Franz Theodor Csokor

• Born: September 6, 1885
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: January 5, 1969
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Other Literary Forms

Franz Theodor Csokor is best known for his plays, but he published some well-received volumes of poetry, notably Der Dolch und die Wunde (1917; the dagger and the wound) and Immer ist Anfang (1952; there is always a new beginning). In addition to a few collections of short fiction, he also wrote a novel about the Anabaptist movement, Der Schlüssel zum Abgrund (1955; the key to the abyss). His most widely read prose works are his autobiographical narratives, combined in Auf fremden Strassen (1955; on foreign roads), which deal with his continual flight from the Nazis before and during World War II.

Achievements

Franz Theodor Csokor first attracted public attention in 1933 when he vehemently opposed the beginning persecution of German Jewish writers at the PEN International Congress in Ragusa. This courageous stance led to his eventually being forced into exile. After his return to Austria after World War II, he became the president of the Austrian PEN club in 1947 and received numerous prizes and awards, among them the Literature Prize of Vienna in 1927 and 1953, the Grillparzer Prize in 1937, and the Austrian National Literature Prize in 1955, the highest honor the Austrian government gives to a writer. Csokor and Fritz Hochwälder are considered the two most influential Austrian dramatists of the post-World War II era. Csokor was also nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Biography

Franz Theodor Csokor was born on September 6, 1885, into an affluent middle-class family. His family tree includes members of almost all ethnic and national groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—he called himself a “true Austrian blend”—and therefore he is a true representative of that multinational social order that appeared at the height of its glory but was already doomed at the time of his birth.

After his high school graduation, Csokor studied art history at the University of Vienna but soon abandoned his studies to pursue his true vocation: literature, particularly drama. In 1912 his first play, Eine Partie Schach (a game of chess), later published as Thermidor, was performed in Budapest in Hungarian. Csokor, who attended the premiere, did not understand a single word of his own play. The success of the play confirmed his determination to devote his life to the theater.

During World War I, Csokor was at first an infantry soldier but was later transferred to the imperial war archives, where Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan Zweig were among his colleagues. His elder brother was killed in the war, an event that Csokor had difficulty coping with and that led him to ally himself closely with the pacifist expressionist writers of the postwar period. The plays Der Baum der Erkenntnis (the tree of insight) and Die rote Strasse (the red road) as well as some volumes of expressionist poetry stem from this time.

In the years after the war, Csokor worked as dramaturge and director at several Viennese theaters and studied subjects related to classical antiquity and Christianity. He became fascinated with the nineteenth century dramatist Georg Büchner, for whose stark Woyzeck (wr. 1836, pb. 1879; English translation, 1927) he wrote a conciliatory conclusion. Büchner is also the protagonist of his play Gesellschaft der Menschenrechte (society of human rights), which was performed on all important German stages until 1933 when the Nazis’ rise to power led to a drastic change of fortune in Csokor’s dramatic career. From Büchner, Csokor adopted the notion that art and political activism are compatible activities.

Because he spoke out against the book burnings of the Adolf Hitler regime while he attended the PEN congress in 1933, further performances of his plays in Germany were prohibited, and as he has stated, he lived with his suitcases packed from 1933 to 1938, all the while witnessing the growing strength of the Nazi movement in his native Austria. Despite his misgivings about the political developments, he considered it his duty to continue to write and remain in Austria. His reputation as a dramatist was firmly established with the production of his most famous and popular play, November 3, 1918, his dramatic requiem for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

While Csokor was working on Gottes General (god’s general), his play about the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, Hitler annexed Austria, and Csokor finally went into exile in Poland. It became the beginning of a long odyssey, as Csokor had to continue to retreat from the advancing German troops, first from Poland to Romania, from there to Belgrade, and finally to the Adriatic island of Korcula. After Allied troops landed in southern Italy, Csokor worked as a propaganda officer for the British and finally returned to Vienna in 1946. This ordeal is described in his autobiographical narratives Als Zivilist im Polenkrieg (1940; a civilian in the Polish war) and Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg (1947; a civilian in the Balkan war), which were later combined under the title Auf fremden Strassen (1955, on foreign roads).

From his return to Austria in 1946 to his death in 1969, Csokor produced a large number of plays and reworked some of his earlier work into thematically grouped collections, including European Trilogy (November 3, 1918; Occupied Territory; The Prodigal Son). At the time of his death, on January 5, 1969, he was working on a play about Alexander the Great. He was to the last a fixture in the literary coffeehouses of Vienna and much revered by the Viennese for whom he represented a nostalgic memory of the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as a shining example of principled resistance against a more unpleasant regime of the immediate past.

Analysis

With a dramatic career spanning both world wars, Franz Theodor Csokor and his dramatic work provide a panorama of the main developments in twentieth century Austrian drama and of the social and political upheavals that shook this era. In contrast to the resignation and ironic distancing so typical of many of the Austrian fin de siècle writers, Csokor always stressed the importance of political activism and the strident defense of humanist ideals in a world rapidly abandoning such principles. Even his early plays written under the influence of Strindberg and the early expressionists not only urge an examination of an increasingly materialistic world (Die rote Strasse) and the battle of the sexes (Der Baum der Erkenntnis) but also advocate strong personal engagement to bring about a change in traditional values and attitudes. In his plays of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Csokor tries to come to terms not only with the catastrophic consequences of World War I, in particular the death of his only brother, but also with the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian multination empire and the resulting rise of increasingly aggressive chauvinist nation states in Europe. His plays of that period are often based on historical events in which the main theme is the defense of individual freedom against totalitarian ideologies, both religious and secular, and the responsibility of the individual to fight for the preservation of humanist ideals threatened by these ideologies. Like many of his protagonists, notably Ignatius of Loyala in Gottes General and Stipe in The Prodigal Son, Csokor lived his own life according to the principles he advocated, even when they endangered his life and his economic well-being.

Csokor’s post-World War II plays continue this examination of individual responsibility and the moral dilemmas confronting people in modern society, notably in the play Das Zeichen an der Wand, inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial. Although the themes of his plays transcend specifically Austrian problems, only a few have been translated into English, probably because of his extensive use of dated Austrian vernacular and his attachment to expressionist characters and structures, even in the representational plays of his later life. However, a good translation of the three plays in the critical edition of his European Trilogy has been available since 1995 and allows the English-speaking reader access to his most often performed and most highly praised plays. The plays in the trilogy appeared individually and were gathered under this title in 1952 to reflect a thematic rather than a chronological sequence.

November 3, 1918

November 3, 1918 is a quasi-historical drama taking place mainly during and after the signing of the armistice between Austria-Hungary and the Entente. The action takes place in a military convalescent home high on a snowbound mountain in southern Austria. Eight officers and men representing all the national and ethnic groups of the empire coexist there in relative harmony, bonded by their service in the imperial army and their fight against a common foe. Kaczuk, a Polish Marxist sailor, enters to bring them the news of the armistice and the subsequent dissolution of the monarchy. Immediately the men begin to draw apart and to see themselves as members of distinct national groups with territorial and political conflicts of interest. Colonel Radosin, the commanding officer, refuses to accept the disintegration of the old system, which had united so many different nationalities, and appeals to the others to uphold the supranational ideals of the defunct empire in spite of the present political situation. When his appeals prove fruitless, he commits suicide. His funeral is the last common action to which the men agree; then they go their separate ways, despite the fact that some of them will not survive the journey home without the support of the others. As the curtain falls, the Slovenian officer Zierowitz and the German nationalist Ludoltz begin their armed struggle for dominance over Carinthia, the area in which the convalescent home is located. This is a historically accurate representation of the so-called “after war,” fought between Austrian and Slovenian nationalists immediately after World War I over the territory that is now one of the Austrian states.

November 3, 1918 was written eighteen years after the historical events it portrays. It is Csokor’s requiem for an admittedly less than perfect political idea, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had nevertheless provided political stability in Central Europe for many years. At the same time, it is an attempt to give an explanation for the disastrous rise of chauvinist fascist movements in Europe after World War I. Csokor was convinced that extreme nationalism was the equivalent of egotism and self-centeredness in individuals; he considered dedication to higher ideals individually and to a supranational political structure as essential for the survival of humankind. He would have looked at the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia as confirmation of these beliefs and would surely have been gratified by the gradual development of a European Union. Indeed, even at the end of November 3, 1918 there is a brief glimpse of hope for such a future development when the nurse, left alone with Ludoltz who is willing to kill and to die for his proto-Nazist ideas, indicates that Colonel Radosin might rise from the grave again in years to come.

Occupied Territory

This play, though written six years before November 3, 1918, is set against the background of the French occupation of the German Ruhr territory in 1923. The Treaty of Versailles had constrained Germany to pay huge reparations to the victorious nations, and when Germany refused to live up to the conditions of the treaty, French troops invaded the main industrial area in Germany to exact the reparations by force. In the play, a group of radical German nationalists instigates violence against the occupation forces, mainly to further its own political goals. Significantly, the French occupiers never appear on the stage: The conflict plays out mainly between Monk, the pacifist humanist mayor of Kaiserborn, and Schlern, the leader of the militant nationalists who stir up patriotic fervor amongst the population by provoking violence from the occupiers. Monk, who sees the looming catastrophe and does not want these nationalist hoodlums to come to power, is faced with a dilemma: He can keep the peace and prevent the rise to power of the radicals only by delivering them to the sworn enemy, thus appearing to become a traitor to his own people. Nevertheless, he sees this course of action as the lesser of two evils and hands Schlern over to the authorities for instant execution; he himself is lynched by the “patriotic” mob in retaliation.

Occupied Territory logically continues the theme of November 3, 1918 by showing the moral corruption and selfishness of extreme nationalism. Schlern and his group are single-mindedly determined to bring their chauvinist, racist ideology to power in Germany. They are no longer bound by any individual ethos but subordinate everything, including their own life, to their misguided cause. Csokor finds this lack of morals and the abandonment of individual responsibility abhorrent, but he is well aware of the fatal attraction of such “patriotic” slogans. He also makes it clear that it is the duty of morally intact individuals to fight this development, even at the cost of their own lives.

The Prodigal Son

In The Prodigal Son, this thematic trend is brought to its logical conclusion by showing the obligation to fight such inhumane ideologies, even by extreme measures. Stipe, the young partisan, returns home to warn his family of an impending threat from the fascists whom he is fighting and asks his to brothers to join him. When they refuse, his father Otac must choose between saving Stipe or himself and his two other sons. He chooses Stipe and is executed by the fascists while Stipe kills his own brothers, taking the wife and child of one of them into the hills. The Prodigal Son is therefore the fitting conclusion to this trilogy, which is, as a whole, a refutation of and a call to resistance against chauvinism and fascism and which insists on the duty of moral individuals to resist such movements and ideologies at any cost.

Bibliography

Brandys, Brygida. “Das dramatische Werk von Franz Theodor Csokor.” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 28 (1981): 407-427. A comprehensive survey of Csokor’s dramatic opus, with detailed analyses of the major plays. Less idolatrous and more scholarly than Wimmer. In German.

Lichliter, Katherine McHugh, ed. A Critical Edition and Translation of Franz Theodor Csokor’s “European Trilogy.” New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Contains November 3, 1918, Occupied Territory, and The Prodigal Son. Apart from modernized, readable translation of the plays, there is ample historical and critical material in the introduction to each play, as well as a good general cultural-biographical essay.

Wimmer, Paul. Der Dramatiker Franz Theodor Csokor. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1981. The only comprehensive study of Csokor’s complete dramatic works, by a friend and admirer. Good plot synopses and analyses of all plays, even some unpublished ones. In German.