Die Drei Zwillinge

(The Three Twins) by Anton "Toni" Impekoven and Carl Mathern.

   Premiered 1920. Among the most popular comedies of the early 1920s, Impekoven and Mathern take mistaken identity to nostalgic extremes in The Three Twins; the playwrights set the play in the idyllic days before aristocrats were forced to give up their seigneurial assets in the aftermath of the kaiser's 1918 abdication. It concerns the Falkensteins, a distinctly minor branch of German aristocrats who, through a mixup at birth, discover they must admit a new member to their family. That new member is the third twin of the title. Eberhard von Falkenstein, elder twin brother and heir to the Falkenstein estate on the Rhine, has been reared by his father Count Oktavio von Falkenstein according to the strict customs of their illustrious family. Eberhard is supposedly a few minutes older than his brother Krafft (they look nothing at all alike), although no one really knows for sure; the hospital in which they were born burned to the ground soon after their birth and all records were lost. The nurses had supposedly tied a red ribbon on the older twin's ankle, but in the confusion that ribbon was lost.

   A wine merchant named Knäblein from nearby Bonn arrives to take orders for Count Oktavio's favorite beverage, the sweet Rhenish white wine of the region. Knäblein is a charming bumbler, but servants notice a stunning similarity between him and the younger twin Krafft (stage directions call for the same actor playing Krafft to play Knäblein). When the servants introduce Knäblein to Oktavio, the count in dazed agreement says the merchant looks enough like Krafft to be his twin brother. Knäblein reveals that he was born in the same hospital as the Falkenstein twins. "Look," he says, "I've still got the red ribbon that was tied onto my leg when I was a baby!" Everyone now realizes that Knäblein is in fact the third twin of the Falkenstein family. The Falkensteins go into emergency session; they decide that Krafft must become heir and that Eberhard will have to settle for a lesser title. They swear among themselves to reveal nothing to Knäblein. But the affable Knäblein finds out anyway, and he is delighted at the prospect of owning a castle; even the dispossessed Eberhard is won over, observing that being bourgeois will be easier than being an aristocrat: no more getting up at 6:00 a.m. to ride the horses and inspect the estate, no more sitting through hours of lessons in noble behavior with his father—and he'll earn 60,000 marks a year as a wine merchant, far more than he ever would have had as Count von Falkenstein.