Volksstück

(Peoples' Play)

   In general reference to popular entertainment, the term Volksstück began 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 in Vienna, where through the 19th century several theaters on a regular basis presented variations on the form. Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy were its most successful Viennese exponents. Its popularity in Berlin came later, where playwrights such as Louis Angely and David Kalisch developed audiences for it up to 1860; Adolph L'Arronge created 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 of Naturalism, but in the 1920s Carl Zuckmayer and Ödön von Horvâth initiated a revival that emphasized parody and, in the case of Horvâth, a tendency toward brutal sarcasm. National Socialism promoted it as a form of Heimatkunst (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 of Franz Xaver Kroetz and Martin Sperr and the "rediscovered" plays of Marieluise Fleisser.