The play represents a move away from Toller’s earlier expressionism towards a style more influenced by the “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) movement. Particularly influential was Piscator’s use of an elaborate constructivist-style multi-level scaffold stage and projected newsreel film interludes.

Hoppla! was one of the many texts burned by the Nazis on May 10, 1933, owing not only to its left-wing themes but also to Toller’s Jewish background. Toller fled Germany for the United States later that year, and eventually became a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM) Studios. Depressed by the news of his relatives’ internment in German concentration camps and the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War, Toller committed suicide in New York in 1939, shortly after Piscator had also moved to New York to establish the Dramatic Workshop at The New School for Social Research.

Sources:

“Book Club: Hoopla, We’re Alive!”, Leo Baeck Institute, November 30th, 2023, accessed June 18th, 2024, /www.lbi.org/de/events/book-club-hoppla-were-alive/>

“Hoppla, We’re Alive! (Hoppla, wir leben!)” in Patterson, Michael, The Oxford Dictionary of Plays (2005), Oxford: Oxford University Press

P.J. Grisar, “He was Germany’s most popular playwright — here’s why you may not have heard of him”, Forward, May 17, 2023, accessed June 18th, 2024, /forward.com/culture/546126/ernst-toller-hoopla-were-alive-bertolt-brecht/>