Ludwig Anzengruber

• Born: November 29, 1839
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: December 10, 1889
• Place of death: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)

Other Literary Forms

Ludwig Anzengruber’s literary reputation rests on his plays, but he also produced a prodigious quantity of prose, including two novels, Der Schandfleck (1877) and Der Sternsteinhof (1885); numerous novellas and short stories about village life, which are often prose sketches for his plays and which he called “Dorfgaenge”; many calender tales that use the figure of “Steinklopferhans” from his play Die Kreuzelschreiber as the focal character; and many short satiric and lyric works written to support the various magazines, notably Figaro, for which he served as editor. The novel Der Sternsteinhof is often considered Anzengruber’s literary masterpiece.

Achievements

Ludwig Anzengruber was the greatest and also the last exponent of the Austrian folk play . His social and educational background did not favor his becoming a playwright for the leading highbrow theater of the time, the Burgtheater in Vienna. His thorough acquaintance with the farces and melodramas of the traveling theater, his genuine interest in common people, and his desire to contribute to the education of the lower classes led him naturally to take up and to improve on the Viennese folk play and the Austrian dialect drama. Anzengruber was appalled by the lack of intellectual honesty and by the absence of any contemporary scientific, social, or political material in the plays that were performed for the lower classes in the Viennese folk theaters. This was at a time when the very fabric of Austrian society was threatened by the conflicts resulting from the reaction to the 1848 revolution. In a time of strict censorship, the church and the stage were the only places where people could meet in large numbers and hope to find the guidance and the answers that the partisan daily press could not provide. Unfortunately, the established church, as Anzengruber points out in his first play, Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld, could not be trusted to furnish honest answers, for the church hierarchy was desperately trying to reestablish its political power, which had been severely reduced during the reign of Joseph II. The Burgtheater was content to present the “classics,” an easy way to preserve its highbrow reputation and to stay clear of the threatening pen of the censor. “No one would come forth,” Anzengruber wrote to a friend in 1876, “who would confront his time from the stage, and someone had to do it—thus I had to be the one!”

In order to achieve this self-proclaimed mission, Anzengruber instinctively and effectively picked up the popular Viennese folk play, mainly the farce, of Johann Nestroyand Ferdinand Raimund. Leaving its characteristic melodramatic form (frequent songs and musical interludes) intact, he turned its stereotyped characters into fully developed human beings. In addition, he confronted these characters with contemporary problems, rather than with the clichéd intrigues of the farce, and made them speak the dialect of the inhabitants of the Viennese suburbs and of the Austrian rural population.

During his lifetime, Anzengruber’s plays were not deemed worthy of performance at the Burgtheater—the contemporary problem play was not suitable company for the classics. Indeed, Anzengruber’s literary reputation was more quickly and more firmly established in Germany and in Scandinavia than in his native Austria. By turning the Viennese farce and the Austrian regional folk play into the realistic problem play, Anzengruber came to represent an Austrian counterpart to Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann. He raised a form considered fit only for the suburban and provincial theaters to a level that made it finally acceptable for the Burgtheater. This new status for the folk play was synonymous with its demise: Once accepted at the leading theater, the folk play, transformed into a modern problem play, could not be considered a Volksstück any longer. Anzengruber thus represents both the zenith and the end of the Austrian folk play. No one would even consider calling the plays of more contemporary playwrights such as Wolfgang Bauer or Peter Turrini Volksstück, although many of their plays use the characters, the situations, and the language of the traditional Austrian folk play.

Biography

Ludwig Anzengruber was born in Vienna on November 29, 1839. His father had moved to Vienna from his parents’ farm to become a minor official in the Imperial civil service. At the same time, he tried his hand as a playwright and even had one of his iambic plays performed with moderate success. Anzengruber was keenly aware of his father’s poetic and dramatic attempts, as well as of the fact that the elder Anzengruber never achieved any financial success with his pen. Anzengruber’s early, mostly unpublished literary work refers frequently to his father’s literary talent and his own hope to follow in his father’s footsteps.

After the early death of his father, Anzengruber grew up in the care of his mother and his grandmother. It was particularly the mother who influenced the career of the young man; she allowed him to terminate his schooling and to take up painting and engraving for a short time, and later, after a brief apprenticeship in a bookstore, to try himself as an actor. So strong was his mother’s devotion that she gave up her small business to accompany her son on all his theatrical journeys through the provinces of the Austrian Empire. Many of Anzengruber’s plays have at their center the figure of the self-sacrificing and unfalteringly supportive mother; this focus is the dramatist’s tribute to the woman who helped him through the bitter times of his early career and who died shortly after Anzengruber’s first dramatic success.

Anzengruber had neither talent nor success as an actor: “I had little luck as an actor, and as a writer—I was diligently writing all the while—I had none.” His constant contact with the stage, however lowly, provided him with a thorough knowledge of dramatic and theatrical technique, and the long days spent on the road allowed him considerable time for writing, but none of his early plays, including several librettos, brought him any financial or artistic success. At that time, when he and his mother had to pawn most of their meager possessions simply to survive, Anzengruber turned to the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. He abandoned his belief in God, in any form of organized religion, and in the idea of Providence and of an afterlife. Anzengruber’s plays, particularly his early ones, are dramatizations of Feuerbach’s naturalistic-humanistic ethic: There is no life after death, they assert. Anzengruber, however, contrary to the traditional Viennese carpe diem attitude derived from this conclusion, added the injunction that one should live this life honestly, in harmony with nature, and with love and respect for one’s fellow beings and for all living creatures.

In 1869, a relative was able to procure for Anzengruber a minor clerical position with the Viennese police. Most of his time was spent issuing certificates of good conduct, an activity that gave him an opportunity to study human character and to gain insight into a variety of interesting lives. At the time he took up his new position, he had already finished the manuscript of Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld and, once more encouraged by his mother, submitted it to the Theater an der Wien in 1870. The play was immediately successful, and, after ten hard years, Anzengruber’s dramatic apprenticeship had come to an end.

With his reputation as a dramatist firmly established, Anzengruber continued his literary output at an amazing rate until his death. Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld was followed by The Farmer Forsworn, then by his first comedy, Die Kreuzelschreiber. Although his main creative period as a dramatist spanned the years between 1870 and 1877, he wrote an average of two plays per year until his death.

Although Anzengruber gained recognition in Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, and even in the United States—Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld was performed as early as 1872 in Detroit—he was never able to achieve the large-scale popular success that would have allowed him to live comfortably. Thus, the playwright had to supplement his income with minor literary and journalistic hackwork until his death in 1889. The public, and therefore the producers, wanted to be entertained rather than educated, and they found this entertainment in the increasingly popular operetta rather than in Anzengruber’s naturalistic folk plays. Even after having been awarded several prestigious literary prizes, the playwright was bitter about his lack of popular appeal: “You find me a minor producer in the field of journalism and prose,” he writes in a letter, “but as concerns the dramatist, you find him quite discouraged.” His dramatic work in his later years was not on the same level as that of his early creative period, and the founding of the Anzengruber Theater in 1889 was somewhat of an irony.

The dissolution of his unhappy marriage of sixteen years added to Anzengruber’s depression. Discouraged, overworked, and in increasingly poor health, he died in Vienna on December 10, 1889. As is frequently the case, popular recognition came soon after his death. Between 1900 and 1915, there were close to fifty-five hundred performances of Anzengruber’s plays on German and Austrian stages, and his plays continue to be regular fare on both the highbrow and the popular stages of the German-speaking countries.

Analysis

During Ludwig Anzengruber’s formative years as a dramatist, Austria was in the grip of a cultural revolution. There was a strong reaction to the enlightened rule of Emperor Joseph II and to the policies of his circle of humanistic advisers, which had led to the revolution of March, 1848. As a consequence, there was a constant battle fought between those who would reaffirm and continue those liberal-republican policies and those who wanted a return to absolutism, strengthened by a renewed treaty between the Roman Catholic Church and the state. The intellectual exponents of this battle formed political parties and rallied around highly partisan publications, whereas the Church attempted to mobilize the still-uneducated rural population to support its conservative policies, which culminated in the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870.

Anzengruber witnessed this manipulation of the rural population with great misgiving. He believed that a group of people who had not been given the chance to acquire an understanding of the issues involved—highly complex theological issues, such as the infallibility of the pope, the celibacy of priests, and civil marriage—should not turn out to be the prime casualties of these political battles. Sympathetic to the common people both through his family background and his early experiences, he set out to “confront his time from the stage” in a way and in words that the common people could grasp. As Anzengruber intended to educate the common people, he could not hope to achieve his goal by writing plays for the Burgtheater, the stage that produced a classic repertory of William Shakespeare, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, as well as Franz Grillparzer and Friedrich Hebbel. Because the Burgtheater was under the personal protection and supervision of the Austrian emperor, its directors steered clear of all controversial subjects, except to support the prevailing official policies.

Anzengruber thus directed his early dramatic works at the suburban Viennese theaters, such as the Theater an der Wien, the Josefstädter Theater, and the Leopoldstädter Theater, which were the popular stages for the Volksstück, the popular play, mostly written in Viennese dialect. Anzengruber himself acknowledged the influence of Friedrich Kaiser, who had modified the very popular magical plays of Raimund and the caustic local farce of Nestroy into the bourgeois character play. The most attractive feature of the Volksstück was the couplet, a usually satiric vocal interlude, which served as emphatic commentary on the farcical action of the plays.

Anzengruber, whose bitter apprenticeship as an actor had made him painfully aware of what was effective and successful on the popular stage, shrewdly chose the form of the Volksstück, included popular elements of the rural tales of Eduard von Bauernfeld, and made them the vehicle for his early polemic plays.

Anzengruber contributed to the development of Austrian drama in several ways. He elevated the popular Austrian farce to the level of the serious problem play while retaining the ingredients that ensured the former’s popular appeal. The musical interludes, particularly the couplet, allowed him, at least for a while, to compete with the growing popularity of the French operetta while still being able to disseminate his liberal, anticlerical ideas and his popular version of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. His easy, nonlocalized use of the Austrian dialect makes him the dramatic equal of such renowned contemporaneous Austrian prose dialect writers as Peter Rosegger and Bauernfeld. The influence of his plays, with their description of the life of the Austrian rural population, can be seen in the work of later Austrian playwrights such as Karl Schönherr, Helmut Qualtinger, Wolfgang Bauer, and Peter Turrini.

Der Pfarrer von Kirchfield

Civil marriage and the question of the celibacy of Catholic priests are the main topics in Anzengruber’s first play, Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld. The protagonist is a sympathetic priest whose name, Hell (meaning bright, clear, luminous, in German), suggests his enlightened outlook: He is more interested in the spiritual well-being of the parishioners of the small rural community in his charge than in the finer points of dogma and canon law. Not surprisingly, the manner in which he interprets his duties as a priest incurs the displeasure both of his superiors and of his secular lord, Graf Finsterberg (again, the name is symbolic, meaning dark, gloomy, obscure). The simple people of Hell’s parish are confused about the new papal directives, and Hell has no answers to their naïve questions. His humanistic approach to his duties is turned against him by Finsterberg, who has discovered that Hell has fallen in love with a girl in his employ. After the priest, in contravention to directives, has blessed the marriage of a Catholic with a non-Catholic and has given a church burial to a suicide, Finsterberg makes him officiate at the marriage of the girl he secretly loves and then orders him before a church tribunal. Hell submits to this vindictive judgment and prevents his parishioners from reacting violently when they hear that they will lose their popular pastor.

Anzengruber’s discussion of church dogma is flawed, and many of his accusations against the clerics are unfounded and illogical, but he manages to create a powerful figure, which serves to enhance the popular appeal of the play. Here it is the character of Wurzelsepp, the simple, rural man who is turned misanthrope and atheist by his having been excommunicated for marrying a non-Catholic. It is he who discovers Hell’s secret love and brings about the priest’s downfall, but it is also he who is reconverted by Hell’s magnanimity when he asks the priest to grant a church burial to his mentally disturbed wife, who has killed herself. In a sense, the true main characters of the play are Wurzelsepp and his wife, the former changed into a misanthrope by the insensitive application of church dogma, the latter driven insane by the insupportable strain between her love for her faith and for her husband.

The success of the play, described by critics as the “most genuine popular play in years,” indicated that Anzengruber had chosen both the right subject matter and the appropriate form to reach his audience. In addition, the dramatist made his characters speak, not in the localized dialect of his rural Tyrolean setting, but in a supraregional conversational Austrian language, which allowed stages all over Germany and Austria to perform the play with only minor modifications.

The Farmer Forsworn

Anzengruber acknowledged Shakespeare as one of the few dramatists whom he had read and whom he emulated, particularly in his early plays. This influence is evident in his second play, The Farmer Forsworn, the main character of which is a villain in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593). Mathias Ferner has managed to gain control of his dead brother’s farm by destroying the latter’s will and by perjuring himself. The rightful heirs, Jakob and Vroni, his brother’s illegitimate children, had to leave their father’s farm, which is to belong to Ferner’s daughter Creszenz and her future husband, Toni, the son of the second-richest farmer of the area. Franz, Ferner’s son, is supposed to become a priest—Ferner thinks that this will, in part, atone for his own perjury—but he has studied agriculture instead. In the true tradition of the Austrian Baroque tragedy, Ferner, who believes himself safe, is brought to justice in the end. A letter, which he had believed lost and which contains proof of his perjury, is found by Vroni at her grandfather’s house. Ferner’s own son, Franz, prevents his father from gaining possession of the damaging document by force; Ferner, after apparently shooting and killing his son, finds refuge from a thunderstorm in the house of an old woman who is just about to tell her nieces the story of a farmer who has perjured himself and who has finally been taken away by the devil. Ferner, who cannot help but listen to the story, dies of remorse, shock, and fear. Vroni and Franz, Toni and Creszenz are married at the end of the play.

In the figure of Mathias Ferner, Anzengruber created a tragic figure of much greater dimensions than any of the characters in Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld. Abandoning topical subjects, he drew a powerful image of rural greed, but pointed out to his audience the fact that such figures were exceptional in the rural areas and that in the long run, truth, honesty, and selfless love would find at least poetic justice.

Der G’wissenswurm

Many of Anzengruber’s plays can be grouped into pairs—two plays dealing with related topics, one in comic and the other in tragic form. The Farmer Forsworn deals with the problem of rural greed, the question of the rights of illegitimate children, and the attempt to buy forgiveness for past sins in the somber form of the Baroque tragedy; Der G’wissenswurm, Anzengruber’s most frequently performed play, takes a lighthearted approach to the same subject.

Dusterer, Anzengruber’s version of Tartuffe, constantly reinforces farmer Grillhofer’s guilt feelings, stemming from an incident twenty-five years before, when he had driven Magdalen, a servant girl, from his farm after discovering that their illegitimate liaison was going to have consequences. Now, after a mild stroke and believing himself near death, Grillhofer finds the “worm” of his conscience stirred by his brother-in-law, Dusterer, who urges him to leave all his worldly possessions to his sister, Dusterer’s wife, and to move to the city so as to have constant masses read for the salvation of his soul. Grillhofer is about ready to take the rural Tartuffe’s advice, when he accidentally discovers the whereabouts of Magdalen. He finds that, far from having been ruined for life, she is a happily married shrew who gave up her illegitimate daughter soon after birth and does not even know what has become of the child. In the true tradition of comedy, the latter, a beautiful, vivacious girl, finds her way to her father’s farm and absolves him from any guilt; she even thanks him for having brought her into the world.

The play emphasizes Anzengruber’s anticlerical attitudes, albeit in comical form. God, the playwright asserts several times, has created human beings to enjoy life, and nobody should interfere with this enjoyment by trying to make people feel guilty for doing what is natural and enjoyable. The play is a rejection of the essentially ascetic Christian moral philosophy and reveals Anzengruber’s strong indebtedness to Feuerbach.

Die Kreuzelschreiber

Die Kreuzelschreiber, Anzengruber’s first comedy—it predates Der G’wissenswurm by two years—takes up all the topical themes of his first play, Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld, and deals with them in a lighthearted way. Clearly modeled after Aristophanes’ Lysistratē (411 b.c.e.; Lysistrata, 1837), the play is a satiric attack on the dogma of papal infallibility, the declaration of which increased already existing tensions between the church and state in Austria and Germany. The men of a small rural community have been persuaded to sign a petition in favor of a scholar who has come out against the new dogma—Anzengruber refers indirectly to Ignaz von Döllinger, a German theologian. All the older farmers put their name, or their “three crosses,” on the petition, but soon they have cause to regret their action, as their wives are incited by the parish priest to refuse themselves to the men until the latter withdraw their signatures and repent for their sinful behavior by going on a pilgrimage to Rome.

After the usual comic complications, a tragic note enters, as the old farmer Brenninger is driven to suicide by the disturbance of his marriage. Now Steinklopferhans, Anzengruber’s most famous dramatis persona, intervenes to settle the dispute. He arranges for the men to leave for Rome, but at the elaborate farewell ceremony, the wives discover to their chagrin that all the young girls of the village have decided to go along on the pilgrimage. In the end, jealousy, love, and common sense prove to be stronger than dogma.

Die Kreuzelschreiber succeeds in discussing a difficult theological question in a way that points out to the audience the problems of individual action in the face of abstract theological theory. It does so in a manner that is neither sententious nor ignorant of the real problems created for naïve people by such dogma. Steinklopferhans, the honest rural philosopher, has arrived at his truths not by studying dogma but by contemplating his own personal experience and by evaluating his relationship to nature and to other people. Near despair and death in his lonely quarry—the scene recalls an episode in Anzengruber’s life, when he almost succumbed to typhoid fever—Steinklopferhans has his “epiphany.” Suddenly, in an astonishing parallel to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” episode, he becomes aware of the only “dogma” that is to have validity for his life: “Nothing can happen to me! I am part of all this and all this is part of me! Nothing bad can ever happen to me!” Steinklopferhans is Anzengruber’s spokesperson, articulating a philosophy modeled closely after Feuerbach’s naturalist-humanist ideas, which, as noted above, inform Anzengruber’s entire dramatic work.

The Fourth Commandment

For Anzengruber, as for Schiller, the stage was a “moral institution” more than a place for entertainment. Anzengruber is most successful in his comedies, however, which strike a delicate balance between instruction and entertainment. Thus, The Fourth Commandment, widely considered his dramatic masterpiece, lacks the dimension that gained for Die Kreuzelschreiber and Der G’wissenswurm both critical acclaim and popular success.

The Fourth Commandment is a social problem play that demonstrates Anzengruber’s growing interest in naturalism, which emphasized the influence of milieu and heredity on the human character. The play centers on two Viennese families. In an ironic inversion of the Fourth Commandment, the well-to-do Hutterers force their daughter into a catastrophic marriage, while the working-class Schalanters contribute to their son’s death in front of a firing squad and their daughter’s becoming a prostitute. Only Eduard, from a family of honest and upright gardeners who sacrifice everything to allow him the necessary schooling, turns into a decent human being. As a priest, he is called on to be at Martin Schalanter’s side when the latter is preparing to face the firing squad. In a moving final scene, Eduard asks the condemned man to ask his parents for forgiveness and reminds him of his duties according to the Fourth Commandment. In anticipation of the more strictly naturalist plays of Karl Schönherr and Hauptmann, Anzengruber has Martin reject this dogmatic advice: “My dear Eduard, you have no problems, you do not know that for many children the biggest disaster is to be brought up by their parents. You teach the children in school to honor their father and mother, but you should also tell the parents from your pulpit that they should be sure to lead their lives to deserve that honor.”

Bibliography

Howe, Patricia. “End of a Line: Anzengruber and the Viennese Stage.” In Viennese Popular Theatre: A Symposium, edited by W. E. Yates and John R. P. McKenzie. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1985. This essay, from a collection on Viennese popular theater, examines Anzengruber’s role in ending this genre.

Jones, Calvin N. “Ludwig Anzengruber.” In Nineteenth Century German Writers, 1841-1900, edited by James Hardin and Siegfried Mews. Vol. 129 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1993. A concise look at Anzenburger’s life and works.

Jones, Calvin N. “Poetry or Realism: Ludwig Anzengruber’s Die Kreuzelschreiber.” In Negation and Utopia: The German Volksstück from Raimund to Kroetz. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. A discussion of Anzengruber’s Die Kreuzelschreiber.

Jones, Calvin N. “Variations on a Stereotype: The Farmer in the Nineteenth Century Volkskomëdie.” Maske und Kothurn 27, nos. 2-3 (1981): 155-162. A close look at farmer characters in the popular folk comedies of Austria.

Kuhn, Anna K., and Barbara D. Wright, eds. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994. A collection of essays that examines nineteenth and twentieth century Austrian and German drama. Bibliography and index.