VOLKSSTÜCK

Volksstück: translation

(Peoples' Play)

In general reference to popular entertainment, the termVolksstückbegan to appear in the mid- to late 17th century as a play in dialect written for unsophisticated audiences, depicting characters from daily life who spoke the local idiom. It was the stock in trade among troupes touring Habsburg territories and what is today Bavaria, proving to be most favored inVienna, where through the 19th century several theaters on a regular basis presented variations on the form.Ferdinand RaimundandJohann Nepomuk Nestroywere its most successful Viennese exponents. Its popularity inBerlincame later, where playwrights such asLouis AngelyandDavid Kalischdeveloped audiences for it up to 1860;Adolph L'Arrongecreated its most popular Berlin manifestations and used it to satirize the initial decades of the Wilhelmine Empire.

The Volksstück became somewhat moribund with the advent ofNaturalism, but in the 1920sCarl ZuckmayerandÖdön von Horvâthinitiated a revival that emphasized parody and, in the case of Horvâth, a tendency toward brutal sarcasm. National Socialism promoted it as a form ofHeimatkunst(an official "hearth-and-home" movement) that helped to preserve dialect plays in several localities; the plays of August Hinrichs are the best examples of such plays. In the early 1970s, the Volksstück experienced yet another revival, this time through the efforts ofFranz Xaver Kroetzand Martin Sperr and the "rediscovered" plays of Marieluise Fleisser.