Karl Schonherr

Background

Karl Schönherr was born on February 24, 1867, in Axams, Innsbruck-Land District, Austria. He was the son of Joseph and Marie Schönherr. His father was a teacher who later moved the family to Schlanders in North Tyrol. Schönherr grew up somewhat impoverished, however, after the death of his father, and the Schlanders authorities awarded his mother a pension to help raise Schönherr and his four brothers and one sister.

Education

In the early 1890s, Karl Schönherr attended the University of Innsbruck. In 1896 he earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna.

Career

Karl Schönherr wrote stage works in the vein of Heimatliteratur. Heimatliteratur, a popular German-language genre at the time, exalted a specific locality, usually in the countryside, and Schönherr’s popular plays - written in the Tyrolean dialect of Austrian German - offered the characteristic uncomplicated themes, standard righteous or evil characters, and in most cases, the crowd-pleasing endings of the form.

Some of these stories appeared in his first published work, the 1895 collection Innthaler Schnalzer: Gedichte in Tiroler Mundart. His first folk play was based upon a famous incident in Tyrolean history from very early in the nineteenth century. Der Judas von Tirol, first produced in Vienna in 1897, centered around a rebellion led by one Andreas Hofer against the French emperor Napoleon in 1809. Hofer, a much-portrayed figure in Austrian folk literature, was forced into hiding after his stand failed, and his whereabouts were betrayed to the French forces by Franz Raffl, an impoverished Tyrolean farm worker. Raffl became an outcast and was forced to move from the region. Schönherr’s Der Judas von Tirol depicts how Raffl had already suffered derision at the hands of the local villagers, who even cast him as the classical betrayer from the bible, Judas, in their passion play, before his act of genuine perfidy takes place.

Der Judas von Tirol was met with a lukewarm reception by audiences and critics and closed soon after its opening night. Schönherr, dismayed, burned the manuscript of it but discovered another copy thirty years later that he was able to rewrite. The revised 1927 version offers a less histrionic tone and premiered to great success in Innsbruck in 1928; it was even made into a film five years later.

Schönherr’s next play premiered at Vienna’s Deutsches Volkstheater (German People’s Theater) in 1900, though he had been doubtful of his talents and hesitant to write for the stage again for a time after Der Judas von Tirol. But Der Bildschnitzer: Eine Tragödie braver Leute enjoyed a far more favorable response and was even produced throughout Germany as well. Its plot concerns an impoverished family headed by an ailing woodcarver, who rejects medical treatment so that he will die and his best friend can marry his widow. Such melodrama was common to the Heimatliteratur genre and to Schönherr’s themes in general.

Schönherr’s 1902 play, Der Sonnwendtag, offered a greater emphasis on religious issues and in particular Roman Catholicism in Austria in its tale of a tragically doomed family. It was honored with a performance at Vienna’s Burgtheater, the official court theater of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His next play, Karrnerleut’ debuted in 1904 and continued his portrayal of tragically impoverished rural Austrians in a fashion. These plays were all written in Tiroler Mundart, or the dialect of Tyrol, but Schönherr’s first play to use standard Austrian German language came in 1905 with Familie. That same year, he abandoned his career as a physician after beginning to find financial success with his works for the stage. His next drama was an even greater success: Erde, first performed in 1908. It featured an unforgettable lead, Grutz, an elderly man that still bullies his middle-aged son, Hannes, and treats the forty-six-year-old like a servant. Grutz tyrannizes the entire household, and two female workers on his farm compete for Hannes’s affections. When Grutz is injured by a horse, everyone speaks in blunt terms about his much-anticipated death, and a coffin is even built. Grutz survives, however, energized by the arrival of spring; meanwhile Hannes has had an affair with one of the maids, Mina, and she becomes pregnant. He carves a cradle for the child, assuming his life will now improve, but Mina does not wish to remain under Grutz and instead departs in order to marry a widower elsewhere. In the end, Grutz destroys his coffin and uses it for firewood. The symbolism of both handcrafted wood vessels - cradle and coffin - was typical of Schönherr’s dramatic devices.

Schönherr encountered some trouble with his next work when Archduke Franz Ferdinand - whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I - would not let the Burgtheater stage the 1908 musical fairy tale Das Königreich. The story revolves around a prince who is tempted by both a poor but happy man and a devil; it debuted in 1909 at the Deutsches Volkstheater instead. It was a play that Schönherr would rewrite several times over and publish under a number of different titles, but none of these were ever produced for the stage.

Sporadic success was a hallmark of Schönherr’s career as a playwright. Some of his works enjoyed great success, while others, like Über die Brücke from 1909, closed after brief runs. He later revised this as 1924’s Der Komödiant, which did enjoy a more successful run at the Burgtheater. What is considered one of Schonherr’s most exemplary efforts in the Heimatliteratur genre came in 1910 with Glaube und Heimat, which was translated into English and published as Faith and Fireside in the 1914 volume The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. The play even won him a major Austrian honor the following year, the Grillparzer Prize.

Glaube und Heimat is set in the seventeenth century in Tyrol, at a moment in history when inhabitants were told they must convert to Roman Catholicism or leave the area of their ancestors. One elderly Protestant peasant, Rott, vows to renounce the detested Catholic faith on his deathbed, but then learns that he will not be allowed a proper Christian burial. He and his son Christoph - along with Christoph’s wife, who is already a devout Catholic - plan to leave the area, but Christoph’s teen son learns he will not be allowed to go with his recalcitrant father, so jumps from a bridge and is killed by a paddle-wheel. Glaube und Heimat also follows the fortunes of another family, the Sandpergers, who plan to convert, but the mother is killed by a soldier before she does so, and dies onstage holding her Lutheran bible.

Glaube und Heimat, despite its melodramatic tendencies, enjoyed success in Germany and Austria. Schonherr’s next play, Der Weibsteufel ("The She-Devil"), premiered in 1915 but had been published the year before. It was also a great hit for the playwright and was honored with a second debut at the Burgtheater despite its sensitive themes of adultery and murderous plotting.

Der Weibsteufel featured a cast of only three: a wily smuggler in poor health, his miserable wife, and a sentry who investigates the husband's trade in contraband by means of seducing the wife to uncover incriminating information. The childless woman at first yields to the sentry’s attentions, but then recognizes his duplicitous intentions and is filled with anger; meanwhile, her husband encourages the affair in the hope that it will distract the sentry. Tire wife becomes caught in the middle between the two men and their aims, which provokes her into double-dealing both. In the end, she forces them into a showdown with one another with predictably morbid results.

Schonherr’s 1916 play, Volk in Not: Ein deutsches Heldenlied, was refused production at the Burgtheater during World War I but not because of the expensive and complex battle scenes in it; rather its portrayal of the human sorrows of war was deemed too sensitive for the time. Volk in Not is set during the Napoleonic era, and in part was considered inappropriate by authorities because it portrayed two Germanic groups, the Bavarians and the Saxons, united against another group, the people of Tyrol. It premiered at the Deutsches Volkstheater instead, went on to critical and commercial triumph and again, earned its author a second Grillparzer Prize.

A 1917 drama by Schonherr, Frau Sultrier, which debuted at the Burgtheater in 1917, again revisited the theme of a childless. The character of Frau Suitner, who shares the maiden name of Schonherr’s mother, is the wife of a storekeeper. A young woman named Gretl works there, and Suitner drowns herself so that her husband will be free to marry Gretl. The upheaval and tremendous tragedies visited upon Austria and the Austrians as a result of World War I stilled Schonherr’s pen for a time, but he returned with Narrenspiel des Lebens, a play that debuted in 1919. Its protagonist is a prominent surgeon, disillusioned with the fact that he can do so little to relieve human suffering, who takes his own life with poison. It traveled to Berlin for a production under the auspices of renowned theater director Max Reinhardt.

When Schonherr rewrote his 1905 play Familie as Kindertragodie, it earned him a third Grillparzer Prize in 1919. It follows the tragedy of its three doomed characters, all offsprings of the same adulterous mother. His training as a physician led Schonherr to re-visit the topic of the psychological inadequacies of modem medicine with his 1922 drama Es. Its sole characters are a doctor and his wife, but the title character is the fetus. The work sparked much discussion in Austria at the time for its provocative theme: the doctor learns he has tuberculosis, and performs an abortion on his wife so that their child will not suffer from it as well, but she becomes pregnant again.

The heroine of another bleak play from this era of Schonherr’s career, Maitanz, also suffers from tuberculosis. In this 1923 work, Annerl, though ill, attends the annual spring dance. Her paramour, Hansl, is distraught by how poorly she looks, and dances with another young woman; Annerl returns home to dance by herself and then die.

When he turned sixty in 1927, he agreed to a four-volume collection of his plays and prose in honor of this milestone. He revised all of his dramas for Gesammelte Werke, published that same year.

He continued to write for the stage, and en-joyed official favor with his 1933 work Passionsspiel, whose premiere was attended by many prominent church and government officials in Troppau, though it was not a subsequent commercial success. The last play by Schonherr came in 1937 with Die Fahne weht. Interestingly, it returned to the subject of his first, Der Judas von Tirol - the heroism of Andreas Hofer. There were problems, however, with the script and the director of the Burgtheater, so Schonherr was successful in moving its production to a theater in the city of Graz instead.

Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany the following year, and in light of Schonherr’s reverence for the values and customs of his Germanic heritage, he was thought to have at least tacitly supported the move, as was the case with many other Austrians of his day. Among other writers of Heimatliteratur, some expressed anti-Semitic themes or incidents in their works, but Schonherr’s works never followed suit.

The Austrian National Library in Vienna holds the majority of Schönherr’s papers; others are located at the Ferdinandeum, in Innsbruck, Austria.

Achievements

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  Karl Schönherr was considered to be the most important and most successful Austrian playwright alongside Arthur Schnitzler. His works were translated into French, Italian, English, and Czech languages, as well as were adapted into films. Schönherr received such literary prizes as Bauernfeld Prize, Schiller Prize, Grillparzer Prize.

Works

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  • Glaube und Heimat 1910
  • Volk in Not: Ein Deutsches Heldenlied 1916
  • Der Sonnwendtag: Drama in fünf Aufzügen 1902
  • Frau Suitner: Schauspiel in fünf Akten 1916
  • Der Judas von Tirol: Drama in drei Akten 1927
  • Innthaler Schnalzer: Gedichte in tiroler Mundart 1895
  • Allerhand Kreuzköpf’: Geschichten und Gestalten aus den Tiroler Alpen 1895
  • Karrnerleut' 1904
  • Caritas: Erzählungen 1905
  • Familie, Schauspiel in drei Akten 1906
  • Erde: Eine Komödie des Lebens in drei Akten 1908
  • Aus Meinem Merkbuch 1911
  • Tiroler Bauernschwänke: Erzählungen 1913
  • Der Weibsteufel 1914
  • Narrenspiel Des Lebens: Drama in Fünf Akten 1918
  • Kindertragödie In Drei Akten 1919
  • Der Kampf: Ein Drama Geistiger Arbeiter In Drei Akten 1920
  • Maitanz: Drei Szenen 1922

Politics

Karl Schönherr supported Anschluss but was against the persecution of Jewish people.

Views

Karl Schönherr wrote under the influence of Ludwig Anzengrüber. Schönherr stood midway between realism and symbolism. Using a few characters, his dramas have the directness of fate, as events inexorably push his characters through successions of crises.

Membership

Karl Schönherr was a member of the Deutsche Dichterakademie (Academy of German Writers).

Interests

• Writers

  Ludwig Anzengrüber

Connections

On April 8, 1922, Karl Schönherr married Malvine Chiavacci.

Father:

Joseph Schönherr

Mother:

Marie Schönherr

Spouse:

Malvine Chiavacci

References

• Dictionary of Literary Biography 118: Twentieth-Century German Dramatists, 1889-1918
  1992
• Contemporary Authors
  2010