KASIMIR UND KAROLINE

In the organizer's words:

Even during the global economic crisis, the Oktoberfest is a place of amusement and a welcome distraction. However, the love between Kasimir, a dismissed chauffeur, and Karoline, an office worker, is put to the test here. In the milieu of the petty bourgeoisie, as the hours go by, people seek solace in alcoholic excess and look into interpersonal abysses. Horváth's kaleidoscope of characters, whose monstrosity lies in the banal, shows people of their time and their economic conditions.

"Man is simply a product of his environment."

The Oktoberfest with its rides, merry-go-rounds, beer tents, a curiosity cabinet and hippodrome is also a place of amusement and welcome distraction at the time of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. However, the love between Kasimir, a dismissed chauffeur, and Karoline, an office worker, is put to the test here. Karoline, who wants to escape her everyday life for a moment, breaks up with Kasimir, meets "better gentlemen" and, in the hope of social advancement, only brings herself to the market. In times of exploding unemployment, love is also a (barter) deal, because "the future is a question of relationships". In the milieu of the petty bourgeois, who - according to the Austrian writer Franz Werfel - "is portrayed by Horváth less as a member of a class than as a person who resists the spirit, a person who is simply obdurate", people seek solace in alcoholic excesses as the hours go by and look into interpersonal abysses. Horváth's kaleidoscope of characters, whose monstrosity lies in the banal, shows people of their time and their economic conditions. The Austrian literary scholar Alfred Doppler aptly recognized that "Horváth's folk plays are plays about the people as they do not see themselves and do not want to see themselves". Ödön von Horváth himself described his folk play as a "ballad about the unemployed chauffeur Kasimir and his bride with ambition, a ballad full of quiet sadness, softened by humor, that is, by the everyday realization: 'We all have to die!

In addition to Ödön von Horváth, the repertoire includes Irmgard Keun, Heinrich Mann and Anna Gmeyner, writers who were early seismographs of the socio-political upheavals at the beginning of the 20th century.

Price information:

10 euros for pupils, students, trainees and volunteers up to 30 years of age