SOURCE: "Ferdinand Raimund and Ödön von Horváth: The Volksstück as Negation and Utopia," in The German Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1991, pp. 325-38.

In the following excerpt, Jones probes the ideological undercurrents of Raimund's Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind, maintaining that the play negates the possibility of social unity in early nineteenth-century Austria and instead strives toward a Utopian solution.

Plays by a number of different authors of the past two centuries have been treated in literary studies as examples of the Volksstück.¹ Although there are many that could be examined in terms of the validity of such a genre designation, two that are particularly appropriate for investigation are Ferdinand Raimund (1790-1836), generally regarded as one of the first to bring literary stature to the popular comedy, and Ödön von Horváth (1901-1938), who consciously attempted a renewal in this century. In Raimund's...