Herr Karl
Play by Helmut Qualtinger & Carl Merz
and its First Performance with a woman as the leading part, translated by Melanie Kutschera. It is a 1 hour-long monologue somewhere between play and cabaret, written in 1961 by Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz. The one-person play, which was first filmed for Austrian television with Qualtinger as the character (director: Erich Neuberg, first broadcast on 15 November 1961) and then performed on numerous stages, caused a great deal of controversy in Austria.
The Production from & with Melanie Kutschera will be performed
in Austrian language in Salzburg on the 28th of November 2024
in Vienna (in Austrian language)
https://1bm.at/
in Berlin (in Austrian-German language & in English)
The delicatessen store employee Herr Karl’, the anti-hero of the play, tells a ‘young person’, the audience, his life story while working in the warehouse of a delicatessen.
At first glance, Herr Karl can be characterised as a typical Viennese, ‘Catholic’ and ‘freedom-loving’, an eternal grump. As a representative Petit bourgeois, he embodies the vox populi, the voice of the people. Outwardly, Herr Karl seems nice, honest but naive with a sweet look. But little by little, the viewer learns that behind this façade lies an opportunist. He turns out to be an opportunistic follower from the petit bourgeois milieu who manoeuvred his way through life in the changing course of Austrian history from the end of the First World War to the end of the occupation in the 1950s.
With the establishment of the clerical-fascist dictatorship in the corporative state in 1934, Karl, who had previously been a socialist, became a supporter of the Christian Socialists. After the “Anschluss” in 1938, he immediately switched to the Nazi political camp. After 1945, he tried to be of service to the occupying forces. However, Herr Karl did not only use the change of his political opinion to gain advantages: Selfishness runs through his whole life. He sees himself as a ‘man of the world’, while the viewer gets to know him through his behaviour towards his fellow men as an unscrupulous profiteer, a shirker and a conformist. His cold-heartedness allows him to never miss an opportunity to take advantage of other people.
After the Second World War, the participation of large sections of the population in the Nazi regime and the deep-rooted anti-Semitism in Austria were ‘not addressed’; instead, according to the victim thesis, Austria was regarded as the first victim of National Socialist Germany. The broadcast of ‘Der Herr Karl’ on 15 November 1961 on ORF broke this ‘spell of silence about the past’.
‘In the portrayal of the typical Viennese opportunist, the soul of the average Austrian was struck. Outraged letters from readers saw themselves misrepresented as fellow hanger-ons of National Socialism.’
‘They had wanted to step on the toes of a certain type, and a whole nation screamed: Ouch!’ (Hans Weigel)
Qualtinger and Merz satirically played with the outrage caused by the storm of protest they triggered and, in the book publication of ‘Herr Karl’, added a series of fictitious letters from good Austrian citizens to the text, who all turn out to be brothers in the spirit of the eternal opportunist.
Today, the play is one of the classics of the post-war period.
