Ernst Stadler was a German expressionist poet, best known for his 1914 collection Der Aufbruch, selections of which were included by Kurt Pinthus in his ground-breaking anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn of Humanity, 1919). Born in the Alsatian town of Colmar, Stadler grew up in Strasbourg and began publishing poems as a teenager. He joined the ‘Stürmer-Kreis’, a coterie of writers hoping to rejuvenate artistic life in Alsatia, and in 1904 published an early collection of poems, Praeludien, which was strongly influenced by aestheticism. Stadler taught German and comparative literature in Strasbourg and Brussels before being summoned to his post as a reserve officer in the German Army at the outbreak of the First World War.