Ferdinand Bruckner

• Born: August 26, 1891
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: December 5, 1958
• Place of death: Berlin, West Germany (now in Germany)

Other Literary Forms

Ferdinand Bruckner used his real name, Theodor Tagger, from 1911 to 1926 when he wrote essays, music criticism, fiction, and lyric poetry. He began in 1920 to write plays, and in 1926 he began to use the pseudonym Ferdinand Bruckner. The plays he wrote under this name are his best known.

Achievements

Ferdinand Bruckner burst on the theatrical scene in Weimar Germany with the passionate intensity of a phosphorescent flame lighting up a dull, gray winter sky. When his plays first appeared, they created a sensation, for they frequently treated controversial subjects. They proved to be extremely popular with audiences, probably because of their sensational subject matter and also because Bruckner was fortunate enough to have talented directors staging the plays and energetic, talented actors performing in them. Bruckner’s plays were also extremely effective theatrically; they employed numerous devices that made the performance of a Bruckner play a memorable experience.

Bruckner’s plays represent a “third” direction in German playwriting after the vogue in “expressionist” styles had waned in 1924-1925. By midpoint in the decade, German audiences, especially those audiences in Berlin, were ready to accept new directions in drama. The first important direction was characterized by Neue Sachlichkeit—New Objectivity or “new matter-of-factness.” Carl Zuckmayer led this new direction with folksy comedies such as Der fröhliche Weinberg (1925) and Katerina Knie (1928); these plays were actually a “neorealistic” return to formats previously employed by Gerhart Hauptmann and Johann Nestroy Bertolt Brecht. Zuckmayer’s masterpiece of the Weimar period was Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (pr., pb. 1931; The Captain of Köpenick, 1932), a comedy that captured the authoritarian, paternalistic spirit of Wilhelminian Germany and then made ludicrous fun of it. Bertolt Brecht led the second direction in German playwriting during the Weimar Republic, a direction characterized by tendentiousness and an aggressive stance toward the capitalist system. His best plays of this period are Mann ist Mann (pr. 1926; A Man’s a Man, 1961) and the well-known Die dreigroschen Oper (pr. 1928; The Threepenny Opera, 1949), which was based on John Gay’s popular The Beggar’s Opera of 1728. These plays espoused a specific political and socially critical viewpoint, and the direction Brecht took with them realized firmest definition in Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or didactic plays, of which Die Massnahme (pr. 1930; The Measures Taken, 1960) is probably the best. The direction Bruckner took in the writing of his plays falls somewhere between Zuckmayer and Brecht; while his plays are socially conscious (like Brecht’s), they also have a certain commercial appeal, and though they may have a sensational impact in performance, they also possess (like the plays of Zuckmayer) a highly individual and compassionate vision of the human condition.

Bruckner’s plays were extremely popular during the Weimar period, but their popularity alone does not explain Bruckner’s significance and achievements. His plays were significant because they treated the tormented drama that unfolded within the human psyche as the play itself progressed. A similar concern for the individual psyche was evinced in the earlier, expressionist plays, but Bruckner’s plays differ from expressionist works in that the viewpoint of the plays is not nearly so distorted or subjective. Bruckner may borrow some linguistic techniques that resembled the expressionists, but his language is mainly characterized by its theatricality and by its effectiveness in performance. Many actors and directors rose to prominence while working on Bruckner’s plays, and the playwright’s sure sense of what “worked” in the theater is perhaps his most noteworthy trademark.

Biography

Ferdinand Bruckner was born Theodor Tagger on August 26, 1891, in Vienna, Austria. His father was a banker from Vienna, and his mother was French, although she herself had been born in Constantinople. The family ancestors on the father’s side were Jewish, and they had been forced to leave Spain, the country of their origin. They subsequently settled in Bulgaria. Bruckner felt an allegiance to France and to the French language, and he mastered French at an early age, primarily as a result of his mother’s influence. His home city, however, was Vienna; there he received most of his schooling, although he also attended schools in Graz and in Berlin. His first language, therefore, was German—even though he attributed to his mother and her interest in French literature his own interest in literary creativity. His mother also seems to have had a major impact on his work as a playwright, for most of his plays portray females as figures central to the action, and many of these figures seem to possess an energy unmatched by the males.

Bruckner also had an interest in music, and after his school graduation in 1909, he studied at the Paris Conservatory. His first published writings, in fact, were essays on composers such as Georges Bizet and Hugo Wolff. In 1911 Bruckner moved to Berlin to attend business school and also to study music with the composer Franz Streker. In 1913 he matriculated at the University of Vienna to study German philology and music history. He ceased formal study in 1914 and in that year joined the German military forces; he was released from active duty in 1915 as a result of a lung ailment.

Bruckner’s experience in the military, brief though it was, served nevertheless to provoke a strong antiwar sentiment in his writing. By this time he had published pacifist essays and poems, and the wartime experience fixed in his own mind his identity as a writer. He spent the rest of the war years writing, and in 1917 he founded the literary magazine Marsyas. In addition to publishing this bimonthly periodical, Bruckner devoted his time to reading Søren Kierkegaard and Blaise Pascal, and to forming his own literary style. His most noteworthy effort during this period was a novella titled Die Vollendungs eines Herzens (1917), which had six printings and made Bruckner, then using his real name, Theodor Tagger, a well-known author throughout the German-speaking world.

In 1920 Bruckner reached a turning point in his career, for in that year he began to devote himself solely to writing for the theater. The period from 1920 to 1933 was remarkable for the German theater generally, for the level of achievement during those years has rarely been matched at any other time anywhere. Bruckner’s productivity and talent also seemed to blossom during those years. In 1920 he wrote two comedies, Harry and Annette, which he subsequently incorporated under the title 1920: Oder, Die Komödie vom Untergang der Welt. These plays were not overwhelmingly successful, but they did receive productions throughout Germany and Austria. In 1923, Bruckner became director of the Renaissance Theatre, a former cinema on Hardenburg Strasse in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin. There he learned at first hand the workings of successful theater. He was a careful observer of what made plays effective with audiences, for in 1924 he wrote Pains of Youth, a play that was the first of three plays that were astoundingly popular. The other plays were The Criminals and Elizabeth of England, and each of them Bruckner wrote under the name of Ferdinand Bruckner. What helped fuel the controversies surrounding Pains of Youth and The Criminals was the mystery surrounding the identity of their author. Bruckner had chosen his pseudonym as an homage to the great nineteenth century Austrian playwright and actor Ferdinand Raimund and the Austrian composer he so greatly admired, Anton Bruckner.

The playwright continued to write plays under his pseudonym for the remainder of his career, but he never again achieved the success that he had enjoyed with the aforementioned trio of plays. He emigrated to France in 1933, and from there departed for the United States in 1936; he subsequently became a United States citizen. Perhaps his most noteworthy achievement of the postwar period is a result of his life in the United States, for in 1949 he composed the translation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949), which became an extraordinary triumph on German-language stages throughout the 1950’s. Bruckner died on December 5, 1958, in West Berlin at the age of sixty-seven, from complications that had aggravated his lung condition.

Analysis

Ferdinand Bruckner wrote twenty-six plays during a career that spanned four decades, but the plays on which his reputation rests are three that premiered in German theaters during a four-year period from 1926 to 1930. Pains of Youth, which had its world premiere in Hamburg in 1926, The Criminals (Berlin, 1928), and Elizabeth of England (Berlin, 1930) proved to be three of the most popular plays ever performed on stages in Weimar Germany. When World War II was over, their popularity resumed, and they sometimes still appear on German stages. They are also performed in Austria and in German-speaking Switzerland. Their popularity may be in part the result of the fact that they have served as “star vehicles” for many actors and actresses. They are popular as well because they provide multifaceted, well-developed roles for women. More than anything else, however, these plays provide startlingly good theater; their author was capable of imbuing them with an energy that intrigued and aroused audiences and that stimulated performers to do their best work.

Pains of Youth

The first of these plays, Pains of Youth, opened at the Hamburg Kammerspiele on October 17, 1926. The “illness of youth” referred to in the title can be variously interpreted. It may be a malady otherwise known as unrequited love, for there are numerous instances in the play of frustrated passion. It may be a kind of exhaustion that has set in after much studying: The play is set in a student rooming house, and the lead character, Marie, is about to complete her final examinations. It is most likely, however, that the “illness” of the title is a feeling of displacement and a lack of firm identity among the characters. Bruckner here portrayed the first generation to come of age in Germany after World War I, and that generation, in his dramatic view, had suffered mightily in the wake of the wholesale collapse of German society. These young people have no values; they exploit one another; they steal from one another; they attempt to murder one another; they commit suicide.

A play that dealt with the “problems of youth” was nothing new. That genre had received its best-known definition in Frühlings Erwachen (pb. 1891; Spring’s Awakening, 1960) by Frank Wedekind in 1891, and Bruckner is Wedekind’s debtor in Pains of Youth. The characters may be somewhat older than their counterparts in the Wedekind play, yet they still speak in that peculiar idiom called aneinandervorbeireden (“speaking past one another”) that Wedekind originated. This type of speech creates a feeling of isolation and terrible longing in each character, while at the same time there is a sensation of the characters’ willful desire to avoid one another. They do not really talk to one another; they speak “past” one another. They also use childish expressions which have no literal meaning; for example, the expression “Thalatala!” is used in Pains of Youth to express triumph or elation, much in the way a child might disclose naïve delight. One major and particularly meaningful difference between Pains of Youth and Spring’s Awakening is that while the children in the Wedekind play use language in an attempt to sound grown up, the young adults in the Bruckner play use it to sound like children. The Countess Desiree is especially fond of sounding like a little girl; she tries to convince Marie at one point to come to bed with her just as the countess and her sister Marion had done as children. Later, when Marie agrees to sleep with the countess, they both jabber like schoolgirls.

The Countess Desiree represents one level of society in Pains of Youth; that level is the displaced nobility, nearly all of whom lost their status under the republican regime. Another level represented in the play is that of the medical student Marie, whose intelligence and hard work have brought her to the end of her medical studies after only ten semesters. She stems from hardy, upper-middle class stock. Irene is another student, but her father is a worker. Finally, there is Lucy the maid, who seems willing to be exploited by a male character named Freder. Freder succeeds in turning Lucy into a prostitute—presumably so that she will support his continued medical studies, although Freder has been studying for at least the past ten years. Other male characters include Petrell and Alt, who meander in and out of the action and serve mainly as love interests for the women. The overall character makeup of the play, however, serves to illustrate a cross section of society, and the picture that emerges from this play is indeed frightening. It portrays a society decaying from within, a society lacking all direction and motivation.

Bruckner employed the motif of youth, therefore, to make a larger social statement. These young people are not in a state of rebellion; rather, they are in a kind of daze. They are searching for no meaning or values. They are satisfied instead with any kind of momentary gratification which will allow them an escape from their despair.

The playwright also succeeded in creating fully dimensional personages on the stage, which no doubt contributed to the play’s success throughout Germany. When the play first opened in Hamburg under Miriam Horowitz’s direction, word soon spread about a controversial new play about students that dealt with homosexuality, drug abuse, and narcissism. Abetting the play’s notoriety was the fact that no one had ever heard of the playwright Ferdinand Bruckner. The program in Hamburg described him as “a Viennese physician living abroad with a patient.” Bruckner used this bit of subterfuge because as Theodor Tagger, he was still engaged as director of the Renaissance Theatre in Berlin, and he was contractually obligated there. He may also have felt somewhat insecure about his efforts as a playwright in 1926; he did not reveal his pseudonym even to his wife after Pains of Youth had become a success. The mystery of the playwright’s true identity grew as Berlin audiences awaited the opening of the play at the Renaissance Theatre on April 26, 1928, under the direction of Gustav Hartung. Ironically, Theodor Tagger was no longer the director of the theater when Pains of Youth opened. He had departed for the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in 1927, and probably viewed with much amusement and pleasure the tremendously positive reception accorded the play by both critics and audiences in Berlin.

One critic asserted that the play was so popular because the playwright attempted to fuse the theatralisch with the moralisch, and such attempts had long been popular among the Germans; the dramas of Sturm und Drang in the eighteenth century had set the precedent. Another critic was closer to the mark when he stated that the play afforded actors great opportunities for bravura performances, and he singled out Hilde Koerber as Lucy the maid; that role called for the performer’s understanding of a personality so self-sacrificing that it must become “the stuff of which great heroines and great whores are made.” Such performances characterized the entire production and undoubtedly added to the play’s success.

The Criminals

Bravura acting performances also contributed to the success of The Criminals later that same year, when it made its world premiere at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin under the direction of Heinz Hilpert. Lucie Hoeflich, Gustaf Gründgens, and Hans Albers headed the cast, and the combined talents of these theater artists helped to create a production that was more popular and created even more publicity than did Pains of Youth. The playwright’s identity continued to remain a mystery, and there were even instances of persons claiming to be Ferdinand Bruckner who presented themselves at newspaper offices across the city. Newspapers sent reporters searching through membership files of Viennese medical associations in the hope of turning up a physician who also had expertise in legal matters, for just as some observers viewed Pains of Youth as a veiled attack on medical education practices in Germany, so others viewed The Criminals as an attack on the German judicial system.

As he had done in Pains of Youth, Bruckner presented in The Criminals a cross section of society; members of this society included fallen aristocrats, sturdy burghers, and lower-class indigents who in act 2 confront criminal charges lodged against them in court. The judges in these various courts of law seem to be caricatures out of plays by Wedekind and another playwright whom Bruckner greatly admired, Carl Sternheim. The Criminals, however, lacks the satiric tone of a Sternheim play, and if it owes anything in its content to precedents in German drama, it is to Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Ratten (pr., pb. 1911; The Rats, 1929), which presented criminals as extraordinary figures, almost as if they formed a dynamic alternative to the static, self-satisfied society of Wilhelminian Germany. Bruckner presented a portrait of criminality within the Weimar Republic, and the criminals there form no alternative but instead reveal the numerous shortcomings of the justice system in the new Republic. Most of the characters in The Criminals, in fact, are not criminals at all, but merely victims of criminal circumstance who get caught in the wheels of justice and in the process are destroyed.

Bruckner’s suggested staging of The Criminals attracted as much attention as its content. He called for a stage divided into three vertical levels, with each level in turn divided into various compartments. The result was a setting that isolated the characters in their environments, in which each was inclined to reveal some deeply personal attribute, longing, or perversion. Scenes transpired in rapid-fire order, as the stage lighting focused intermittently on one compartment and then another. Unit sets such as this, using lighting to focus on the action, were nothing new, either. Erwin Piscator had employed a unit set a year earlier in Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, wir leben! (pr., pb. 1927; Hoppla! Such Is Life!, 1928), and Piscator had indeed employed variations of the technique in many of his other productions. The Simultanbühne, or simultaneous setting, dated at least from Johann Nestroy’s Zu ebener Erde und im ersten Stock: Oder, Die Launen des Glücks, which premiered in Vienna in 1835. That Bruckner employed a simultaneous, compartmentalized setting to portray both the domestic and the courtroom scenes was innovative, however, and that some of the court decisions seemed simultaneously to contradict each other pointed out to audiences the contradictory, inconsistent nature of the justice system. A totally innocent youth, for example, was convicted of perjury, while the extortionist Schimmelweiss was set free.

Bruckner was also able to improve his skills as a composer of realistic dialogue in The Criminals. He alternated the street jargon of the younger characters with the utterances of the more educated characters, and the contrast became even more striking in act 2, when the playwright employed legalistic parlance in the mouths of the lawyers and judges. The play’s strongest aspect, however, was once again the roles offered to actors. Hans Albers played Tunichtgut (“Good-for-Nothing”), and critics generally agreed that his performance alone was worth the price of admission. Other performers, such as Lucie Hoeflich as the lovesick and insanely jealous Ernestine, received praise for portrayals of “criminals of love.” Some critics condemned the play as a slander against the state; it was so controversial in Bavaria that it was banned there from public performance. In Munich, the capital of Bavaria, authorities permitted performances only before invited audiences. Despite the controversy—or perhaps because of it—Bruckner was awarded the Kleist Prize for Best Play in 1928 for The Criminals.

Die Kreatur

Bruckner was by this time extremely well-known throughout the German-speaking world; Pains of Youth and The Criminals both played in every major theater to packed houses. Furthermore Bruckner’s true identity was by this time well-known, for the playwright had been engaged by Max Reinhardt to compose new plays. Even in the late 1920’s Reinhardt was the great theatrical impresario of Berlin. Bruckner wrote Die Kreatur for Reinhardt, and Reinhardt himself staged it at the Komödie Theatre in Berlin. The play was not at all well received, but Bruckner’s next effort for Reinhardt proved to be his most popular success ever, and in fact it became so popular that it made Bruckner known in many non-German-speaking theatrical circles.

Elizabeth of England

The play was Elizabeth of England, and with it Bruckner attempted to write a historical play with a psychological emphasis, paying little attention to “the sweep of history” or to the profound impact of historical events on succeeding generations. Friedrich Schiller had established such precedents for plays with historical figures, and he himself had written in 1800 a superb play featuring Elizabeth I of England, which he titled Maria Stuart (English translation, 1801). Bruckner consciously rejected Schiller’s precedent and elected instead to follow the example of Franz Grillparzer, whose historical plays, such as Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (pr., pb. 1872; Family Strife in Habsburg, 1949), focus on the internal struggle of the characters. The character of Elizabeth, for example, is portrayed as one with no firm sense of royal leadership, and she wavers back and forth on the war issue. She even seems at times to be a kind of naïve schoolgirl forced to choose among members of her privy council for companionship at a high school dance. King Philip of Spain, whose character acts as a dramatic counterweight, is in contradistinction zealously decisive, and he is intent on punishing Elizabeth and all English Protestants who deviate from the “true path” of Holy Mother Church. His war against England was a result, in this play, of his religious fervor and his view of the war as a crusade.

The play is thus one built on contrasts: the Jesuits of faith on one side of the stage, the Puritans of reason on the other; in Spain, an overflow of passion, and in England a restraint of passion; and in Philip’s court, a sense of security, in Elizabeth’s, a sense of skepticism. These contrasts Bruckner embodied on the stage as he had done in The Criminals, and as he had done in that play, he employed the simultaneous setting. On stage left was located the court of Philip, and stage right found Elizabeth and her privy council. In between these courtly scenes were episodes involving Elizabeth and Essex, but those episodes served only as romantic interludes. The real action of the play centers on the issue of political leadership, and therefore the character of Philip, though he has far fewer lines, assumed a stature in dramatic and theatrical importance every bit as substantial as Elizabeth’s. Political leadership was an issue very much in question during the years of this play’s performance in the Weimar Republic, and Bruckner no doubt wished to submit this issue for debate.

The division of the stage into “English” and “Spanish” camps reached its climax in the “confessional scene,” in which Philip and his advisers pray to their God for victory, while Elizabeth and hers pray to theirs for the same. Ornate, atmospheric organ music unified the diversity of the simultaneous setting, and director Heinz Hilpert used such devices, as he had done in The Criminals, to integrate action, character, theme, and setting within a unified whole. As he had also done in The Criminals, the director elicited superb performances from his cast. Gustaf Gründgens gave a disciplined, hard-edged rendition of Sir Francis Bacon; Agnes Straub played Elizabeth in a role that must be “sensed,” in the words of one critic. The actress playing this part must have a strong personality with which to infuse the role, for the role itself remains a bare outline. The same may be said of Philip, for he essentially speaks only in aphorisms. Hilpert was extremely fortunate to have Werner Krauss in this role, and Krauss had distinguished himself previously in dozens of other Berlin productions. Philip, however, became his masterpiece; he turned the role, said one critic, into “a Baroque monument.”

Later Plays

Never again was Bruckner able to create roles like Philip, Elizabeth, Ernestine, Tunichtgut, Marie, Countess Desiree, or Lucy the maid. His subsequent playwriting efforts were interesting—such as Timon, a treatment of William Shakespeare’s The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater (pr., pb. 1678), and Races, an overtly political play that attacked Nazi ideology. By 1933, Nazi ideology was firmly in place, and Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels swiftly began to turn the German theater into a platform for the state. Bruckner abhorred the Nazis, and he left Germany in 1933. Unlike his counterparts Carl Zuckmayer and Bertolt Brecht, Bruckner found himself unable to continue effective playwriting in exile, and his plays written while in France and in the United States lack any of the theatrical effectiveness which had characterized his earlier and most exemplary work.

Biliography

Collins, Scott. “Evidence Room’s Swell Falters.” Review of Swell by Ferdinand Bruckner. Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1995, p. 29. This review of Swell, an adaptation of Bruckner’s Pains of Youth, performed by the Evidence Room in Culver City, California, criticized Director Bart DeLorenzo’s adaptation of the work.

Isherwood, Charles. Review of Race by Ferdinand Bruckner. Variety, February 26-March 4, 2001, p. 52. Review of a performance of Race by the Classic Stage Company in New York. Analyzes the play and its relevance to modern audiences.