Contemporary Austrian Playwrights

CONTEMPORARY AUSTRIAN PLAYWRIGHTS Martin Esslin Austrian writers use the German language and there is thus not little confusion about whether a world-renowned playwright and novelist like Peter Handke is German or Austrian. Yet the distinction is not without importance, and is becoming increasingly so. Present-day Austria is the remnant of the nucleus of what was, until 1918, one of Europe's great Empires, rivaling Germany and Russia in extent and population. Between 1918 and 1938 Austria was, it is true, independent, but unwillingly so: the German-speaking part of the rump of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted to join Germany, and it was only through the compulsion of the victorious powers after World War I that the little country remained independent. Then, in 1938, Hitler achieved the unification of Austria and Germany. It looked as though the end of Austria as a country had arrived. But, so tactlessly and cruelly did the Germans behave, so openly did they treat the Austrians as inferior, and, as the war broke out, so evident did it become that being one with Germany was far from comfortable (andAustrians are proverbially addicted to comfort) that, for the first time, a genuine desire to be free of the German connection developed. After World War II there thus arose a genuine Austrian national feeling, a genuine Austrian national identity. No longer did educated Austrians try to speak as clear and dialect-free a German as possible; suddenly it was socially acceptable, even desirable, to have a recognizably different language. And that could not remain without influence on literature. Moreover, after the holocaust of World War II, German literature had to deal with the overwhelming topic of German national consciousness, the question of guilt and its expiation. The Austrians, because they had felt occupied and oppressed by the Germans and saw themselves as victims rather than instigators of the war, felt no such compulsion to devote themselves to bitter heartsearchings about the sources of the relapse into barbarism which preoccupied their German colleagues. So not only the language but the subject matter of post-World War II Austrian literature became different. 93 * * * Austrian writers and intellectuals began busily to re-discover the roots of their different national tradition and identity: the Baroque theatre, the Viennese folk theatre of the early nineteenth century, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and the great satirist Karl Kraus were re-defined as the forebears and creators of a specifically Austrian attitude to drama. These newly consecrated classics were eagerly cultivated by the many theatres of Vienna and the other Austrian cities-Linz, Graz, Innsbruck, Salzburg and Klagenfurt. What is it that differentiates these dramatists from the German tradition? Whereas in Germany the main trend in the literature of the eighteenth century had been the endeavor to create a "respectable" German literature, which could rival the achievements of the other great nations of EuropeEngland 's Shakespeare, Spain's Calderon and Lope de Vega, Italy's Dante, France's Racine and Moliere-so that the cruelly divided German nation could make a valid claim to political unity and national identity, Austria, the center of a powerful Empire and secure in its power as a major country, was free from this somewhat hysterical effort. Hence, while in Germany the folkg theatre was being frantically cleaned-up and academics established classical standards of "high" literature as against the vulgar entertainments of the people, in Austria this division into a serious and a trivial stream in the theatre never took root. The greatest achievements of Austrian theatre were works in the "vulgar" tradition: the fantastical fairy tale plays of Raimund, the broad but brilliantly witty farces of Nestroy, the entire tradition of Viennese operetta which culminated in works like Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus and ultimately helped to inspire the American musical. Much of this dramatic literature was, being folk theatre, in broad Austrian dialect. And this is where the younger generation of Austrian playwrights took their inspiration after World War II. Even writers who do not use dialect, like Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, are deeply preoccupied with the problem of language and are in open revolt against the prevailing German tradition of serious, thoughtful, and didactic theatre...