Casimir and Karoline

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data
Title: Casimir and Karoline
Genus: Folk piece
Original language: German
Author: Ödön from Horváth
Premiere: November 18, 1932
Place of premiere: Leipzig theater
Place and time of the action: At the Munich Oktoberfest in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929
persons
  • Casimir
  • Caroline
  • Commerzienrat Rauch
  • District Court Director Speer
  • The crier
  • The midget
  • Schuerzinger
  • The Merkl Franz
  • To Merkl Franz his Erna
  • Elli
  • Maria
  • The man with the bulldog head
  • Juanita
  • The fat lady
  • The waitress
  • The paramedic
  • The doctor
  • Abnormalities and Oktoberfest people

Kasimir and Karoline is a play by Ödön von Horváth . As can be seen from the first stage directions, the folk play takes place in Munich , “in our time”. At the time of the premiere, this meant the time after the Great Depression of 1929. The motto of the piece is: And love never stops.

plot

The chauffeur Kasimir is with his fiancée Karoline at the Munich Oktoberfest. She wants to have fun, but Kasimir does not feel like celebrating because his job has just been terminated. Therefore, there is an argument between them. At first they part ways. In the course of the action, they meet each other several times, a reconciliation is within reach, but their conversations always end in arguments.

At an ice cream stand, Karoline met the cutter Schürzinger, who had an eye on her. Two well-heeled gentlemen, the fat Kommerzienrat Rauch (Schürzinger's superior) and the district court director Speer, take a liking to Karoline. The rest of the evening can be done by the two gentlemen, while Schürzinger - intimidated by Rauch - remains in the background. Karoline wants to “drive to Altötting” with the Kommerzienrat in its car. In the car, however, it collapses. After Karoline saves his life with her courageous intervention, he ends up in the medical barracks. There they learn that another accident has happened: Speer's jaw was broken in a fight. In view of this situation, Rauch reflects on their friendship and quickly drops Karoline again. In the meantime, Kasimir roams the festival tents, gets drunk with the little crook Merkl Franz, who thinks Kasimir is too lax towards Karoline and her new companion. When Franz breaks into cars in the parking lot, Kasimir and Erna stand for him Schmiere. However, the petty criminal is caught in the act, arrested and taken away.

Kasimir and Erna stay on a park bench together. When Karoline appears to be reconciled with Kasimir, the latter rejects her. Now she gets involved with Schürzinger, who can secure her place in society.

Quote

"You often have such a longing in you -
but then you return with broken wings
and life goes on
as if you had never been there"

- Karoline : in Casimir and Karoline

Rating

Kasimir and Karoline is a socially critical folk play. The fairground atmosphere stands in sharp contrast to the bleak circumstances of Kasimir, who, despite Karoline's love, does not manage to break out of his milieu. Horváth judged:

"It is the ballad of the unemployed chauffeur Kasimir and his bride ..., a ballad full of silent grief, softened by humor, that is, by the everyday knowledge" We all have to die! ""

- Ödön of Horváth

At the premiere, critics criticized the relaxed, episodic plot and the sometimes hearty language of expression.

Performance history

An evening at the Oktoberfest was the subtitle of the premiere on November 18, 1932, which took place in the Leipzig theater as a guest performance by the Berlin theaters . A week later the premiere took place in Berlin , the staging was realized according to designs by Caspar Neher .

In February 1935, the Austrian premiere took place as a one-off guest performance in the “Komödie in der Johannesgasse” in Vienna by the “Ernst Lönner Group” and was then shown six more times at the Wiener Kammerspiele with Ernst Ziegel. The play was so successful that on November 29, 1935 it was also included in the repertoire of the Small Theater on Praterstrasse , the troupe's new venue. Fritz Grünne (Kasimir), Marianne Gerzner (Karoline) and Hans played under the direction of Ernst Lönner , a student of Erwin Piscator who had left Germany as a Jew after Hitler came to power in 1933 to start a theater group with other emigrants in Austria Czerny (Rauch), Carl Merz (Speer), the stage design was designed by Gustav Manker , who also appeared in an assigned role as “speaker”. The Viennese production was better received by the press than the German premiere in 1932; In the “Viennese version” produced for the Small Theater, music was the main element, a musical conference that “proclaims morality” linked the elevators, songs and bench songs by Josef Carl Knaflitsch , a friend of Lönner's Berlin days, were accompanied by additional texts Sung by Lönner and Georg Alfred by four singers. The press compared the piece with Ferenc Molnár's Liliom , calling it "one in the Prater transposed Threepenny Opera ". Horvath wrote: “I always hoped and suspected that my pieces would have to find understanding, especially in Vienna. (...) When my play was premiered in Berlin in 1932, almost the entire press wrote that it was a satire on Munich and the Oktoberfest there - I don't have to emphasize that this was a complete misunderstanding of my intentions, a confusion of location and Contents; it is not a satyr at all, it is the ballad of the unemployed chauffeur Kasimir and his bride with the ambition, a ballad full of silent grief, softened by humor, that is, by the everyday knowledge: 'We all have to die!' "

Important productions in recent times:

Film adaptations

Current issues

  • Ödön von Horváth: Casimir and Karoline , folk piece. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 978-3-518-18828-6 (= Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek , Volume 28); ISBN 978-3-518-46022-1 (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch , Volume 4022 [formerly: 3337]); Reclam, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-15-018614-5 .
  • Ödön von Horváth: Stories from the Vienna Woods and Casimir and Karoline , dramas. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-90318-4 (= Fischer Klassik ).

literature

  • Peter von Matt : Treason of Love - The Faithless in Literature . Hanser, Munich 1989

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paulus Manker : The theater man Gustav Manker. Search for clues. Amalthea, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-85002-738-0 .
  2. ↑ Ödön von Horváth, Kasimir and Karoline (ed. By Klaus Kastberger, Kerstin Reimann) Vienna edition of all works, volume 4. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009.