Carl Zuckmayer

• Born: December 27, 1896
• Birthplace: Nackenheim, Germany
• Died: January 18, 1977
• Place of death: Visp, Switzerland

Other Literary Forms

Carl Zuckmayer’s collected works, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, 1920-1975 (1976), consists of ten volumes. In addition to his plays, Zuckmayer’s works include the novel Salwàre (1936; The Moon in the South, 1937), numerous short stories and poems, as well as two volumes of an autobiographical nature—Pro Domo (1938) and Als wärs ein Stück von mir (1969; A Part of Myself: Portrait of an Epoch, 1970). He also wrote several film scripts and adaptations of American plays for the German stage.

Achievements

The mention of Carl Zuckmayer’s name among reasonably educated people in the German-speaking countries invariably conjures up a number of major dramatic characters, as well as the names of great actors and actresses who embodied these characters on the stage and on the screen. People think of Curt Jürgens as Schinderhannes and as the Devil’s General, of Werner Krauss as the Captain of Köpenick, and of Paula Wessely as Barbara Blomberg. Zuckmayer’s major plays had a tremendous popular appeal. He created a dramatic universe that has become part of the cultural consciousness of generations of German-speaking people. His dramatic œuvre depicts at least three distinct periods of twentieth century German history: the end of the Wilhelminian Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. In addition to mirroring the modern age in Germany, he has written a number of remarkable historical plays that have their settings in other centuries and in other countries. Zuckmayer’s autobiographical work A Part of Myself is appropriately subtitled: It is indeed a fascinating “Portrait of an Epoch.”

Biography

Carl Zuckmayer was born on December 27, 1896, in the village of Nackenheim in the Rhenish Hesse district, where his father owned and operated a small factory. In 1900, his family moved to Mainz, a city that then had some eighty-four thousand inhabitants. Zuckmayer attended the Humanistische Gymnasium (academic high school) there from 1903 to 1914. When World War I broke out, he enlisted as a volunteer and attained the rank of lieutenant by the end of the war. The war years were of paramount importance for his development as a man and as an artist. His fellow soldiers came from all regions of Germany and from all social classes. The future writer of realistic dramas took careful note of their various dialects and modes of expression. He also had time to read widely. This reading, together with his firsthand experience of the war, led him to adopt an idealistic, pacifist worldview. In 1917, he published several poems in Die Aktion, a pacifist-socialist weekly.

After the war, he served briefly on the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Mainz and on the Revolutionary Students’ Council of the University of Frankfurt. During 1919 and 1920, he studied economics, philosophy, botany, and biology at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg. While in Frankfurt, he was in contact with young socialists and pacifists, notably with Carlo Mierendorff, who was the editor of Das Tribunal, a periodical that advocated comprehensive social reforms. Zuckmayer joined such writers as Kasimir Edschmid and Theodor Däubler in contributing to Das Tribunal. At the same time, he became acquainted with the expressionist dramas of Fritz von Unruh and Walter Hasenclever, which were then performed in Frankfurt. Zuckmayer’s political and philosophical thinking was influenced by his socialist and pacifist friends, and in his writing he emulated the practitioners of expressionism. In 1920, his first drama, entitled Kreuzweg, had its premiere in Berlin. It consisted of a series of expressionistic outpourings about love and death that were poorly related to a sort of plot involving some peasants who revolt against their feudal lord. The play was lambasted by the critics and closed after three performances; for a while Zuckmayer was forced to eke out a living as a freelance writer and as a singer in cabarets, along with a variety of other jobs.

In 1922, Zuckmayer’s friend Kurt Elwenspoek, the newly appointed director of the theater in Kiel, offered him a job as Dramaturg (literary adviser). The two friends shocked and infuriated the conservative burghers of Kiel by staging plays by such avant-garde authors as Georg Büchner, Ernst Barlach, August Strindberg, and Frank Wedekind. When they presented Terence’s erotic comedy Eunuchus (161 b.c.e.; The Eunuch, 1598) in a daring and provocative adaptation by Zuckmayer, both he and Elwenspoek were fired on the spot, and the theater was closed by the police. During the 1924-1925 season, Zuckmayer and Bertolt Brechtwere employed as Dramaturgen by the prestigious Deutsches Theater in Berlin. At that time, Zuckmayer was more concerned with society and politics than was Brecht, who was then in his expressionist phase and had become known for such plays as Baal (wr. 1918, pb. 1922; English translation, 1963) and Im Dickicht der Städte (pr. 1923; In the Jungle of Cities, 1961). It was partly under Brecht’s influence that Zuckmayer wrote his second play in an expressionist vein, entitled Pankraz erwacht. It was also a failure, and the eminent critic Alfred Kerr suggested that both the play and its author ought to be forgotten. Fortunately, Kerr was quite wrong about the second part of his suggestion, because in the very same year, 1925, Zuckmayer’s comedy Der fröhliche Weinberg had its premiere in Berlin. It was a tremendous success and was shortly afterward performed in more than one hundred theaters. Also in 1925, Zuckmayer married the actress Alice Frank, née von Herdan. During the next several years, Zuckmayer enjoyed huge artistic and financial successes with his plays Schinderhannes (also based on Terence’s Eunuchus), Katharina Knie, and The Captain of Köpenick.

The latter also provoked numerous diatribes in the Nazi press, and in 1933 (the year that Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany), Zuckmayer moved to Austria, where he had purchased a country house in 1926. In 1938, when the Germans annexed Austria, Zuckmayer emigrated to Switzerland. His plays and books having been banned in Germany and Austria, his financial situation became precarious. In 1939, he was deprived of his German citizenship, and he moved to the United States. He was first a scriptwriter in Hollywood, then a lecturer at the dramatic workshop of the New School in New York, and starting in 1941, a farmer near Barnard, Vermont. Zuckmayer’s years in exile were difficult ones: He was cut off from his linguistic milieu and forced to devote most of his time to his chores as a farmer, and his literary output diminished to a trickle. It was precisely during this time of hardship and isolation, however, that he created one of his masterpieces: The Devil’s General was written during the period of 1943 to 1945 and had its premiere in Zurich in 1946.

Beginning after the play’s German premiere in 1947, Zuckmayer participated in numerous discussions with German students and other young people about the issues raised in the play. During the next ten years or so, he lived alternately in the United States and in Europe. In 1958, he took up permanent residence in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. During the last twenty years of his life, Zuckmayer wrote a number of plays and prose works, and he was showered with prizes and honors, including the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Great Austrian State Prize. He died in Visp, Switzerland, on January 18, 1977.

Analysis

Carl Zuckmayer’s apprenticeship in the theater during the early 1920’s and particularly the failure of Pankraz erwacht eventually led him to an important insight:

For the first time I recognized my limits. . . . I had neither the gift, nor intention of founding a new literary epoch, a new theatrical style, a new direction in art. . . . But I knew that a revitalized impact and revitalized values (eine neue Lebendigkeit der Wirkung und der Werte) can be achieved by human artistic means which transcend the limitations of time, which will never become obsolete. . . . I wanted to approach nature, life, and truth, without distancing myself from the demands of the day, from the burning subject-matter of my time.

Although Zuckmayer said that this statement was not intended as a “program” for his future dramatic production, the fact is that after Pankraz erwacht, he wrote only “realistic” dramas with plots structured according to Aristotelian principles, intended to inspire “pity and fear” in the audiences of serious dramas and to celebrate life with all its folly in comedies. One of the most important touchstones for the success or failure of a drama is the question of characterization and audience identification with the protagonists. Those plays that contain a fairly large number of full-bodied, “round” characters have the greatest effect on the audience. In Zuckmayer’s case, such characters are usually firmly rooted in regions he knew well, and they speak languages or dialects he knew well.

Der fröhliche Weinberg

A case in point is Der fröhliche Weinberg. This rollicking comedy is set in Rhenish Hesse, Zuckmayer’s home district. The time of the action is the fall of 1921 during the grape harvest. Jean Baptiste Gunderloch, a rich winegrower (and a widower), has resolved to give half of his vineyard and half of his other possessions to his daughter Klärchen as a dowry, to auction off the other half, and to live from the proceeds during his retirement. Klärchen is being wooed by a student named Knuzius, but she really loves Jochen Most, the owner of a freighter plying the Rhine. Gunderloch has set a condition that must be met before he will consent to Klärchen’s marriage to anyone: She must be pregnant by the man in question, and she must be involved in the matter “voluntarily and with pleasure.” In other words, Gunderloch wants to be sure of having a grandchild, and he wants his daughter to have a happy sex life. Klärchen confesses to Annemarie, her father’s housekeeper, who is Jochen’s sister, that she does not love Knuzius, that he “has no talent for love,” and that she believes he is only after her dowry. Her major problem is how to rid herself of Knuzius’s assiduous attentions long enough to be able to see Jochen and clear things up with him. Annemarie advises Klärchen to tell Knuzius that she is pregnant. In this way she will be able to plead sickness and absent herself from the party to be held that night. When Klärchen does make her “confession” to Knuzius at the end of act 1, his first and only reaction is to shout “Hey! Gunderloch! Father-in-law!” Her suspicions are thus confirmed.

The entire act 2 is devoted to a big party in the village inn. The party is given by Gunderloch for this season’s wine buyers, for the prospective bidders at the auction to be held the following morning, and for his friends in the village. As the richest vintner in the region, he is also obliged by custom to provide free cider for a group of veterans who have formed a choir. The party is very boisterous, the wine flows in streams, and there is dancing and singing. While Knuzius dances with Babettchen, the innkeeper’s daughter, Klärchen tries to explain to Jochen that she is not engaged to Knuzius and that she is not pregnant, but he stubbornly refuses to listen to her; all he wants is to beat Knuzius to a pulp. He soon gets his chance because the bleating “singing” of the veterans so infuriates Gunderloch that he wants to throw them out of the room. There ensues a monumental general brawl that Gunderloch survives as the sole victor. Act 3 takes place before sunrise in the courtyard of the inn. It consists of a series of declarations of love and offstage lovemaking. First, Gunderloch realizes that he is far too young and full of vitality to retire and to live alone. He and Annemarie (who has loved him secretly for a long time) quickly reach an understanding, and their love is consummated in an arbor in the garden. Then Knuzius, who is totally drunk, declares his love to Babettchen and denounces Gunderloch and Klärchen. Babettchen tells him to sleep off his inebriation, but she intimates that she might be interested in him. Next, Jochen and Klärchen are finally able to communicate and to clear up the misunderstanding between them. They also make love immediately. Finally, one of the wine buyers and the daughter of one of the prospective buyers of the vineyard enter the courtyard, only to disappear quickly thereafter in the barn. The play ends as Gunderloch announces that he will not sell any of his possessions and that he and Annemarie, and Jochen and Klärchen will marry. Babettchen will marry Knuzius, and the wine buyer will marry the girl he seduced during that memorable night.

The main characters of Der fröhliche Weinberg consist of several stock characters in folk comedy, such as a country girl who is mistakenly attracted to an educated or upper-class man from the city, a dowry hunter, and a kindhearted but clever confidante. Zuckmayer used these stock characters to construct an effective comic plot. Beyond that, he imbued his main characters with an aura of contemporaneity, and he surrounded them with an entourage of secondary characters designed to accentuate this aura. For example, when Knuzius asks for Babettchen’s hand in marriage, he uses the anti-Semitic language and concepts typical of the Nazis: “As I ask for her hand . . . I am not only striving for the fulfillment of personal wishes, but also for the restoration of our nation’s health in view of its virtue, its fitness for military service, its cleanliness, its loyalty, and its racial purity.” While these words are met by laughter and applause, their meaning is surely undercut by the fact that they are spoken by the impecunious dowry hunter who, according to Klärchen, has no talent for love. It is also noteworthy that Knuzius spends the night sleeping on a pile of manure while the other protagonists are making love. Similarly, when some of the veterans and the teacher direct anti-Semitic remarks at the Jewish wine buyers, these remarks are consistently rejected and proved nonsensical by other characters. Incorporating these topical concerns in his comedy seemed to be Zuckmayer’s way of achieving his goal of not “distancing [himself] from the demands of the day.” Indeed, these topical allusions, and particularly the characterization of Knuzius, prompted several protests against the play from right-wing groups. The most important aspect of the play, however, is its joyful affirmation of life. This affirmation is expressed in the almost ritualistic rash of marriages at the end of the play, in the unabashed sensuality of the four protagonists, and in several instances of vivid nature imagery. When Gunderloch, Annemarie, Jochen, and Klärchen meet in the morning, for example, they notice that the vineyards are steaming, that the trees are laden with fruit, and that the fragrance of blossoms is rising from the soil. Nature’s bounty and human love become fused in Annemarie’s words, “now everything is growing for our happiness.” Plot construction, characterization, the finely nuanced use of language, and the splendid nature imagery—all these elements combine to make Der fröhliche Weinberg into a first-rate comedy.

The Captain of Köpenick

Zuckmayer’s undisputed masterpiece is The Captain of Köpenick. Although this “German fairy tale,” as it is subtitled, consists of twenty-one scenes and includes seventy-three characters, its basic plot (based on an actual incident that occurred in 1906) is quite simple: Wilhelm Voigt, a cobbler, has recently been released from jail, where he spent fifteen years for a minor offense. His native village has struck his name from its lists and now refuses to give him a residence permit. In order to get employment elsewhere, he needs a residence permit, and in order to obtain that, he must furnish proof that he is employed. In an attempt to end this impossible situation, he breaks into a police station to obtain the necessary forms, stamps, and papers with which he could forge a passport. He is caught and sentenced to a new jail term. After his release, the vicious cycle regarding residence permit and employment repeats itself. This time, however, Voigt decides on a radical cure for his problem. He purchases a captain’s uniform in a pawnshop, puts it on in a public toilet, and orders a group of soldiers to accompany him to Köpenick, a suburb of Berlin, where he arrests the mayor and confiscates all the money in the town hall. He finds out too late that there is no passport office (and thus no forms and stamps) in Köpenick. He sends the mayor to Berlin under military escort, dismisses the soldiers, and goes to live in a hotel. For the next few days, all the newspapers are full of the exploits of the “Captain of Köpenick,” and the police are embarrassed by their inability to find the impostor. Eventually Voigt turns himself in at police headquarters but not without first striking a bargain to the effect that after his third jail sentence he will be given proper papers.

Parallel to this main action runs a secondary action involving the uniform that Voigt eventually purchases. During the first scene, Captain von Schlettow, who has recently been promoted to that rank, tries on the uniform. Shortly afterward he has to resign from the Prussian army because he gets into a brawl in an establishment that is off-limits to soldiers. The uniform is returned to the store and is next purchased by a lieutenant of the reserves. When he becomes too fat to wear it, it is used at a costume ball, and it finally ends up in the pawnshop where Voigt finds it. The uniform thus becomes a leitmotif in the play, a symbol of authority that commands blind obedience, while the person who wears it means very little. It is significant that von Schlettow’s misfortune in the ill-reputed establishment arises from the fact that he acts in the authoritarian manner of an officer while wearing civilian clothes. Similarly, when the mayor of Köpenick asks the “captain” for identity papers, Voigt simply points to a bayonet held by one of “his” soldiers and asks whether “that does not suffice.” The mayor then meekly accepts his arrest. The butt of Zuckmayer’s irony in this play is the unquestioning deference to authority (indeed to the mere trappings of authority) at the expense of humanness and common sense. Although this point is repeatedly made throughout the play, the ingenious device of the ubiquitous uniform also enables the playwright to present a kaleidoscopic view of all the social strata of Wilhelminian Germany. His mastery of the nuances of language (ranging from low-class Berlin dialect, to military jargon, to standard German) is a sheer delight. Although this linguistic differentiation is difficult to translate into other languages, the utter theatricality of The Captain of Köpenick prompted an English translation that was performed at the prestigious National Theatre in London.

The Devil’s General

In December, 1941, Zuckmayer read a newspaper report that the renowned flying ace Ernst Udet had fatally crashed while testing a new type of plane. Zuckmayer knew Udet from World War I, and he knew that Udet was opposed to the Nazi regime. Udet became the model for General Harras, the protagonist of Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General. The principal action of the play concerns Harras’s development from an unenthusiastic, even unwilling collaborator with the Nazi regime to an opponent who eventually atones for his service to the “devil” (Hitler) with his death. During act 1, a group of air force officers, high government officials, three actresses, the wife of one of the officers, and her sister are assembled around General Harras in a private dining room of a fashionable Berlin restaurant. He is giving a party to honor Colonel Eilers, a fighter pilot who has recently shot down his fiftieth enemy plane.

During the party, the various characters reveal their reasons for supporting the Nazi regime. The spectrum ranges from honest belief in the purer and better world advocated by the Nazi ideology, to political opportunism (the adherents of which see Nazism as a bulwark against communism), to sheer egotism professed by those who have enriched themselves at the expense of Jews or whose careers have been furthered by the Nazis. In a sense, Harras belongs to the last category: The one thing he loves most in life is flying, and the air force has allowed him to indulge his passion. He also likes high living, as illustrated by the expensive delicacies and wines he serves at his party at a time when food is severely rationed for the average German citizen. At the same time, he is not a member of the Nazi party, and he particularly despises the regime’s narrow-minded and foolish racial policies. One of the most moving texts that Zuckmayer ever wrote is Harras’s description of the ethnic and cultural mixture that makes up the population of the Rhine Valley—a pithy and brilliant refutation of the Nazi doctrine of racial purity.

During one of the conversations in act 1, the specific problem that will lead to Harras’s downfall is mentioned. He is in charge of quality control of new fighter planes and cannot find out why some of them crash when they are first put into service. Act 2 takes place in Harras’s apartment. He has just been released from Gestapo headquarters, where he has been interrogated for two weeks. He is given a period of ten days to find out why some of the planes are crashing. This act contains two important turning points in Harras’s development. First, he receives a letter of thanks and farewell from a Jewish surgeon whom he planned to help escape. The surgeon has been tortured in a concentration camp for six months, and he simply has no strength left and cannot face life in a foreign country. By the time Harras receives his letter, he and his wife have already committed suicide. On reading this letter, Harras realizes his guilt:

Everyone has his conscience Jew, or several, so that he can sleep at night. But one cannot buy off one’s guilt with that. That is self-deception. We are still guilty of that which is happening to thousands of others whom we do not know and whom we do not help. We are guilty and damned to all eternity. To permit villainy to occur is worse than perpetrating it.

After this insight, it appears for a short while that Harras might flee and build a new life for himself with the young actress Diddo, but then the second turning point occurs. The evening paper carries a report that Harras’s friend Eilers has crashed in one of the new planes, just above the airfield. Harras decides to ascertain the cause for this and all the other crashes.

Act 3 takes place in Harras’s office at the military airfield, on the last day of the period of grace that had been granted to him. In spite of a meticulous investigation, he has not been able to determine why some of the planes are defective. Toward the end of the play, Oderbruch, the chief engineer of the plant where the planes are made and Harras’s close friend of twelve years’ standing, confesses to him that he and other members of the resistance movement have been sabotaging the aircraft. In a poignant personal statement, Oderbruch explains his motivation:

No brother of mine died in a concentration camp. I did not love a Jewess. No friend of mine was chased out of the country. I did not know anyone who died in action on June 30. But one day—I was ashamed of being a German. Since then I have not been able to rest until—until it is over.

With Oderbruch’s confession and with SS guards at the main gate, the moment of decision for Harras has come: If he exposes Oderbruch and his resistance operation, he will be completely rehabilitated and will continue to enjoy the prestige and luxurious life of an air force general. If Harras accepts Oderbruch’s advice to fly abroad (a small plane is standing by, ready for takeoff), he can work actively against the Nazi regime. Harras chooses neither of these alternatives. He takes up one of the fighter planes he knows to be defective and promptly crashes. The government orders a state funeral for him. The profoundly ambivalent decision taken by Harras mirrored the ambivalent moral position of many spectators, as became evident in Zuckmayer’s discussions with German audiences and in the heated debate that raged in the press. Harras is a most effective protagonist in terms of Aristotelian drama: He certainly inspires pity and fear, and he allows the audience to identify emotionally with him. Many of the young people in the audiences identified more with Lieutenant Hartmann, however, a secondary character whose development from an idealistic supporter of the regime to a morally outraged opponent is one of the subsidiary actions of the play. During the last few scenes of the play, Hartmann becomes a sort of idealistic extension of Harras. He will be able to do what Harras could not do. As Oderbruch and Hartmann join in the Lord’s Prayer while Harras’s plane crashes, the drama ends on a note of atonement and faint hope.

The three plays discussed in this essay are generally considered to be Zuckmayer’s best. They are sometimes grouped together and called his “German trilogy.” The plays that Zuckmayer wrote after World War II (mostly historical dramas) did not grow from the author’s emotional essence; their characters and plots are rather obvious intellectual constructs. Thus, none of these later plays projects the aura of reality (albeit poetic reality) that distinguishes the earlier ones.

Bibliography

Finke, Margot. Carl Zuckmayer’s Germany. Frankfurt, Germany: Haag and Herchen, 1990. A biography of Zuckmayer that focuses on the Germany of his time. Bibliography and index.

Grange, William. Partnership in the German Theatre: Zuckmayer and Hilpert, 1925-1961. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. This study examines the close relationship between Zuckmayer and his principal director, Heinz Hilpert, in the staging and production of German drama. Bibliography and index.

Mews, Siegfried. Carl Zuckmayer. Boston: Twayne, 1981. A basic biography of Zuckmayer that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Wagener, Hans. Carl Zuckmayer Criticism: Tracing Endangered Fame. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Wagener expresses his distress at the declining amount of scholarship involving Zuckmayer and his gradually fading reputation among scholars.