Klaus in the closet or The wrong Christmas party
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| Title: | Klaus in the closet or The wrong Christmas party |
| Genus: | A modern Christmas fairy tale in seven pictures |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Erich Kaestner |
| Publishing year: | 2014 |
| Premiere: | 2013 |
| Place of premiere: | State Theater Dresden |
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Klaus in the closet or The Wrong Christmas is a comedy that Erich Kästner completed in 1927. The world premiere took place in 2013 at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden .
structure
The titles of the seven pictures
- 1st picture: Klaus gets cheeky
- 2nd picture: A dog is eating chocolate
- 3rd picture: Father is electrified
- 4th picture: Nobody brings the belly wave
- 5th picture: Jackie Coogan as prosecutor
- 6. Picture: When parents play with dolls
- 7th picture: Klare has a headache, but everything will be fine.
The places of action
- 1st and 7th picture: Children's room in a good home
- 2nd picture: An inanimate city street
- 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th picture: A (childlike) film studio
action
Summary
Klare (around 11 years old) and her brother Klaus (a little older than her) are neglected by their parents, a bank director and his fun-loving wife, because they are mainly occupied with themselves or with arguing. Play and tenderness, attention and dialogue no longer come about between these parents and their children. But then suddenly another world opens up inside the family closet, in which the comedian Jackie Coogan , child star in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid , directs and reverses roles: From then on, adults have to go to school again and the children earn their money or smoke the cigars. This leads to various grotesque contortions and a general overburdening, because childhood is not only "made of great cake batter" (Erich Kästner), but the lives of adults can also be very complicated. After the children come out of the closet at the end of the play, the parents must love one another and stay together according to the saying of the “Children's Court”.
1st picture: Klaus gets cheeky
Klaus and Klare play in their children's room, with Klaus practicing outside the window frame for his aspired career as an action actor. He also subordinates his school efforts to this. As a punishment for this, he wants himself to be beaten, because "then you at least notice that you have parents". When the parents, ready to go out, enter the nursery, Klaus actually gets a slap in the face from his mother - for disrespect for her theater companion, Mr. Bongardt.
In order to spend at least some time with their mother in the next few days, the children want her to go to the hairdresser's with them. Mr. Altenberg comes to pick up the father and is the only one who shows interest in the children. The parents then go out separately, as usual. While the children are still thinking about what it would be like if they could give their parents orders, the light in the room changes. On the radio the children suddenly hear the "Gabelsberger transmitter", which instructs them to go into the closet. This is followed by directions on how to proceed afterwards (“Fasanenstrasse 117, first floor, third window from the right”). Klare is afraid, but both enter the closet.
2nd picture: A dog is eating chocolate
In the closet, Klaus and Klare fearfully run away from a large dog and come to the named house. The window described is dark. To attract attention, Klaus throws in the window with a ball. Then all the lights in the house go on and the front door opens. The children are greeted politely by two porters. The parents and Altenberg can be seen in the windows of the house. They don't know how they got there. Jackie Coogan appears and tells the children that they are going to be in a film. They go into the house together.
3rd picture: Father is electrified
Rehearsals for the film take place in the studio. The children, Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin and Altenberg are present. He finds it just as difficult to fold a paper hat as it does with a whip top . But he knows when the Battle of Zama was, which according to Chaplin and according to his own knowledge is of no use to him. But he wants to learn children's games because he enjoys it. The father is not ready to play along. He already refuses to put on short velvet panties, a shirt blouse with a white Eton collar and a colorful bow. To do this, Chaplin pushes him onto a swing that is pulled up. Only after the swing has been electrified is the father ready to swing. The mother should also do a childlike exercise, she should drive a tire , which she does with joy but little skill. Meanwhile, the children should laugh less and take on more of the adults' tasks.
According to Jackie, the aim of the planned film with the title "Adult School" is to show that "it would be better if some parents were raised by their children." replies Jackie: “Nobody is indispensable. Except as a father or mother. "
4th picture: Nobody brings the belly wave
Shooting for the film begins in a gym. The parents and Altenberg, together with other adults, unsuccessfully perform gymnastics exercises as extras. Both exercises with clubs and the belly wave on the horizontal bar overwhelm the adults. They act childishly, make a noise and tell each other. After all, the children are busy picking up their parents from class. Klaus and Klare want their parents to have another sibling, which both parents don't want. They prefer to go to the men's home or girls' boarding school alone. Jackie explains that this would only be possible through the "children's court" in which the parents have to submit to the judgment of the children.
5th picture: Jackie Coogan as prosecutor
Charlie continues to film what is now happening in a classroom. The parents quarrel before class, falling back into their old roles as bank director and housewife. They still want to be divorced from each other, Klaus and Klare talk to them about it. The announced court hearing begins. Judges are Klaus and Klare, Jackie Coogan plays the prosecutor. The parents are accused of no longer loving each other. In their statements, both parents find it wrong when the other leaves the children. Altenberg hesitates with a judgment - but would never leave his children instead of his parents. The parents can only think of little things as reasons for their separation, for example the father: “When I'm at home, she sings for hours” and the mother: “When I sing, he runs away!”.
The parents demand and are given three days to think about it. Jackie shortens this to a few moments by calling the meteorological station. After the cooling off period has ended, it is already one day before Christmas Eve . The parents decided to try again together.
The children go to get presents, while the parents kiss in love for so long that Charlie is afraid of his short footage.
6. Picture: When parents play with dolls
For Christmas, Klaus and Kläre give their parents numerous things that the children want for themselves. In return they get the same gifts from their parents that they gave them the year before: cigars and stationery. The children like Christmas better than in previous years, because the parents don't go to Oberhof on their own afterwards . Both father and mother understand that this behavior was wrong.
At first the children play timidly with the gifts they actually gave their parents. The father also smokes the cigars he gave Klaus as a present. It is slowly becoming a “normal” Christmas again. The parents remember previous Christmas evenings that were just as peaceful. Later he and his wife did not notice that the children were dissatisfied with them. The parents love each other again and start a new life. Klaus resolves to be more diligent in school, because from now on he no longer has to be lazy just to be punished and thus gain attention from his parents.
Altenberg comes to visit and immediately notices the positive change. The question of why he himself has neither a wife nor children is not answered. Jackie steps in and is dissatisfied that the happy ending doesn't fit into his script. To remedy this, he even wants to call the “children's police”. Charlie appears on stage and lets Jackie disappear into oblivion. He then sprays everyone with a spray bottle, disappears and everyone else falls asleep.
7th picture: Klare has a headache, but everything will be fine.
The seventh picture takes place again in the room from picture one. The mother comes back from the theater, cannot find the children in their beds and calls the police. The father comes home too. Both blame themselves for being to blame for the disappearances because they didn't care enough about their children. You call Altenberg, who wants to look for the children in town. Meanwhile, the parents search the whole apartment without success.
Finally they hear a rumble from the closet. The father tears open the closet and finds the two children. They wonder why their parents are back from them. Father and mother declare that they have been to the theater or the philharmonic orchestra. But they go into the story of Klaus and Klare and promise not to leave them alone anymore.
Altenberg calls and receives the good news that the children are back and is invited to dinner because the parents don't want to go out anymore. The parents put the siblings to bed and once again profess their love for them.
Origin and recovery
The play Klaus in the closet is Kästner's first long work. Before that, he had only published a few articles and essays in newspapers. The first time Kästner reported on his project of a Christmas fairy tale to his mother on October 16, 1926, the draft of the play was finished at the beginning of July 1927. Kästner sees his “real theater debut” only 30 years later in the play Die Schule der Dictatoren, which premiered in 1957 .
After the comedy was completed, Kästner had offered the work to at least four different publishers, but all of them rejected the play. The stage distributor Oesterheld wrote that the play was "original and cheerful", but "a bit too modern for a Christmas play and towards the end also monotonous". In the decades that followed, the piece was considered lost until it reappeared in the estate of Kästner's secretary Elfriede Mechnig in the 1980s . At the time, the manuscript was stored in the archive of the Berlin Academy of the Arts , but received no public attention there. After the play was mentioned in an edition of the Muttchen letters published by Luiselotte Enderle in 1981 , the work was mentioned in the 1988 Kästner personal biography of Uta Lämmerzahl-Bensel.
In the existing version, the manuscript has 66 pages plus four pages for the title, table of contents, list of people, picture titles and locations. On page one is noted “Submitted by Dr. Erich Kästner, Berlin - W 50, Prager Strasse 17 near Ratkowski ”(today Berlin-Wilmersdorf ).
On November 3, 2013, 86 years after its creation, the piece was first performed at the Dresden State Theater . Susanne Lietzow directed and text version . The siblings played Jonas Friedrich Leonhardi and Nina Gummich . The piece was adapted to the times. So the father no longer lands on the electrically charged swing. Text fragments from a missing page (from image 1) also had to be added, and the narrative speed was increased somewhat.
As early as 1931, the play served as a template for the script written by Kästner, Emeric Pressburger and Max Ophüls for the film Then Already Better Cod liver oil , in which Alfred Braun , Max Gülstorff , Käthe Haack and their daughter Hannelore Schroth played under the direction of Ophüls .
theme
This early work already shows the central theme of Kästner's books: to preserve your own childlike soul and not to let yourself be bent by the unreasonable demands of the world. In doing so, he takes the idea particularly far, elevating it comedically into the grotesque. The sentimentality and the avaricious pathos from Kästner pieces like Emil and the Detectives or Der 35. Mai already appear here. The criticism of the boring, unimaginative “adult world” is never neglected.
reception
Still in the Kästner work publication The Merchant's Carnival: Collected Texts from the Leipzig Period 1923–1927 by Klaus Schuhmann from 2004, there is no room for Klaus in the cupboard. “As was evidently already during Kästner's lifetime, quality issues in particular speak against a first publication .
On the other hand, in an essay in 1998, Helga Karrenbrock points to the importance of Klaus in the closet in Kästner's entire children's literary work and his career as a children's book author. A year later, Gundel Mattenklott rated the work as "an early document of Kästner's commitment to the children". Stefan Neuhaus sees in Klaus in the closet as parallels to ETA Hoffmann's fairy tales, both "the emphasis on the fantasy in the play" and "the motif of the closet through which the children go into the fairy tale world". He adds that "the design of the fairy tale world as a bizarre film world in which children and comedians have the say [...] the adjective in the subtitle" A modern Christmas fairy tale "" is justified.
literature
- The text of the play was published by Verlag für Kindertheater in 2014 .
Web links
- Information on the world premiere at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden , accessed on December 17, 2013
- Then I prefer cod liver oil (script based on Klaus in the closet ) at filmportal.de , accessed on August 14, 2018
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Information on the world premiere on the website of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden ( Memento of the original from December 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 17, 2013
- ↑ a b c Thomas Kramar: Dresden: premiere of a piece by Erich Kästner. DiePresse.com, November 4, 2013, accessed December 17, 2013 .
- ↑ Erich Kästner: My dear, good mother, you! Your old boy . Letters and postcards from 30 years. Selected and introduced by Luiselotte Enderle . Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Hamburg 1981.
- ↑ Erich Kästner: Collected writings for adults . tape V . Droemer Knaur.
- ↑ a b c Johanna Lemke: This piece is the primordial soup . In: Saxon newspaper . October 30, 2013 ( paid online [accessed December 17, 2013]).
- ↑ Hartmut Krug: Kästner early work revived. Staatsschauspiel Dresden shows "Klaus in a closet". deutschlandfunk.de, November 4, 2013, accessed on December 17, 2013 .
- ↑ I 'd rather cod liver oil at filmportal.de
- ↑ Erich Kästner: The merchant's carnival . Collected texts from the Leipzig period 1923–1927. Ed .: Klaus Schuhmann. Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-937146-17-2 , p. 475 .
- ↑ Gundel Mattenklott: Childhood in the mirror . To Erich Kästner's children's books. In: Manfred Wegner (Ed.): Time drives the car . Erich Kästner on his 100th birthday. DHM GmbH, Berlin 1999, p. 65-76 .
- ↑ a b Stefan Neuhaus: The secretive work . Erich Kästner's collaboration on plays under a pseudonym. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1765-X , p. 24-25 .
- ↑ Information about the piece on the publisher's website ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
