Harry´s Blog

There’s a man who shot off his mouth for seven long years in Austria. There are others who have done it for longer, but not under the circumstances. The guy I’m talking about did it between 1938 and 1945. At the time Austria was not Austria, but “Ostmark.” So that makes a difference. By doing that at the time, he was, of course, unsurpassed.

His name was Karl Bockerer. Regretfully Karl was not a real person. He is the hero of the play Der Bockerer by Ulrich Becker and Peter Preses. Bockerer is their only success. It is one of the most popular Austrian plays, but the playwrights couldn’t follow up.

During the time Austria’s incorporation in the Third Reich, Karl says everything that should be said. And he doesn’t whisper, he shouts. Imagine that! And he’s there at the end of the play to welcome the Russian liberators before the curtain comes down. Karl is a butcher who speaks his mind to the Nazi butchers. But somehow, due to his charm they don’t butcher him.
The play belongs to the category of what’s called “boulevard theater” in the German-speaking world. Translating the word is easy since boulevard = boulevard. But there is no translation for the term. A boulevard play is entertaining with plenty of laughs but with no serious aspirations

Anyway, the Austrian director Franz Antel filmed the play in 1981. Antel was awarded a prize at the Moscow Film Festival and has followed up by three sequels. Becher and Preses couldn’t do the scripts since they are long dead.

Antel, at one time called Hans Weigel, an Austrian writer “a lousy Jew!” and added. “I was a Nazi and I’m proud of it!”

Here’s a quote by Weigel “Austrians have a reputation for being anti-Semitic, but I’m relatively popular….I never made the acquaintance of an anti-Semite.”

Apparently he forgot.

The play of course is the wish-fulfillment of those who kept their mouths shut and those who like to think there were anti-fascist loudmouths at the time.

In reality, anyone who bucked the system did not do it for long. The curtain would only have come down once. The denouement would have been the gallows or the guillotine. There would only have been one act in the play, and its duration would have been very short - from five minutes to a quarter of an hour, at the most.

- Herbert Kuhner

Online first “die jüdische” 05.11.2003 10:42