Les relations de Johann Nestroy avec la France. Austriaca: Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche ed. by Irène Cagneau and Marc Lacheny (review)

This special issue of the publication Austriaca presents some of the proceedings from a mixed French and German symposium held on October 11–12, 2012, organized by Irène Cagneau, Marc Lacheny, Martine Sforzin, and Karl Zieger at the Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis. The original event was dedicated to the relations of France to the works of Johann Nestroy and Arthur Schnitzler; the Schnitzler contributions went to Germanica (no. 52, 2013), and Austriaca published the Nestroy contributions (in German or French, with trilingual abstracts included at the rear of the volume).

The Nestroy selections achieve an unusual focus for an edited volume in that they revolved heavily around the Nestroy edition and its contributors (Johann Nestroy, Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jür-gen Hein, Johann Hüttner, Walter Obermaier, and W. Edgar Yates; Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Walter Obermaier; and Nachträge I & II, ed. Fred Walla and Walter Obermeier). The result is an incomparable introduction into the historical-cultural study of Nestroy’s work. The introduction, by Cagneau and Lacheny, points out that Nestroy’s work scarely resonated in France, with Der Zerissene the only play translated, and that there was only a limited amount of academic engagement with the author (7–8). Most of the contributions, therefore, deal with Nestroy’s use of French sources, culture, and language.

The first section of the volume outlines the historical givens for Nestroy’s writing and performance. Jürgen Hein, in “‘Die Handlung ist dem Französischen nachgebildet’: Johann Nestroy und seine Vorlagen im Spiegel der neuen Historisch-kritischen Ausgabe,” opens the discussion by offering an overview of what corpus of information exists that can be used to elucidate what Nestroy did in adapting (not just translating) plays. He shows how documentation of Nestroy’s activities in a particular set of Viennese theaters can help situate his work and activities; this essay outlines how other modern historical-critical editions might proceed if they were to take seriously a cultural studies framework, not just textual criticism. The result traces the influence of French theater on German ones in the nineteenth century and then shows how that influence was to be translated into a historical-critical edition, following a model of translation/adaptation/performance that speaks of Nestroy ’s Umgestaltung of his sources.

W. Edgar Yates, in “Die ‘französischen Künstler’ in Wien,” amplifies Hein’s overview by addressing the repertoire from France that appeared on Viennese stages. Between 1826 and 1846, the Kärtnertortheater hosted seven touring troupes of French players to augment opera and play in vaudeville comedies. Carl Carl, the director of the theater with which Nestroy was most closely affliated, considered them different from Viennese humor. Yates’s discussion of Nestroy’s Das Gewürzkrämer Kleeblat (1845) shows now Nestroy’s adaptations proceeded on different assumptions, as he situates that play’s failure in the context of audience expectations and the playlists then current at the theater.

A second group of essays helps clarify what we know about how Nestroy’s process as an author. Walter Obermaier, in “Johann Nestroy und Jacques Offenbachs Orpheus in der Unterwelt,” tracks how Orphée aux enfers was transferred to Vienna and amplifies what we know about the part that Nestroy played in the adaptation. It had its first performance in 1860 in the Carltheater, staged by Nestroy and Carl Treumann. Nestroy played Jupiter and may have adapted the text himself: The preserved manuscript is not in his handwriting, but the dialogue has his characteristic style.

Norbert Bachleitner, in “Die Mängel des sozialen Lebens geißeln: Johann Nestroy et Eugène Sue,” takes up two Nestroy works that derive from Sue (Zwey ewige Juden und Keiner [1846] and Kampl [1852], the latter drawn from Pride, an 1849 novel...