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The Theatre ofFranz Xaver Kroetz URSULASCHREGEL translated by Peter Harris and Pia Kleber Thirty-four year old Franz Xaver Kroetz is the most frequently performed playwright writing in German in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Austria and Switzerland. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he has also recently achieved a significance that should not be overlooked. Kroetz writes in a language that is coloured by Bavarian dialect. In his plays he portrays everyday events. Often the initial impulse for a play has come to him through reading an item in the newspaper. He describes the individual behaviour ofpeople within their own private lives, portraying alienation within the basic family unit or between unmarried couples living together. In the process, Kroetz makes it apparent that the perverse social behaviour of his characters is determined by the social conditions in which they live. Kroetz presents quite limited excerpts out of the world of the petty bourgeois and the proletariat; his characters usually give no indication of having any social contacts beyond those with their family or their lovers. Because of their conscious thematic reduction, Kroetz's plays are often wrongly performed as sensational news items and also wrongly received by critics. Critics have tried again and again to force Kroetz's characters into corners and to label them as peripheral figures. By doing so, they have avoided right from the outset a serious critical examination of the contents of the plays, and prevented aD understanding of them as plays of social protest. Kroetz's characters do not lead a peripheral existence. They earn their livings as workers and minor employees, or are self-employed. Kroetz describes the lower middle class, that stratum of the population which probably includes most people in the FRG. His characters are strongly consumer-oriented. They work so they can buy something - on instalments: the colour television, a new car, a vacation. The majority ofthe population ofthe FRG spend the most money for these sorts of things in their leisure time. Kroetz's characters react with disapproval and disdain when their "averageness ," their normality, is threatened from outside. It is important what the The Theatre of Franz Xaver Kroetz 473 neighbours think, and that everything is in the proper order. Whoever runs counter to their sense of values. whether their own child or their partner, is subjected to negative sanctions. This external pressure is often so unbearable for the person who has deviated from the norm that the only way out for him is force. The aggression he directs against himself or others is the expression of total helplessness. The characters have not learned to speak, and therefore cannot defend themselves. THE TURN TO REALISM In the theatre season 1970/71, Kroetz's first play, which he had written in 1968, had its premiere performance in the FRG. The discovery of Kroetz as a playwright coincided with the "renaissance" of Odon von Horvath and Marieluise FleiBer. The reasons for the rediscovery of Horvath and FleiBer can be found in the specific socia-political development of the 1960'S: the documentary plays of the 1960'S could no longer serve the newly acquired interest in intellectual findings keyed to the social structure. In this process of change, the sciences played a significant role. Social realities were analysed principally in terms of dialectical materialism. In the course of the student movement, the positions of social philosophy and of social theories of the 1920'S achieved a new significance. A parallel development in the theatre was the revival of Horvath and FleiBer, who are the orientation points for the playwrights of post-documentary drama (Sperr, Handke, Kroetz, Bauer, FaBbinder), and who illustrate "the durability of the structure of provincial life ... backward conditions of a social and psychological sort, right down to a language that has degenerated to the point of incomprehensibility.'" This theatrical trend does not contradict the linguistically sophisticated revolt of the student movement. Drama draws attention to unsolved social problems from another perspective: it confronts the failed political utopia with exact observation. This tendency begins to appear in German plays early in the 1970'S, and it can be most readily described as a tum to realism, however...

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