Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Realistic Folkplay

FRANZ XAVER KROETZ THE REALISTIC FOLKPLAY Michael Toteborg In his play They Are Dying Out (Die Unvernunftigen sterben aus,1973), Peter Handke has the entrepreneur Quitt tell his servant: I would much prefer to express myself inarticulately like the little people in the play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me. This way I suffer my articulateness as part of my suffering. The only ones that you and your kind pity are those who can't speak about their suffering In response to the servant's questions, Quitt retorts sarcastically: Pity only occurred to me because the characters in the play moved me so- not that they were speechless, but that despite their seemingly dehumanized demeanor they wanted really to be as kind to each other as we spectators who all live in more human surroundings are already with each other. They, too, wanted tenderness, a life together, et cetera-they just can't express it, and that is why they rape and and murder each other. Quitt then once again speaks cynically of his experiences in the theatre, which pleased him as an entrepreneur, because, as he says: ... the painted grimaces from my own class sit in the audience anyway. On stage I want to see the other class, as crude and as unadorned as possible. After all, I go to the theatre to relax. These statements by a Handke character who has the playwright's full sympathy are, in essence, a thinly disguised polemic against another 17 playwright, namely Franz Xaver Kroetz. It may at first seem strange that Handke mocks the lack of speech in a Kroetz character since Handke's own theatre, despite the pathological impulse of its characters to overspeak, is a theatre of speechlessness and a general lack of communication . Moreover, both authors seem to have a common point of orientation in Odon von Horvath. Kroetz's evaluation of Horvath, published in 1971 -"Horvath's plays are, at least at this point, more political and more significant in terms of a new dramaturgy than Brecht's"- equals the pithy statement of Handke's-"Horvath is better than Brecht." Handke, however, generalizes Horvath's presentation of speechlessness and strips it of any social context or personal history of the characters, whereas Kroetz makes this aspect of Horvath's thought even more concrete and central. The theme of the earlier Kroetz plays is the social deformation of marginal groups in society. The most well-known of these plays are Game Crossing (Wildwechsel, 1968; Fassbinder's film version appears in English under the title Jailbait), Men's Business (Mannersache, 1970) and Farmyard (Stallerhof, 1971). The characters of these plays are helplessly at the mercy of a hostile environment precisely because of their inability to articulate their problems. The resigned silence of the characters on stage is Kroetz's essential theatrical device. These people become victims of their language, which no longer is an adequate means of communication , nor can it serve as a vehicle for resolving conflict. Kroetz sees this language as the fate (Schicksal) of his characters: "There is a type of expropriation which comes by withholding speech. The proletariat in the province can no longer express itself or make itself clear; it can no longer organize itself. That is its fate." Kroetz wants to portray the discrepancy between the violence of language and its hollowness, which capitalism exploits for its own purpose. This finds expression in his plays in the inability of the characters to communicate clearly, in their inability to defend themselves, and in their inability to think at all. This results repeatedly in an accumulation of emotional frustration which finds its only outlet in brutal violence. Erwin's lines of dialogue in Kroetz's first play, Game Crossing, are characteristic: "This rag is from somebody else, yes indeed. (He hesitates, then slaps her.) I don't know what to say." He thereby anticipates the correlation between speechlessness and violence which results finally in his daughter and her boyfriend shooting him to death. All the earlier plays of Kroetz end in a similarly brutal fashion. In Housework (Heimarbeit, 1969), the husband drowns his wife's illegitimate child while taking a bath...