RICHARD GILMAN
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opposition to the
Hochdeutsch
or high German in which the over–
whelming majority ofGerman plays have always been composed.
The form was introduced in Vienna in the early eighteenth
century by a writer named Josef Anton Stranitzky, and carried to a
full development by the nineteenth-century Austrians Johann Nes–
troy and Ferdinand Raimund. Then after a long period of neglect it
was revived in the twenties and thirties of this century, chiefly by the
gifted German writer Egon Von Horvath (whose neglect here-he has
scarcely been translated-is a minor cultural mystery). Von Horvath,
who died young in 1939, wrote plays whose characters were mainly
petty clerks, small shopkeepers, housemaids, hustlers, grifters, and
the like, the marginal, tamped-down people of modern urban life,
and which were free of the didactic moralizing that had marred the
work ofNestroy and Raimund.
Von Horvath's influence on Kroetz and his fellow neo-realists
is clear and acknowledged by them, but their most direct and power–
ful predecessor, as they unreservedly avow, is a writer with a strange,
painful history who figures in only the most marginal accounts of
twentieth-century German literature and is entirely unknown here.
Marieluise Fleisser, who died in 1973 at 71, wrote plays, as well as
novels and stories, about the most oppressed of characters, the socially
insulted and injured, employing a coarse , ragged vernacular for their
speech and exhibiting them in an atmosphere of spiritual desolation.
The victim of psychic disorders and domestic turbulence, at various
times of censorship, and almost throughout her career, of public
indifference, she was "rediscovered" in the late sixties by Kroetz,
Fassbinder, and others and has since enjoyed a certain vogue . Before
her death she met Kroetz, who has carried her vision and techniques
to a much more extreme point. She called him "the dearest of her
sons" and went on to say, with an understatement characteristic of
both him and herself, that' 'he cares about the others."
This caring, which is clearly so much more than abstract concern
for the victims of social and economic injustice, has, as I have tried
to point out, entered Kroetz's work without fanfare or any kind of
declaratory impulse whatsoever. And it is just this quality of austere
detachment, the placing before us, without comment or the least
grain of theatrical seductiveness, of imaginative evidence which
makes up a stringent, self-validating dramatic whole, that helps lift
