Many of the major dramatic works of the twentieth century reflect an opposing perception of history as progress or history as crisis. Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, is intrigued by the possibilities of breeding a race of supermen that will lead humanity to new heights of consciousness, but is also concerned that historical progress may be illusory. The plays of Arthur Schnitzler and T.S. Eliot reflect the need to see our current period through the lens of the past. Schnitzler's Der einsame Weg represents history as paralyzed, and Eliot in The Family Reunion demonstrates excessive reliance on tradition and established institutions to combat the alienation and lack of spiritual focus of twentieth-century man.

Bertolt Brecht in Baal, Georg Kaiser in Der gerettete Alkibiades, and Duerrenmatt in Romulus der Grosse, see history and human existence as governed by meaningless, random, or destructive forces. They combat this lack of meaning through an anarchic and anti-historical attitude. Sean O'Casey and the later Brecht, in translating the historical materialism of Marx and Engels into their literature, qualify socialist optimism with the harsh realities of economic need and human exploitation; the optimism of O'Casey's Within the Gates and Brecht's Leben de Galilei is consequently guarded.

While the historical views of the dramatists considered here vary substantially, their plays all demonstrate a critical need to find meaning through history.