Johann Nestroy

• Born: December 7, 1801
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: May 25, 1862
• Place of death: Graz, Austria

Other Literary Forms

Johann Nestroy is chiefly known for his comedies, although his most famous “couplets” (brief operatic songs) and epigrammatic sayings from within these plays have been compiled into separate collections. }

Achievements

Johann Nestroy was praised as the “Aristophanes of Vienna” by his contemporaries, and the more than eighty comedies and farces that he wrote during his lifetime support that praise. As dramatist and actor, he marks the culmination and finale of the long tradition of the Viennese folk theater, which had its roots in the baroque age and its first significant representative in the famous Josef Anton Stranitzky , who took over the directorship of the newly constructed comedy house near the Kärntnertor in 1712. Within fourteen years Stranitzky had created that unique Viennese folk theater that achieved its highest expression at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the hands of Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund.

While Raimund seemed to cling to the idealism of a past age in his fairy-laden dream plays, Nestroy was a realist who excelled in the parody of this fairy world as well as in social criticism of the new middle class in the growing metropolis of Vienna and has been called “the first realistic writer of German comedy” as well as “the greatest German comedy writer” altogether.

“Opposition to the spirit of his time, and not only his time, dominated his work,” remarks Franz H. Mautner in his introduction to Nestroy’s plays. One of the great dramatists of the twentieth century, the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, remarks in the notes to Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956; The Visit, 1958), “One should treat me as a sort of deliberate Nestroy, and one will get far.” In his essay Problems of the Theatre (1955), there is no other author whom Dürrenmatt mentions nearly as often as Nestroy. Modern comedy and especially Dürrenmatt’s tragicomedies have prompted a reevaluation of Nestroy’s plays. What had been regarded as his failure by earlier critics has proved to be Nestroy’s strength after all. He is, observes Mautner, a modern writer in his passion for a theater that shuns the illusion of reality.

Nestroy himself regarded his playwriting as only a vehicle for his acting, writing role after role for himself, preferring to leave literary fame to others: “I don’t aspire to poetic laurels. My things should please, entertain, people should laugh, and it also should make me some money, so that I can laugh, that’s the whole purpose.” Nestroy cared little about his written texts, constantly improvising onstage and filling the scripts with their best lines only then. (Even a so-called complete critical edition that appeared between 1924 and 1930 does not include all his plays because some remain known of by title solely and others were discovered only relatively recently.)

Because of his busy schedule, which did not permit him time to revise manuscripts, his farces, which were primarily intended for the stage and not as works of literature, lacked some of the polish provided by other dramatists of the time. Critics have commented that these witty parodies and farces were not comedies in the true sense of the word and charged that these dramatic works lack a deeper humor that springs from personal experience. In addition to this problem, Nestroy frequently failed to create an internally coherent and convincing plot. His characterization is also weak. Minor roles often remain stereotypes, and his women lack individuality altogether, with the notable exception of Salome Pockerl in The Talisman.

Nestroy’s ample use of Viennese dialect and the fact that he was his own best interpreter onstage limited his popularity primarily to Vienna during his lifetime. Northern Germany, especially, remained closed to him, since the standard of High German spoken in that region was usually the language reserved for Nestroy’s more despicable characters. Only a few of his comedies now belong to the standard repertoires of the German-speaking stage outside Vienna. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, five of his plays were translated into English, but even with these translations, Nestroy remains virtually unknown on the American stage, with the exception of The Matchmaker, which Thornton Wilder adapted as The Merchant of Yonkers in 1938, the revised version of which became a Broadway success as The Matchmaker in 1954.

Biography

Johann Nepomuk Eduard Ambrosius Nestroy was born on December 7, 1801, in Vienna. His father immigrated to Vienna from Silesia and became a successful trial lawyer who intended the same career for his son. Nestroy’s mother, the daughter of a well-to-do Viennese commercial inspector, died of consumption at a relatively young age. During Nestroy’s adolescence, the family’s prosperity vanished quickly, and the wheel of fortune that sends Nestroy’s characters up and down with such unpredictable regularity tumbled Nestroy himself from a secure childhood into growing poverty hidden under the pretense of a life unchanged. Instead of the law, Nestroy pursued a career in the opera, making a successful debut in Vienna as Sarastro in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791; The Magic Flute). After a year, he went as an opera singer to Amsterdam, Brünn, and finally to Graz for a more permanent engagement. He married, but his wife, Maria Philippine, with whom he had a son, left him after a short time. In Graz, he then met the actress Marie Weiler, whom he could not marry, because Austrian law prohibited a second marriage. They lived together, and he had two children by her.

In Graz, Nestroy switched over to the comic theater and endeared himself to audiences in 1831, in the role of Sansquartier in Louis Angely’s popular farce Sieben Mädchen in Uniform (seven girls in uniform; for his performance, the farce was temporarily retitled Zwölf Mädchen in Uniform, meaning twelve girls in uniform). In this role he seems to have developed the farcical gestures and comic devices that would later become his mark as playwright and actor. This farce also launched his career as a playwright because it did not fill the evening and thus prompted him to write a farcical prologue to round out the bill. In 1831, Karl Carl, the director of the Viennese theater, engaged Nestroy as actor and playwright first for the Theater an der Wien and later for the Theater in der Leopoldstadt. The immediate printing of Nestroy’s works was prevented by the harsh contract that Nestroy signed with Carl. This exploitative contract provided that everything that Nestroy wrote, including individual scenes, had to be submitted to the Carl-Theater first for consideration, and that Carl retained the exclusive option on the text for eighteen months after its first performance. By that time, a text was well worn and apparently of no further interest to the playwright. The contract lasted until Carl’s death in 1854, when Nestroy, in addition to his acting and writing careers, also assumed the directorship of the Theater in der Leopoldstadt.

Nestroy ended his career as director of that theater in 1860, when he retired to Graz. After 1860, Nestroy only appeared in some guest performances in Vienna and was seen onstage for the last time in 1862, in his Häuptling Abendwind. Not quite four months later, he died in Graz.

Analysis

Johann Nestroy’s works stand at the end of the Viennese folk-theater tradition, and at the beginning of the modern theater of tragicomedy. Appreciation for the striking modernity of Nestroy’s vision has continued to grow, as is evidenced by Tom Stoppard’s adaptation On the Razzle (1981), and Nestroy’s work is seen in the context of the profound influence of Austrian culture on the modern mind.

Nestroy shares with modern playwrights their predominantly intellectual-ironic-objective stance, their skepticism, and especially their aversion to false pathos. In particular, he shares with Bertolt Brecht the effect of deliberate alienation. Nestroy even anticipated Brecht’s technique of alienation through song in his couplets. Parody in Nestroy’s work and in modern plays serves the identical purpose of alienating the audience from ideas and values long held sacred and opening the spectator’s eye to a new perspective. Indeed, Nestroy’s affinity with modern playwrights such as Dürrenmatt and Eugène Ionesco runs deeper still, for he often went beyond the parodistic reinterpretation of a given situation to a parody of language itself, a parody of overused and meaningless phrases and metaphors, of virtuous banalities and proverbs, even to a parody of the pompous theatrical language of his time, which he effectively contrasted with the Viennese folk dialect. Franz Mautner postulates that Peter Handke’s 1966 Pubikumsbeschimpfung und andere Sprechstücke (plays about language), which closely investigate each word as to its possible range of meanings, are unthinkable without Nestroy’s example. Present-day theatrical devices such as the division of the stage into two or more independent spheres of action are also common occurrences in Nestroy.

Nestroy’s shunning of the illusion of theatrical reality can be traced to the influence of the commedia dell’arte on his writing. This influence can be seen best in his characters and plots. Originality is not important to him, and he usually borrows the plot from other works, including the comedies of antiquity. His farces consist of an artful mechanism held in motion by stock characters, burlesque situations, and theatrical coups. There are jealous lovers, fathers who want to prevent their children’s marriages, cunning servants, and crafty craftsmen. His plays are filled with the Viennese lower and middle classes: the shoemakers and tailors, the rich merchants and parvenus, the servants and masters. In some ways, these farces must have been regarded by their audiences in the same manner in which the more intelligent television situation comedies are received today.

Der Tod am Hochzeitstage

Reflecting the heritage of the Viennese folk theater, magic plays a significant role in Nestroy’s work. Its representatives have become all too human, however, their virtuous or evil qualities reduced in scale. Clearly, the effects of romanticism are noticeable in Nestroy, even though he was anything but a romantic writer. One of his earliest plays, Der Tod am Hochzeitstage (death on the wedding day), is not far removed from romantic Symbolism. Its protagonist Dappschädl, “the fool of melancholy,” dreams of what could have happened if his wife had not died twenty-five years earlier. In his despair, he throws himself on his servant girl Seppi, and as his mournful feelings well up, he tries to seduce her. This early comedy is a mixture of magic and disillusionment, a parody of romantic witchcraft that expresses the absurd in life.

Nagerl und Handschuh

Nestroy employed a specifically Viennese locale for the first time in his play Nagerl und Handschuh (Nagerl and the glove). This “parody of an often satirized theme” (Cinderella) replaces the shoe with a glove and the gruesome ending for the older sisters with a happy one.

Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus

It was a play in the following year, however, Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus (the evil spirit Lumpazivagabundus), that signified Nestroy’s breakthrough as the most prominent Viennese actor and playwright of his time. As with most of his plays, Nestroy here drew on an earlier source, Carl Weisflog’s Das grosse Los (1827; the winning ticket). In good baroque fashion, and again like most of his plays, it has a double title, the second half of which lifts the veil on that which is about to happen just enough to whet the audience’s appetite (in this case the subtitle, “Das liederliche Kleeblatt” means “the roguish trio”). The real world of nineteenth century Vienna and the fairy kingdom encounter each other in this story of three dissolute journeymen: a shoemaker, a tailor, and a carpenter. The old magicians of the realm, led by Mystifax, complain to the Fairy King Stellaris about Lumpazivagabundus, who has seduced their sons and daughters into a dissolute life. The king commands Fortuna to return their squandered possessions to them, but Lumpazivagabundus mocks that wealth will never better the young. As if to prove his point, Hilaris, the son of Mystifax, exclaims that only love can conquer the dissolute, and he demands the hand of Brillantine, Fortuna’s daughter. Fortuna refuses, even though Amorosa takes the side of the lovers. Finally, Fortuna offers the following condition: Three dissolute humans shall receive wealth from her horn of plenty. If two of them make wise use of their gifts, Brillantine and Hilaris shall not marry; if two squander their wealth obstinately, Amorosa will be victorious.

The action then shifts to the city of Ulm, where the audience is introduced to the shoemaker Knieriem, a student of beer and astrology, the squanderous tailor Zwirn, and the carpenter Leim, who has become melancholic after the loss of his beloved Pepi. At the inn, they discover that the main drawing in the city’s lottery will be held on the following day. During the night, Fortuna allows each of them to dream about the same number, 7359, and the next morning they buy this ticket with their last pennies. They win a considerable amount of money, which they divide evenly, and then they go their separate ways. Leim will try to regain his lost Pepi, Zwirn wants to lead the life of a Don Juan, and Knieriem will give himself entirely to the study of wine and beer, since his astrological observations have foretold the impending doom of the world. In one year, they plan to meet again at the house of Pepi’s father, Master Hobelmann, in Vienna. Because Leim is now equipped with money, Hobelmann is happy to consent to Pepi’s marriage. Zwirn, meanwhile, has become a parvenu in Prague and entertains worthless friends and passions with his quickly diminishing fortune. When the year has passed, Zwirn and Knieriem appear penniless at Master Hobelmann’s door. In the famous letter scene, Hobelmann pretends that Leim is lying on his deathbed in Nuremberg, but he has left some money behind for his friends. They resolve immediately to rush to Nuremberg in order to help him. In spite of their dissolute lives, they have demonstrated their good hearts. Leim appears, and the three are reunited. The two squanderers do not want to settle down, however, and they march on to the next inn. There, Stellaris, horrified by so much slovenliness and angered by the success of Lumpazivagabundus, catches up with them and banishes the two into the underworld. Fortuna declares herself the loser of the bet, and Hilaris and Brillantine are allowed to marry. Amorosa does not give up her hope, though, that Zwirn and Knieriem can become decent human beings through the power of love. In the end, she succeeds, and in a peaceful apotheosis, the three craftsmen appear, seated on different floors of the same house, working diligently, surrounded by wives and children, until the evening bell calls them all to dancing and merriment.

The play became an unsurpassed success at the Theater an der Wien. With it, Nestroy modified the traditional form of the magical farce into his own vehicle of expression. The contemporary critic Karl Meisl observed that Nestroy still employed the magic convention to motivate the dramatic action, but it was no longer intrinsically necessary and might even be eliminated altogether. The traditional bet waged between the forces of good and evil, which has notable forerunners in Raimund’s Das Mädchen aus der Feenwelt: Oder, Der Bauer als Millionär, (pr. 1826, pb. 1837; The Maid from Fairyland: Or, The Peasant as Millionaire, 1962), and particularly in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, pb. 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1828) served to illustrate Nestroy’s ironic and paradoxical view of the world, since Lumpazivagabundus, the representative of slovenliness, remains victorious. His counterpart is Fortuna, a force who is similarly negative in a classical system of values. The old juxtaposition of virtue and vice has thus been abolished a priori, and the “Everyman in reverse,” as the play has been called, proved to its amused audience that it was much more enjoyable and took much less pain to go to Hell than to walk the path of virtue.

Some critics stress that Nestroy also sounded, for the first time, a political note in Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus and especially in the refrain to the famous couplet “Die Welt steht auf keinen Fall mehr lang” (This world will not exist much longer in any case). To this line Nestroy apparently added still greater relevance by delivering it with strong emphasis on the definite article, thus making the allusion to the shaky condition of the social order of his time. In the character of Knieriem, who sings this couplet, the author and actor Nestroy, for the first time, had made the coarsest of the poor his central comic figure and spokesperson. Knieriem was drawn and acted with a realistic quality that led another contemporary critic to observe, “Mr. Nestroy is a genre painter who conceives the most common scenes from life with such a sure and efficient hand and puts them on the stage so drastically that the viewer seems to shy away stunned as from a portrait so life-like that one expects it to speak any second.”

Die Familien Zwirn, Knieriem und Leim

Die Familien Zwirn, Knieriem und Leim (the families of Zwirn, Knieriem and Leim) takes place twenty years after Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus. Leim and Knieriem are now married, but Zwirn has remained an itinerant skirt-chaser and tailor and at the same time has become an apprentice to a quack named Paracelsus. The play was a parody of the then popular “improvement-plays” but lacked the originality and drive of its predecessor. Nestroy hinted at the reason for its mediocrity in a line from one of his later plays: “That’s how it goes with continuations, there simply no longer is the same interest.”

Weder Lorbeerbaum noch Bettelstab

In Weder Lorbeerbaum noch Bettelstab (neither laurel tree nor beggar’s staff), Nestroy deals with his own profession of comedy writing. The poet Leicht is chided because his comedy contains witty ideas. Blasius, the son of a rich manufacturer, tells him that comedy should never be witty but rather sentimental and good-hearted so that one can laugh with one eye and weep with the other. The conventions of Nestroy’s period are satirized when Blasius continues: “We are upright and good people, and we want our hearts touched in everything we see.”

Zu ebener Erde und im ersten Stock

The second play of 1835, Zu ebener Erde und im ersten Stock (downstairs-upstairs), almost appears to be the model for the similarly titled British television series. The stage is divided throughout all three acts. The poor family of Schlucker, his wife, children, and brother-in-law Damian live downstairs; the millionaire, Goldfuchs, and his daughter Emilie lead an opulent life upstairs. The wheel of fortune turns constantly, however, and during the course of the play, downstairs becomes upstairs and upstairs, downstairs. The Schluckers win a large amount of money in the lottery, while Goldfuchs loses his fortune through bad speculations. Nestroy played the central character, Johann, the butler upstairs. The play has been called magical, but no fairies or magicians appear. Life itself performs the magical acts. This masterpiece, in which Nestroy comes closest to the spirit of his rival Raimund, has been rated higher than Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus by several critics.

Das Haus der Temperamente

Das Haus der Temperamente (the house of temperaments) sections the stage into four separate spheres, representing the four human tempers as character-types. As in Zu ebener Erde und im ersten Stock, the lives of the families living in one house are interwoven. Nestroy’s stylistic principle of presenting the same action from varied viewpoints is particularly evident in this play.

The Talisman

During the decade from 1840 to 1850, Nestroy wrote three of his most important plays. The first among these was The Talisman. Red hair makes life miserable for Titus Feuerfuchs, the barber’s apprentice, and for Salome Pockerl, the goose-girl. A black wig with which he is rewarded for saving the master-barber’s life inadvertently wins for him the favor of Flora Baumscher, the widow of a gardener. She puts him into her husband’s clothing and makes him an overseer. In this job, he is espied by the chambermaid Constantia, similarly suffering from the tribulations of widowhood. She launches him on a new career as hunter for the court. Complications arise when the master-barber suspects in the black-wigged Titus a rival for the hand of Constantia. After the loss of the black wig during a brawl with the master-barber, Titus flees to become the secretary of a countess, now hiding himself under a blond wig. During an evening gathering, Titus is unmasked, however, by the vengeful widows and the master-barber as a wig thief and is thrown out of the house. Fortunately, Titus has a rich uncle who appears at this moment to save his disgraced nephew from destitution. New complications arise that finally compel Titus to forgo the inheritance and favors attained by the use of his wigs and to marry Salome Pockerl, who never objected to the color of his hair in the first place.

The Talisman is one of the high points of Nestroy’s work, featuring his most fully realized female character (Salome Pockerl), exceptionally well-written dialogue, and the witty exposition of one of his recurring themes: the discrepancy between Schein und Sein (appearance and essence). By the beginning of the 1840’s, Nestroy had perfected his particular variety of farce, but at the same time had not yet slipped into the glib routine that, according to several critics, characterizes his later plays. Yet even then he continued his practice of adapting the scripts of others. The source of The Talisman was the farce Bonaventure (1840), by the French authors Charles Desiré Dupeuty and F. de Courcy, which had premiered in Paris a few months earlier. Critic Helmut Herles has investigated Nestroy’s gradual adaptation of the original into The Talisman, providing some valuable insights into Nestroy’s method of adaptation.

The social criticism first noted in Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus seems to have gained ground. Nestroy’s proximity to his contemporary Georg Büchner should not be overlooked here. A couplet in the third act shows Nestroy as a direct ancestor of Bertolt Brecht: “Mit ein’ orndlichen Mag’n/ Kann man alles ertrag’n” (With a decent stomach one can endure everything) seems to reflect the same attitude as Brecht’s famous “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (First comes eating, then morality). W. E. Yates emphasizes that Titus recalls Brecht’s Shui Ta in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (wr. 1938-1940, pr. 1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan, 1948) when he states in an aside: “Meine Stellung hier im Hause gleicht dem Brett des Schiffbrüchigen; ich muss die andern hinunterstossen, oder selbst untergehn” (My position here in the house equals the board of the ship-wrecked: I must push the others off or drown myself). Yates considers The Talisman a social allegory in which Nestroy uses the story of the wig—that is, the “talisman”—as a

presentation of a society in which prejudice is all-powerful, appearance all important, and merit unrewarded. Titus is excluded for reasons of birth (symbolized in the red hair he was born with from a world to which he aspires until he finally sees through the worthlessness of its standards.

The Talisman can also be seen as one of Nestroy’s best portrayals of the Austrian capital during his lifetime: a Viennese Biedermeier idyll with its widows, gardeners, brewers, bakers, chambermaids, and poets, and with the satiric tableau of the literary salon of Frau von Cypressenburg.

In the character of Titus Feuerfuchs, Nestroy created the first and perhaps the best of a new breed which he was to repeat with Herr von Lips in A Man Full of Nothing: the articulate raisonneur and philosopher who stands above his time and dominates it with virtuosity.

The Matchmaker

The second great play of this period, The Matchmaker, features a dazzling plot full of delightfully preposterous confusions. An exact English translation of Ein Jux will er sich machen (he wants to have some fun) would seem a more fitting title for Nestroy’s work than The Matchmaker. This farce has been appropriately labeled the “first tragicomedy of an apprentice whose wildly flailing attempt to break out of the boredom of his existence into the adventure of the unknown is doomed to fail.” Curiously enough, the play was based on a British farce, A Day Well Spent, by John Oxenford. As in most other instances, however, Nestroy considerably modified and expanded the original.

Nestroy returned in The Matchmaker to his earlier device of separating the stage into two contrasting spheres; acts 1 and 4 are situated in Zangler’s small-town shop, while acts 2 and 3 take place in the big city. Nestroy also returned to an earlier age of innocence, as compared to the mood of The Talisman or even Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus; The Matchmaker came closer again to the pure farces of his early years. The action is highly improbable, as is the case in most of Nestroy’s farces, while the lively tempo and the many comical quid pro quos lend a poetic aura to the interspersed realistic-satiric scenes, as, for example, those depicting the dull lives of Zangler’s two employees Weinberl and Christopherl. One critic has observed that the masquerades—as for example that of Weinberl, who would like to be a swashbuckler just once in his life—are symbolic depictions of the general madness of the world. The wise simpleton of the play, the servant Melchior, responds to every incomprehensible event that he witnesses with the stock phrase “Das is klassisch” (that’s classic). Humankind’s foolishness, Nestroy seems to say to his audience in The Matchmaker, is its most characteristic feature.

Weinberl, on the other hand, is also a calmer reincarnation of the raisonneur and philosopher Titus Feuerfuchs, more resigned to the ways of the world than Titus was and, after his edifying adventures in the big city, perhaps more moderate in the demands which he will put on it.

A Man Full of Nothing

The third notable play in this fruitful decade was A Man Full of Nothing. Herr von Lips is disgusted with the world and bored with his friends in spite of all the wealth he has been able to amass. The locksmith Gluthammer, who has been called to Lips’ mansion to install a new banister, is also at odds with the world because a certain Mathilde, for whom he had sacrificed all his possessions, has left him. In a conversation with Kathi, the young niece of Lips, Gluthammer laments his sad fate and confesses that he is still in love with Mathilde. Kathi has arrived to return a sum of money that her mother had borrowed from Lips many years earlier. Within the circle of his friends, Lips, who has never married, vows that he will marry the first woman whom he meets that day in order to break his boredom and disgust with the world. At this moment, a widow, Madame Schleier, appears to offer Lips tickets to a ball that she will hold at her country home in order to improve her modest finances. Lips is bound by his vow and offers to marry her, which at first surprises and then delights the widow. Kathi is less enthusiastic, since she is secretly in love with Lips. After Kathi has heard that Madame Schleier’s first name is Mathilde, she confides this to Gluthammer, who recognizes his long-lost love. Lips insists on his wedding plans and a fight ensues between him and Gluthammer, in the course of which they tumble over the yet unfinished banister down into a brook that runs in front of the house.

Lips, who believes that he has killed Gluthammer, disguises himself and hides from the police at the farm of his tenant farmer, Krautkopf, where Kathi is the househkeeper. She coaxes the farmer into hiring Lips as the new handyman. While Lips is at work, Gluthammer, who has also survived but believes himself to be the murderer of Lips, appears at the farm and implores his friend Krautkopf to hide him from the police. The farmer hides him in the grain silo. In the meantime, Lips’s will has been probated, and his three best friends arrive at the farm in order to look at their newly inherited property. Lips can overhear his friends unnoticed and finds out their sentiments toward him. He is very disappointed, and when the will is left unguarded, he manages to affix an addendum to it which declares Kathi to be the sole heir. The probate judge discovers the addendum and declares it valid. Kathi, the rich heiress, is now wooed by the three friends. Lips grows increasingly jealous, but Kathi assures him that she will sell the whole estate and send the money to Lips, who now plans to flee abroad. The friends dislike the confidences between Kathi and the hired hand, and when one of them seizes him by the collar, he recognizes Lips. The probate judge proclaims that he must arrest Lips for murder, and that he will be locked up in the grain silo until the police can be summoned. There, Gluthammer and Lips encounter each other during the night, and each imagines that the ghost of the other has come to haunt him. From this climax, it is only a brief step to the end, when Lips and Kathi and Gluthammer and Mathilde are united in marriage.

In Lips, Nestroy created one of his most interesting and rewarding stage characters. A Man Full of Nothing depicts most clearly a humanity victimized by its own masquerades and tricked by itself. In contrast to The Talisman and The Matchmaker, the responsibility for the protagonist’s situation has been shifted from the outside to the inside. Oskar Maurus Fontana suggests that Lips is the incarnation of modern humanity with his self-inflicted disintegration and inner void. Once life is without meaning and all activity has become senseless, profound boredom is the unavoidable result. Such existential ennui on the stage of nineteenth century Vienna resurfaced in the twentieth century philosophies of such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.

Nestroy’s contemporaries would not have missed his parody of the Byronic Weltschmerz, which afflicted the Romantic age and which had been similarly satirized in Georg Büchner’s Leonce und Lena (1838; Leonce and Lena, 1927). Indeed, A Man Full of Nothing was Nestroy’s ultimate satiric statement, in which satire of the world around him had turned into satire on itself, a parody of the sort of Zerrissenheit (torn state) that Nestroy’s skepticism has produced.

In A Man Full of Nothing, Nestroy drew on French comédie-vaudeville, L’Homme blasé (1843) by Frédéric Auguste Duvert and Auguste Théodore Vaux-Roussel de Lauzanne. The two writers were regarded as among the leading vaudevillistes of the time, and W. E. Yates suggests that their play stood out from the common fare, being based on a relatively new comic situation. He further suggests that Nestroy did not really improve the original significantly, having reached a creative plateau in the mid-1840’s after the peaks of the previous year: “Nestroy develops the characters of Kathi Krautkopf and Lips, but without having to alter the fundamentals of the characterization . . . and he takes over some of the limitations of the original, to the detriment of the finished work.”

Freedom Comes to Krähwinkel

Freedom Comes to Krähwinkel deserves to be mentioned at least as the one play of Nestroy written most clearly under the influence of the revolution of 1848. Here Nestroy vents his disappointment that the revolution for freedom had quickly changed into a petty rebellion of the middle class.

Kampl

During the following decade, Nestroy produced one more outstanding play, Kampl. The theme is again that of Schein und Sein. The protagonist, Kampl, has a double identity: as a doctor of the poor on the one hand, and as a fashionable health spa doctor on the other. He disguises himself only in order to do good more effectively. The fairies and evil spirits from the past have clearly become the opposing powers of love and money, and Kampl is a more modern version of Raimund’s famous Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (pr. 1828, pb. 1837; Mountain King and Misanthrope, 1962).

Bibliography

Harding, Laurence V. The Dramatic Art of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy: A Critical Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. An examination of the plays of Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund. Bibliography.

Yates, W. E. Nestroy and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. An analysis of the critical reaction to Nestroy’s works. Bibliography and index.

Yates, W. E. Nestroy: Satire and Parody in Viennese Popular Comedy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1972. A study of satire and parody as they appear in the works of Nestroy. Bibliography.