Until 1966, when his autobiography Als wär's ein Stück von mir: Horen der Freundschaft (translated as A Part of Myself, 1970) appeared, Carl Zuckmayer was known mainly as the author of highly successful plays. He had been one of the most popular playwrights of the Weimar Republic and, next to Bertolt Brecht, he was the most widely performed dramatist in West Germany after World War II. His comedy Der fröhliche Weinberg: Lustspiel in drei Akten (The Merry Vineyard, 1925), with its blunt realism, had been hailed as the end of expressionism in drama. Der Hauptmann von Köpenick: Ein deutsches Märchen in drei Akten (1930; translated as The Captain of Köpenick, 1932), an excellent example of neorealism in drama and probably Zuckmayer's best play, was a sharp attack on Prussian militarism which was to brand the author as an irreconcilable enemy of...