Zuckmayer, Carl b. December 27, 1896; Nackenheim, Hesse d. January 18, 1977;Visp, Switzerland
German playwright, poet, and novelist who was a long-term emigre and visitor to the United States. Interpreting war as part of a natural, even cosmic order, Zuckmayer participated in World War I.
In his memoirs, he gave a vivid impression of the spirit of the time, stating that the soldiers went to war like lovers do, in a kind of patriotic intoxication and under the impression that it was a just cause for which they were fighting. One expected the unknown, a liberating adventure providing freedom from stagnation and conventions. That attitude of Zuckmayer’s, however, was to change due to an intellectual reorientation. An unsystematic course of studies in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, made possible due to the family’s sound financial background, fostered in him the development of Socialist and pacifist positions.Finding himself in Berlin in the 1920s, Zuckmayer was exposed to new literary trends like expressionism. The impulse in art in general to envisage a different, nonmechanical society and to stop the suffering stemming from a sense of alienation became manifest in a strong interest in America. The United States was generally perceived as the land of a humanist potential that war-struck Europe seemed to have lost. Zuckmayer shared this interest: he named his daughter Maria Winnetou after a male Indian character in the works of Karl May, and in his oeuvre, we find the unfinished draft of a novel called Sitting Bull dating from 1924/1925 as well as a play of the same period, which is set in the Wild West. The latter work is also proof of the friendship and cooperation Zuckmayer enjoyed with Bertolt Brecht; both playwrights briefly worked together at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsche Theater in Berlin.
Subsequently, Zuckmayer rose to fame as a writer: his comedy of 1925, Der froh- liche Weinberg (The Merry Vineyard), proved a great success as did his script for the movie Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), which was cowritten with Robert Liebmann and directed by Joseph von Sternberg in 1930.
It was based on the 1905 novel Professor Unrat (Small Town Tyrant) by Heinrich Mann and featured Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. What is arguably Zuckmayer’s most popular play, Der Hauptmann von Kopenick (The Captain of Kopenick), subtitled “a German fairytale,” was based on a true story: a former prisoner desperately tries to settle down in Berlin, but is denied the necessary passport. It is only when he disguises himself as a captain that the authorities readily yield to his orders. The play was premiered in Berlin in 1931 and elicited ferocious attacks from the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which rightly perceived it as denigrating and ridiculing the Prussian sternness of the military. The Nazis started to focus on Zuckmayer’s family background (the mother was Jewish) and, consequently, Zuckmayer was forbidden work from 1933 onward and emigrated to a village near Salzburg in Austria that same year. He obtained Austrian citizenship in 1938, but fled to Switzerland shortly thereafter because of the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.The year after, when the Nazis had terminated Zuckmayer’s citizenship for good, the family arrived in New York, where the journalist Dorothy Thompson supported them. Although prominent Germans in exile—such as Marlene Dietrich, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein—wrote letters in Zuckmayer’s favor to enable him to continue with his literary work, he struggled to make a living.
To Zuckmayer, emigrating to the United States, however safe a refuge, had involved the loss of linguistic competence. He assumed that he was on a journey without return and became homesick. Various works in English, amongst them a play cowritten with Fritz Kortner, were not as successful as he had expected. From 1942 on, he published essays and short prose in the German American, a journal for Germans in exile. Still, Zuckmayer found short-term work as a playwright in Hollywood, but was bordering on depression in what he regarded as the “purgatory” of Los Angeles.
He moved on to the New School for Social Research in New York and also joined Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop there, a kind of university-in-exile.Zuckmayer subsequently became a farmer in Barnard, Vermont, and then moved on to Woodstock, also in Vermont, in 1945. The forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), invited him to come to Washington, D.C., to discuss plans for relaunching cultural enterprises in postwar Europe. Despite the FBI surveying his mail, Zuckmayer became head of the German section of the War Department, his task being to act as a civil mediator between the occupying forces and the Germans, to initiate and to improve the state of cultural life in the western occupation zones of Germany and in Berlin. His activities also included reporting back on the state of cultural affairs in Austria and Switzerland. In 1947, the Voice of America, a radio station attempting to promote understanding for the reeducation policy in Germany, also turned to him for his expertise.
In the same year, Zuckmayer’s literary resume of the Third Reich, Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General), which previously had been censored by the American occupying forces due to the military leitmotif of its plot, was finally premiered in Germany. The play revolves around the life of General Ernst Udet, an antiNazi obsessed with aircraft, who, in the beginning, cooperated with the Nazis, then committed suicide in 1941. From 1951 on, Zuckmayer lived in the United States. When at last returning to Europe in 1958, he decided to settle in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Markus Oliver Spitz
See also Brecht, Bertolt; Council for a Democratic Germany; Dietrich, Marlene Magdalene; Einstein, Albert; Intellectual Exile; Jannings, Emil; Mann, Thomas; May, Karl Friedrich; Reinhardt, Max; Sternberg, Josef von, Thompson, Dorothy
References and Further Reading
Wagener, Hans. Carl Zuckmayer: Tracing Endangered Fame. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.