Born: Vienna, Austria, 28 May 1911. Education: Educated at Reform-Realgymnasium, Vienna, and in evening classes at the Volkshochshule. Family: Married 1) Ursula Buchi in 1951 (divorced 1957); 2) Susanne Schreiner in 1960, one daughter. Career: Apprentice upholsterer in Vienna; moved to Switzerland in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime; lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, 1938-42; freelance writer in Zurich, from 1945. Awards: Vienna prize, 1955, and Ehrenring, 1972; Grillparzer prize, 1956; Wildgans prize, 1963; Austrian State prize, 1966; Austrian Ehrenkreuz fur Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1971. Named Professor by Austrian government, 1963. Died: 20 October 1986.
Publications Plays
Jehr (produced 1933).
Liebe in Florenz; oder, Die unziemliche Neugier (produced 1936).
Das heilige Experiment (produced 1943). 1947; as The Strong Are Lonely, translated by Eva Le Galienen, 1954; as The Holy Experiment (televised 1985); also translated by Todd C. Hanlin and Heidi Hutchinson in Holy Experiment and Other Plays, 1998.
DerFlUchtling, from a work by Georg Kaiser (produced 1945). 1954.
Hotel du commerce (produced 1946). 1954.
Meier Helmbrecht (produced 1947). 1956.
Der offentliche Anklager (produced 1948). 1954; as The Public Prosecutor, translated by Kitty Black, 1958; and in The Public Prosecutor and Other Plays, 1980.
Der Unschuldige (produced 1958). Privately printed, 1949; 1958.
Virginia (produced 1951). Donadieu (produced 1953). 1953.
Die Herberge (produced 1957). 1956; as The Inn (produced 1962).
Donnerstag (produced 1959). In Dramen, 1, 1959.
Dramen. 2 vols., 1959-64.
Esther. 1960.
1003 (produced 1964). In Dramen, 2, 1964.
Der HimbeerpflUcker (televised 1965; produced 1965). 1965; as The Raspberry Picker, translated by Michael Bullock, in The Public Prosecutor and Other Plays, 1980.
Der Befehl (televised 1967; produced 1968). 1967; as The Order, in Modern International Drama, 3(2), 1970.
Dramen. 1968.
Dramen. 4 vols., 1975-85.
Lazaretti; oder, Der Sabeltiger (produced 1975). 1975; as Lazaretti; or, the Saber-Toothed Tiger, translated by James Schmittin, in The Public Prosecutor and Other Plays, 1980.
The Public Prosecutor and Other Plays (includes The Raspberry Picker; The Public Prosecutor; The Strong Are Lonely; Lazaretti; or, the Saber-Toothed Tiger), edited by Martin Esslin. 1980.
Die Prinzessin von Chimay. 1982.
Der verschwundene Mond. 1985.
Die Burgschaft. 1985.
Radio Plays: Der Reigen, from the play by Arthur Schnitzler; Weinsberger Ostern 1525, 1939.
Television Plays: Der HimbeerpflUcker, 1965; Der Befehl, 1967.
Other
Im Wechsel der Zeit: Autobiographische Skizzen und Essays. 1980.
Critical Studies:
The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama edited by George E. Wellwarth, 1964; ”Tradition and Experiment in the Work of Fritz Hochwalder” by Anthony J. Harper, in New German Studies, 5, 1977; ”The Theatre of Fritz Hochwalder: Its Background and Development” by James Schmitt, in Modern Austrian Literature, 11(1), 1978; Der Dramatiker Hochwalder by Wilhelm Bortenschlager, 1979; ”Fritz Hochwalder’s Range of Theme and Form” by Donald G. Daviau, in Austrian Literature, 18(2), 1985; ”The Classical Theater-of-Illusion Modernized: The Conflicting Messages of the Moral Imperative in Fritz Hochwalder’s Drama Das heilige Experiment" by Edward R. McDonald, in Maske undKothurn, 31, 1985.
In the years following World War II Fritz Hochwalder’s plays were at the forefront of German-speaking and indeed European drama, challenging the audience to come to terms with the recent past.
Hochwalder saw himself as part of the vigorous tradition of Viennese folk theatre, revitalized in the 1930s by Odon von Horvath. When the angry young men of the Austrian theatre announced in the 1960s that ”Grandpa’s theatre is dead,” Hochwalder’s reply was characteristically tart: no one had ever fallen asleep in any of his plays! Throughout his career his works relied on the characteristic devices of the VolksstUck, stock characters, unexpected twists to the story line, cases of mistaken identity, and a nice turn to the dialogue with moments of unexpected comedy to lighten the mood.
Above all, however, Hochwalder was a moralist and the light touch of his pen never disguised the fact that he was dealing with serious issues. It would be surprising were this not so. A Jew forced into exile and living through the Europe of the Third Reich could not but be affected. Behind the costume drama lies a grim political and moral reality. The fact that his plays move, over the years, from historical pieces (Das heilige Experiment [The Strong Are Lonely], Der offentliche Anklager [The Public Prosecutor], to allegory (Donnerstag, 1003, Die Herberge [The Inn]), to works dealing with the second half of the 20th century (Der HimbeerpflUcker [The Raspberry Picker], Der Befehl [The Order]), reflects the innate Austrianism in his soul. The Austrian tradition shies away from immediacy, preferring to depict the present from the safer, apparently objective context of history and costume drama; the first National Socialist to appear explicitly as such in Hochwalder’s work does not walk on stage until the mid 1960s, by when, of course, Nazi uniforms have begun to become historical pieces in their own right.
Behind the surface Hochwalder probes deep into the psyche of his protagonists and emerges with a picture of hell. Hochwalder’s hell is knowledge of the inner self, gained at the cost of considerable personal pain. There is much of Oedipus Rex in Hochwalder’s work. A characteristic example is the mild-mannered Dutch police inspector in The Order, given the task of hunting down the perpetrator of a brutal war crime and child murder by a military policeman in occupied Holland. As he penetrates the past, the inspector unravels his own repressed subconscious until he is forced to realize that he is the brutal war monster he is seeking.
Power versus justice, the demands of the ideal set against the limitations of reality: these are the axes of Hochwalder’s plays. Jesuit black in Latin America, although an apparent world away from the Gestapo black of Europe, is used by Hochwalder to show the danger of unquestioning acceptance of a cause (however noble). Read as a study of the evil of individual reliance on external support and the seductive appeal of ”Order,” The Strong Are Lonely regains much of the relevance many would today deny the work. The shadow of the Gestapo is equally apparent behind the Terror of revolutionary France in The Public Prosecutor. The public prosecutor’s relentless commitment to the Thermidor government is used by his opponents to engineer his self-destruction.
Hochwalder does not make his public prosecutor a monster; he shows him as a man with feelings who would like to be humane but who has fallen victim to the machine he serves. The true tragedy in both plays is that of the individual lost in the morass of a system where individualism has no place. Hochwalder’s virtual disappearance from the theatrical scene in recent years does him scant justice. It is difficult to believe that the European stage can afford to ignore The Strong Are Lonely and The Public Prosecutor. He himself felt he would be remembered for these two and, and surprisingly, The Inn, an allegory on the theme of justice which offers this profoundly pessimistic thought: ”Only one thing protects us from our neighbours—and that is order. There is no such thing as justice, we have to make do with order.”
Towards the end of his career Hochwalder ran out of creative steam. Both Lazaretti and Die Prinzessin von Chimay [The Princess of Chimay] lack the bite of his earlier works. The Prinzessin is a tired attempt to take forward the threads of The Public Prosecutor, and Lazaretti has been described as an old man’s play for old men.
Hochwalder’s more allegorical plays continue the theme of security and individual responsibility. In Donnerstag, a modern mystery play, an architect, Niklaus Pomfrit, sells his soul to Belial Incorporated in order to gain understanding of the meaning of the world; in 1003 (with clear echoes from Don Giovanni) he has become invincible and invulnerable: ”He’s like the man in the fairytale: his heart has frozen solid.”
What is attainable in allegory is impossible in reality, and the plays in a contemporary setting explore the legacy of the National Socialist security that has been so cruelly dashed from its adherents’ grasp. The Raspberry Picker, a mischievously malicious farce, neatly pillories the capacity for self-deception and collective amnesia of a group of former Nazis in post-war Austria. Hochwalder milks the device of mistaken identity to good effect as his characters erroneously identify a petty criminal as a former SS official come back to claim his share of war-loot. The discrepancy between the pathetic figure the criminal cuts on stage and the grandiose past he is supposed to embody is not lost on the audience who are in possession of both sides of the story and can draw their own conclusions.
Much of what Hochwalder wrote has a particularly Austrian timbre and loses much in translation. Best approached with an awareness of the social and political context in which he wrote, his dramatic work, like that of Friedrich Schiller before him, uses the theatre as a moral institution to expose and challenge the great and petty tyrannies of life that could otherwise not be brought to book.
