Pension Schöller

(The Schöller Boardinghouse) by Carl Laufs and Wilhelm Jacoby.

   Premiered 1890. One of the German theater's most effective farces, Pension Schöller has remained a favorite among audiences and performers since its premiere. Its action centers on the encounter of a provincial naïf named Philipp Klapproth with several eccentric "big-city" types at the boardinghouse of the title. While Klapproth's wife is out shopping and not expected back for hours, Klapproth asks his nephew to help him "go to a kind of house I've always heard about, but never had the nerve to visit." "A brothel?" asks the nephew. "Of course not!" retorts Klapproth. The kind of house he has in mind is one of those whose residents are "mentally impaired." The nephew takes Klapproth to Pension Schöller, a boardinghouse near the city's center where a half dozen remarkable characters reside. Among them is a student actor who cannot pronounce the letter l except as an n; his favorite play, naturally, is " Winnem Tenn by Friedrich Schinner." There is also a big-game hunter who tries to recruit Klapproth to go with him on his next safari, a woman who is taking inventory of every man she meets in the hope of finding a suitable husband for her daughter, a retired army major with a striking resemblance to Kaiser Wilhelm II, a woman who is writing a novel but after 17 years of note-taking has yet to write a single word, and similar oddballs who make their entrances and exits through the numerous doorways in the sitting room of the boardinghouse.

   The Schöller boardinghouse is intended as a cross section of the Berlin population; the result is a parody of Berlin itself, and that parody extends to Schöller and his wife, the nominal authorities in charge of the place. They are perhaps the most bizarre of all, because they assume all their residents are completely normal. At the turn of the 20th century, no list of plays that regularly sold out would be complete without Pension Schöller, even though many critics condemned it as "disguised theater art." It had absolutely nothing to do with art, apologized one critic years later, "and [it] had no plans to be confused with art. But it certainly sets the laugh-muscles in motion" (Peter Squence, "Hessisches Landestheater, Kleines Haus: Pension Schöller" Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 14 May 1937).