Ferdinand Raimund by Ian Roe (review)

Even the most generous assessment of the book market in German-speaking Europe would have to concede that the ever-increasing number of literary biographies leaves but a small, overcrowded space for publishers to put forth conceptually innovative works. It is therefore a pleasant surprise that the Wehrhahn Verlag’s new Meteore series has envisioned an innovative way to enrich the genre. With its critical biographies on writers designated as less noteworthy by literary posterity, this series offers portraits of writers as dissimilar as Wolfgang Hilbig, Johann Karl Wezel, Hedwig Dohm, and others whose often meteoric but fleeting impact deserve closer attention. Following an established series model that includes careful introductions to key works, a number of high-quality illustrations and a short but informative bibliography of primary and secondary readings, Ian Roe accomplishes in his biography of Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836) far more than one might initially expect from a monograph of 132 pages. Most significantly, Roe does not give into the temptation of positioning one of the pillars of the Viennese Volkstheater in predictable ways. Whereas earlier scholars, including the leading Raimund expert Jürgen Hein (1970), attempted to establish the writer as a nationally celebrated Austrian figure alongside his contemporaries Franz Grillparzer and Johann Nestroy (117), Roe instead simply continues to make a strong case for a renewed research interest in Raimund, as he has previously done in a number of articles. Even though Roe’s monograph never fully answers his own call to design “ein neues Raimund-Bild” (9), this biography does conscientiously reintroduce Raimund‘s entire dramatic and poetic works. Moreover, this study effectively intersects valuable insights about the many idiosyncrasies that shaped Raimund’s long reception history with the ups and downs of the disturbing professional and private lives of this actor, dramatist, and director.

In six succinct, chronologically structured chapters, Roe thus traces Raimund’s rise from his early acclaim as an actor in the Theater in der Josefstadt in 1814 through a period of great triumphs kicked off by his best-known romantic comedy Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (1828) to his attempted suicide and death at the conclusion of a European tour following guest appearances in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, and Prague. What makes this biography worthwhile for Raimund scholars and students alike is Roe’s capacity to situate Raimund’s development as an unusual Volkstheater author within the social-historical backdrop of Biedermeier Vienna but also within a captivating life story. As Roe repeatedly suggests, Raimund’s oeuvre evolved over the years from the all-too-familiar patterns of the Biedermeier Besserungsstück (123) made popular by Karl Meisl and others into the psychologically acute dramas that playfully ameliorated the characteristic simplicity of the Lokalstück with bursts of intertextual referentiality and theatrical experimentation. In particular, Roe’s introductions to and interpretations of the plays Der Bauer als Millionär (1826), Der Alpenkönig, and Der Verschwender (1834) underscore this often simultaneous presence of innovation and tradition that sets Raimund’s plays apart from those of his contemporaries.

In an insightful chapter on Raimund’s early accomplishments, for example, Roe describes perfectly the extent to which Raimund’s first successfully received piece, Der Bauer als Millionär, so closely followed the “Volkstheater-tradition” as it concurrently introduced another level of narrative complexity (45). However, that Raimund’s theatrical experimentations remained mostly within the realms of literature and dramaturgy, as Roe suggests, cannot serve as true evidence of the Volkstheater’s inability to stage issues of contemporary relevance. Rather, it must be read as a common and somewhat paradoxical sign of the outward distance to the social-political realities of Biedermeier Vienna. Whether some of Raimund’s implicit politics could then in fact have been a distinctive way of reacting to and engaging with the restrictive reality he and his contemporaries faced, perhaps in the ways that Gordon Craig once outlined in his still-influential study The Politics of the Unpolitical (1995), is a topic Roe skirts a bit too frequently. Explicit political commentary was...