Fritz Hochwälder

• Born: May 28, 1911
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: October 20, 1986
• Place of death: Zurich, Switzerland

Other Literary Forms

The only writing Fritz Hochwälder did outside his dramatic works is contained in his book Im Wechsel der Zeit: Autobiographische Skizzen und Essays (1980), a collection of autobiographical sketches and essays on the theater written between 1949 and 1979.

Achievements

In the preface of the first English volume of Fritz Hochwälder’s dramas, The Public Prosecutor, theater critic Martin Esslin wrote that the enduring value of Hochwälder’s work will be increasingly recognized in the future and that his best plays will rightfully survive in the permanent repertoire of world drama. Other critics have not always been as generous—for example, at premiere performances of Donnerstag and Lazaretti in Hochwälder’s native Austria, at the Salzburg festivals. Nevertheless, as is evidenced by the many productions of his plays and his numerous Austrian literary awards, Hochwälder was probably the best-known Austrian dramatist between the years 1945 and 1970.

The prestigious Burgtheater of Vienna has staged three premieres and four other productions, while Switzerland and Germany have hosted others. Translations of his plays have spread throughout Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. There were four hundred performances of The Strong Are Lonely in Paris alone.

Hochwälder was the recipient of several literary honors: the Literature Prize of the city of Vienna in 1955, the Grillparzer Prize from the Viennese Academy of Sciences in 1956, the Anton Wildgans Prize in 1963, the bestowal of the title of Professor from the president of Austria in 1964, the State Prize for Literature in 1966, the Austrian medal of honor for Art and Science in 1971, the Ring of Honor from the city of Vienna in 1972, and the Drama Prize in 1982 from the Swiss section of the Society of Authors and Playwrights, an award that is usually granted to French-speaking authors.

Although Hochwälder attained a certain amount of literary acclaim, his dramas have suffered from a dearth of interest and analysis. There is, nevertheless, no doubt about the forcefulness of his message, applicable at the personal, political, or social level, that man is capable of the worst evils and therefore must cultivate vigilance to keep that evil in check.

Biography

Fritz Hochwälder was born May 28, 1911, in Vienna, Austria. He was the only child of a poor Jewish family that lived in a modest apartment at Westbahnstrasse 3. His father worked as an interior wall decorator and his mother managed a small antique shop. The first influence on his literary life, however, did not come from his family, but rather from a third-grade teacher who told stories and took the class to afternoon productions at the Raimundtheater. Ferdinand Raimund’s plays Das Mädchen aus der Feenwelt: Oder, Der Bauer als Millionär (1826; The Maid from Fairyland: Or, The Peasant as Millionaire, 1962) and Der Verschwender (1834; The Spendthrift, 1949) made a lasting impression on the young Hochwälder, and he later considered Raimund’s Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (1828; Mountain King and Misanthrope, 1962) to be one of the twelve best dramas of world theater.

During his Viennese years, Hochwälder was also influenced by a youth group in which he met others with a similar interest in literature, among them Richard Thieberger, who later translated Hochwälder’s plays into French. At this time, literature was only a hobby for Hochwälder. He had begun his apprenticeship as an upholsterer and decorator in 1929, and he passed the master’s test in 1936. He opened his own one-man shop, but soon, like most of his contemporaries, he was out of work. During this period of worldwide depression, he had to survive on meager financial aid from the state and goulash handed out across the street from the state opera house.

Despite the poverty, the fall of the monarchy, and the revolutionary upheaval, Hochwälder always felt at home in Vienna. Had someone suggested that he would spend most of his life in another country, Hochwälder would have ridiculed the idea. What made him decide to leave his beloved Vienna was the annexation of Austria in 1938 and persecution by the Nazis. The twenty-seven-year-old tried to persuade his parents to accompany him, but because of their age and unaware of the dangers of staying under Nazi rule, they preferred to remain. With the borders to Switzerland closed, Hochwälder daringly swam across the Rhine with his papers and possessions tied to his back. His parents were never heard from again.

In Zurich, as an immigrant with few job possibilities and as a young man who had already written a few plays, he began to write in earnest. With the help of friends who provided him in the early years with a place to live, he wrote The Strong Are Lonely, the play that perhaps more than any other made him known. It premiered in Biel/Solothurn, Switzerland, on March 24, 1943, and was a success with both the public and the press. The newspaper predicted that the play would achieve artistic recognition in the free world. Yet only after the postwar Austrian premiere in 1947 (arranged by Hochwälder’s friend Franz Theodor Csokor for the Burgtheater) and the subsequent 1952 Paris production did this prediction come true.

Georg Kaiser, another dramatist living in Swiss exile, became in the last two years of his life a close friend and consultant to Hochwälder. Der Flüchtling was based on an outline by Kaiser and, bearing the mark of Kaiser in its character types, tightly knit plot, and theme of moral regeneration, became one of Hochwälder’s most performed plays. Although this play dealt with the recent war, most of Hochwälder’s important plays up to 1953 had distant historical settings: The Strong Are Lonely is set in seventeenth century Paraguay; Meier Helmbrecht, in the Middle Ages; The Public Prosecutor, during the French Revolution; and Donadieu, in seventeenth century France.

In 1954, thinking that the historical drama no longer appealed so much to modern audiences, Hochwälder wrote about modern settings. He considered Die Herberge, a dramatic legend of an unjust world, to be a turning point in his life and work; he decided to write about what interested him rather than be a commercial writer, mass-producing for profit. His experiments with an allegorical, fanciful world in Donnerstag and 1003 were not as successful. In his next two dramas of the mid-1960’s, The Raspberry Picker and The Order, he returned to conventional plot structure, examining the mentality of those who supported the Nazis and warning that all people are capable of such crimes. Ten years later, he repeated the warning about what the potential evil in man can do, that terror as an answer to terror can eventually annihilate humankind.

After the fairy-tale play Der verschwundene Mond, inspired by his rediscovery of the poetry of Jakob Haringer (1898-1948), Hochwälder returned in 1985 to writing plays with historical settings. Die Prinzessin von Chimay deals with murder committed during the French Revolution. The stage directions prescribe scenes and clothing exactly according to the period. Die Bürgschaft, a satiric historical treatment of the tyrant Dionysius, is meant to be staged as a timeless political commedia dell’arte in modern costume.

Analysis

Fritz Hochwälder was one of the few contemporary dramatists who employed the traditional dramatic techniques of Aristotelian theater almost exclusively. The prevalent literary philosophy of the postwar era was that the traditional theater is passé because it is unable to stimulate social improvement or critical thought, as the epic theater, the Theater of the Absurd, and other varieties of modern theater have supposedly done. What concerned Hochwälder more than this theoretical controversy, however, was the practical condition of the German theater: He compared it to a tubercular patient, outwardly suntanned and blooming with life, but on the inside a moribund creature hastening to the grave. Generous subsidies to the theater by the cities and states suggest cultural vigor, yet the theater is dying because it has intellectualized the drama instead of encouraging vital, absorbing plays. Hochwälder’s own stated aim was to write well-constructed plays that audiences will appreciate—plays that deliver a message that audiences will understand, not plays that modern critics will endorse merely because of theatrical innovation and sophisticated intellectualism.

It is evident from his own statements about his dramas and from the plays themselves that Hochwälder used theater as an entertainer and moralist. The prevailing influence of theater as entertainment comes from the Viennese Volkstheater, and the dominant influence of Hochwälder’s message stems from World War II, especially the Nazi experience.

The Viennese theater tradition influenced him to present metaphysical truths through the senses rather than through the mind, by means of intellectual discourse. He believed that by combining spectacle and truth, his theater would be meaningful to all classes of people. In practice, his dramas for the most part adhere to his theoretical intention. His plays feature tightly knit plots with straightforward action, unity of time, place, and action, and folksy dialogue. There are character types, such as the miser Kavolius, the schemer Fouquier, and the academician Galgotzy, but most of the characters, such as the Provincial, Pomfrit, Mittermayer, and Lazaretti, are realistically developed. A major character often has a Hanswurst counterpart who is a servant or who is subordinate in rank or intellect. These exaggerated figures, such as Birnstrudl, Krott, and Damboritz, exemplify Viennese qualities of comedy and farce. Not evident in the plays, however—even those labeled comedies—is the quality of fun and lightness.

A recurring message in Hochwälder’s plays is that, because of the basic evilness of man, he is a potential murderer and must therefore always be on his guard against his own impulses, exercising personal responsibility to keep them in check. He cannot excuse himself by saying that he has merely followed orders, or that society, the times, or the circumstances are at fault, or that injustice in the world has made him the way he is. The characters in the play who have been irresponsible must usually pay the grim consequences, and those who are not guilty must beware lest the same happens to them. Even with the presence of evil and injustice, man is often capable of learning, of changing, and of achieving a kind of enlightenment or salvation. Nevertheless, there are dilemmas, resulting from the natural evil in man, that are not resolved in the plays. To try to produce heaven on earth (as in The Strong Are Lonely) will yield a hell. To try to fight terror with terror (as in Lazaretti) will bring destruction. Hochwälder believed that neither religion nor the state has the answer, nor do his dramas; consequently, the individual must grope for the solution himself, aware that his most formidable foe is himself.

The Strong Are Lonely

The Strong Are Lonely, Hochwälder’s first success, is a good example of both his theater and his message. In this play, as well in his other historical dramas, he was concerned with giving life to themes rather than biography or history. According to Hochwälder, the play portrays the eternal problems of mankind, the questions about social justice and the kingdom of God on earth.

This seventeen-character, five-act play of the classical tradition takes place in a Jesuit school in Buenos Aires in 1767. The Jesuits are trying to establish a spiritual kingdom and a social-welfare state for the Indians of Paraguay. The state is becoming so economically and militarily powerful that Spain has commanded an immediate political dissolution and an abandonment by the Jesuit founders. Should the Father Provincial, the leader of this missionary project, disobey and continue his work, providing for the spiritual and material needs of the oppressed Indians, or must he obey Spain and his religious superiors in Rome, knowing that if he does this, the Indians will be subject to further colonial exploitation?

In regard to the Indians, the play is predictable: They are unable to preserve a permanent utopia for themselves and, as a result of the Jesuits’ eventual departure, they become prey to the colonialists. Because they are portrayed as naïve, unquestioning followers whose only desire is a heaven in which there will be no lack of earthly or spiritual goods, they will necessarily be losers, regardless of the Father Provincial’s decision; whether they are under the Jesuits or under the colonialists, they will lose personal freedom and autonomy.

What is not so predictable and what makes this play dramatic theater is the Father Provincial’s internal strife when faced with opposing commands. Suspense is felt until he reluctantly reverses his first, instinctive decision to fight for the Indians and gives in to the secular command of Spain and the religious obedience to the Church—contrary to his better judgment and his conscience. The only one to refuse the Father Provincial’s new order to surrender to the Spaniards is the Jesuit ex-soldier Oros, who believes that religious authority is no longer binding when a sin is commanded. Oros intends to fight to the death defending the poor and weak. The moment of personal enlightenment for Father Provincial occurs when he is shot while attempting to quell the uprising led by Oros. As he is dying, he sees that he cannot solve his personal dilemma, that to fight force with force is futile; he hopes that the kingdom of God he feels in himself will live on in others.

Historical Dramas

After The Strong Are Lonely, Hochwälder wrote three more important historical plays: Meier Helmbrecht, The Public Prosecutor, and Donadieu. In the historical dramas, he seemed less interested in directly criticizing maladies of the recent war than in presenting timeless truths, objectified by historical garb and meant for all theatergoers regardless of time or geography. In fact, he once went so far as to say that there are no burning current issues in these plays.

In Meier Helmbrecht, the title character must stand trial because his son was a robber-knight. He pleads his innocence, saying that he cannot be held responsible because he was powerless to do anything. He did provide a horse for his son, but he was afraid of him. Finally, however, Helmbrecht acknowledges and confesses his guilt, a guilt that includes neglect, weakness, permissiveness, and cowardice. The general message of the parable seems to be that everyone shares in evil and guilt through sins of commission or omission; the play’s specific message may refer to the guilt that Germany and Austria must bear for their part in the atrocities of World War II.

Fouquier, the prosecutor in The Public Prosecutor, is also irresponsible but is more guilty because of his ruthlessness. To preserve his own life and position, he is ready to serve a terrorist government, even if it means sending innocent people to the guillotine. Through his own guile, he unwittingly prepares a case against himself; he is condemned and sent to the same death that he has arranged for so many others. The play ends in a struggle for power and forebodes even further terror and the downfall of yet another tyrant.

Donadieu poses the timeless questions of revenge and retribution, and the resolution is more optimistic than those of the former two plays. The Huguenot Donadieu’s immediate response to the discovery of his wife’s murderer is to take the matter into his own hands. In a moment of enlightenment, however, Donadieu overrides his desire for revenge, realizing that it would precipitate further persecution. He entrusts retribution to divine justice.

Die Herberge

Hochwälder considered Die Herberge a turning point in his life and work. He wanted to be creative and experiment with forms of drama other than the classical—in part because the classical historical play did not seem popular among modern audiences, and he wanted to keep entertainment in the theater. On the other hand, he did not want to be a commercial writer whose aim is mere profit. He was still willing to probe the conscience of his audience; in fact, he seemed more intent on criticizing modern society than on entertaining it. Die Herberge presents the contemporary world, where injustice is rampant and where everyone is tested and found guilty. Each character typifies a certain kind of sin. Kavolius, the innkeeper and father of Staschia, whose sin is greed, represents the bourgeois burgher who already has money and whose only desire is to obtain more. He is willing to sacrifice principles for money—and, what is worse, his own daughter. Anyone, including the moneylender and extortionist Berullis, can marry her as long as he has money. The comic policeman is also guilty of greed, wanting to drive the beggar out of town lest the villagers will have to feed him over the winter months. The other comic figure, the coffin maker, hoping for a quick execution of the thief so that he can get some drinking money, is similarly greedy. The most outrageous example of greed, however, is Berullis, who robbed Jurgis’s father many years before.

Staschia, less guilty than her father, nevertheless shares in the general guilt of the world. Her fault is untruthfulness. Not wanting to hurt anyone, she lies to cover up Jurgis’s theft of Berullis’s money and the half-wit Andusz’ lustful attack against her. Andusz also lies to protect himself, but his guilt stems from a previous murder and his uncontrollable lust. The judge is guilty of setting up his own principle of man-made order to rule people in the absence of justice; since there is no justice, it is better that ten should die rather than that one guilty man should go free. The judge finds the hobo Schimke guilty of the theft, simply because he was found asleep in the barn with the stolen gold next to him. In a noble gesture, trying to avert an injustice, Jurgis admits that he took the money in the hope that with it he would be able to marry Staschia.

The hobo, the only character without guilt, thinks that God’s justice lives in man’s heart like a seed in fruit. Hochwälder implies that the seed of justice exists in man’s heart and that, even if others will continue to perpetrate and perpetuate injustice, justice will at times be observable outside man’s heart in the darkness of the world.

Der Unschuldige

In the ironically titled play Der Unschuldige (the guiltless one), all the characters are guilty. Erdmann’s wife, his daughter, his neighbor, and the ambitious judge are guilty of false accusations; having based their judgment on circumstantial evidence after finding a skeleton in Erdmann’s rose garden, they accuse him of being a murderer. Although proven innocent of murder, Erdmann is nevertheless guilty of tyranny over his wife, daughter, and servants. His enlightenment allows him to see himself as he really is: not the perfect man who expects to be adored by his family, but a weakling who in anger could have killed a man whom he hated.

Donnerstag

In Donnerstag, Hochwälder was more concerned with modern man’s materialistic life than with his guilt. Donnerstag is a mystery play, an allegory that is set in an imaginative world of the Faustian, Everyman, and the Austrian Zaubertheater traditions. Hochwälder’s Everyman, Pomfrit—a successful architect—is an allegorical figure for one who has become king of all creation yet possesses within himself nothing more than dissatisfaction, unrest, and despair. These woes plague Pomfrit, even though in his pursuit of happiness he has been a Freemason, Methodist, Socialist, reactionary, drunk, European, world citizen, nihilist, and existentialist. Even when death approaches after a heart attack, his previous soulless existence prevents him from believing in God. He does not confess to having been a mass murderer (as some have suspected), but only to being a fool. In a moment of despair, he seems to opt for the Devil. There is, however, a hint of hope in the minor character of Estrella, a simple ragpicker whose love for Pomfrit is symbolic of the human capacity for unselfish love. Pomfrit’s final humble prayer to the God in whom he cannot believe suggests a chance for himself or for others to attain future salvation.

The Raspberry Picker and The Order

In the plays The Raspberry Picker and The Order, Hochwälder left the imaginary world to treat the real world of World War II. The setting is twenty years after the war has ended, but the effect of the war is present in the hearts of individuals and communities.

The Raspberry Picker exposes an entire Austrian village that has benefited economically from a concentration camp and still recalls the good old days, especially the fond memory of one Nazi hero. He was called the Raspberry Picker because he shot down prisoners while they were picking raspberries. When a stranger registers at a local inn, he is mistaken for the famous Nazi; in actuality, he is no more than a petty thief. The villagers, happy about this triumphant return and proud of their hero, are willing to help him escape the country. After discovering that the stranger is a mere thief and a Jew rather than the famous murderer, the people become outraged. Later, when reading about the capture of the real Raspberry Picker and his subsequent suicide in jail, they drink to his memory.

In the more serious and less satiric The Order, Hochwälder psychologically probes the personal guilt of a man’s war crime. Mittermayer, a satisfied citizen and competent police inspector, is confronted with a past deed far removed from his consciousness: a murder he had committed twenty years ago, during the war. He eventually recognizes his weak yet vicious nature, which caused him to follow blindly the commands of his superior officers during the war and which even now turns violent under the influence of alcohol. Unable to cope with this revelation and perhaps trying to expiate his offenses, Mittermayer chooses a way out: He chases a gangster outside his own police jurisdiction and permits himself to be shot by the hoodlum.

In both The Raspberry Picker and The Order, Hochwälder condemns leaders, followers, and fence sitters alike for their irresponsible actions during and after the war. At the same time, he is warning that everyone is capable of similar crimes under similar circumstances and must therefore control the beast within; unfavorable historical conditions do not absolve personal or collective guilt.

Lazaretti

An even greater peril to society than the Nazis is nuclear terrorism. The thesis of Lazaretti is that if man continues to be corrupt and irresponsible, he will use the ultimate weapon of terror, the nuclear bomb. He will then become like the saber-toothed tiger of the play’s subtitle, which was doomed to extinction because of its overgrown fangs—the very armament that was supposed to protect it. The dramatic action of the play, however, is not centered on this warning, but rather on the personal conflicts of two writers. Professor Camenisch is worried about his lack of inspiration to complete a book he is writing, and the publishers are pressuring him. His boyhood friend Lazaretti, now a famous writer and lecturer, seeks refuge because he believes that he is being persecuted. Lazaretti claims that a gang is trying to drive him insane to prevent him from publishing his latest manuscript, which tells how to eliminate terrorists. As an idealist, his intentions are good, but the consequences could be disastrous; the book could result in a growing spiral of international nuclear terror. His plan is to kill all potential aggressors immediately by establishing an international secret society, a conspiracy of young idealists from all countries. They will be cold-blooded, daring, unscrupulous, and merciless in the service of mankind. Camenisch finally has his friend committed to an asylum and solves his own problem of nonproductivity by publishing Lazaretti’s work as his own.

The pessimistic dimension of this play is that nobody is really enlightened; today’s society—its elite humanists as well as its idealistic youth—can only resort to terror as an answer to terror. A minuscule trace of hope is provided by the play’s sole female character, the secretary Rouzha, because she abandons all the characters to preserve her faith in humankind. Even with this desperate message, Hochwälder is an entertainer as well as a moralist: The love triangle, the comic characters of an overzealous servant and a classicist neighbor, the dramatic swings in the moods and sanity of Lazaretti, the intrigue, and the uncertain outcome make this play as much entertaining melodrama as serious social commentary—consistent with Hochwälder’s belief that, in order to reach the largest number of people, a warning must be cloaked in entertainment.

Der verschwundene Mond

Der verschwundene Mond (the vanishing moon) is very different from Hochwälder’s other dramas because it is not a warning about society or the theater, but rather a literary legacy, a meditation on the essence of poetry. The author even considered this fairy-tale play his best work, inasmuch as it is pure poetry, something he wanted to express for personal satisfaction. A first version was typed in 1951. Then, after thirty years of gestation and a rediscovery of the work and life of the wandering poet Jakob Haringer, Hochwälder was inspired to complete it. The main character, Gustave, modeled after Haringer, is a poet and an isolated yet content hobo who envies no one’s power or riches. He is unlike his former academic associates and his rich friend who writes for fame and money. He possesses something more wonderful: the power to take the moon out of the sky.

A beautiful woman persuades him to sell the moon so that he can make himself more presentable to her with the profits. French mobsters direct Gustave to their boss, who already has everything else and is still unhappy, but he dies of a heart attack while negotiating a deal with Gustave. Then a rich American entrepreneur offers to purchase the moon. Spending the money for new clothes and entrance into her bordello, Gustave discovers that the woman is a whore: For this, he stole the moon. He acquires the money to repurchase the moon from a successful writer friend, who realizes that Gustave had something that he himself has never possessed: the gift of writing literature. While searching in vain for the American, Gustave finds the love of a poor flower girl. She insists that all they need is each other, but he knows that without the moon there is no poetry, no love, no life. He gives her the money. Later, Gustave is found dead on his bench, but the moon is shining once again.

Unlike the dramatic conflicts of other Hochwälder plays, this work of admiration for Jakob Haringer generates a mood of love and melancholy reminiscent of lyric poetry. The moon is a metaphor for the gift of poetry; it may not be stolen, sold for money, or hoarded for exclusive personal use. It must be shared by all, but only the unfettered poet will have access to it. Free of material possessions, removed from the evils of everyday life, the poet is able to live a just life, dreaming and writing. Similarities can be seen between the life and work of Hochwälder and that of the poet Haringer, who unwillingly became a vagabond, who sank into anonymity after having been honored by literary prizes, and who, despite it all, retained the gift of poetry.

Bibliography

Demetz, P. Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction. New York: Pegasus, 1970. Gives history and criticism of mid-twentieth century literature, providing a context for the contemporaries and genres of Hochwälder.

Finlay, Frank, ed. Centre Stage: Contemporary Drama in Austria. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Examines the contributions to Austrian theater by many playwrights not previously studied, including Hochwälder, Wolfgang Bauer, Thomas Bernhard, Elias Canetti, and Peter Handke. Focus is on the themes, forms, and concerns of Austria’s contemporary playwrights.

Robertson, Ritchie. Theatre and Performance in Austria: From Mozart to Jelinek. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. In providing a wide-ranging account of Austria’s theater, one of the defining features of the country’s culture, Robertson offers a context to Hochwälder’s development as a playwright.

Schmitt, J. “The Theatre of Fritz Hochwälder: Its Background and Development,” in Modern Austrian Literature 2, no. 1 (1978). Traces the development of Hochwälder as a dramatist and explores his techniques and themes.