Together with Bertolt Brecht and Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Zuckmayer (1890-1977) was one of the most popular and significant German dramatists of the twentieth century. His folk play The Merry Vineyard (1925) marked the end of German expressionism; his comedy The Captain of Kopenick (1931), a scathing satire on German militarism, and his drama The Devil's General (1946), about a Nazi general and German resistance, were some of the most frequently performed plays in recent German theater history. During the Third Reich Zuckmayer's works were banned in Germany while their author lived as an exile in the United States, trying to survive as a farmer in Vermont. For that reason, Zuckmayer scholarship was off to a slow start. Wagener demonstrates that it received its main impetus from the United States where the majority of dissertations on Zuckmayer were written. He shows the development of scholarship from reviews to general assessments, from positivistic biographical fact finding to the New Criticism and finally to recent modes of critical assessment, including feminist criticism. Wagener draws particular attention to the role of the Carl Zuckmayer Society in critical discourse about this neglected author.

The charming, return-to-the-land memoir of a refugee family who flees Nazi Germany and finds their true home in the backwoods of rural Vermont Alice and Carl Zuckmayer lived at the center of Weimar-era Berlin. She was a former actor turned medical student, he was a playwright, and their circle of friends included Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. But then the Nazis took over, and Carl’s most recent success—a play satirizing German militarism—impressed them in all the wrong ways. The couple and their two daughters were forced to flee, first to Austria, then to Switzerland, and finally to the United States. Los Angeles didn’t suit them, neither did New York, but a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm and the eighteenth-century farmhouse where they would spend the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves building chicken coops, refereeing fights between fractious ducks, and caring for temperamental water pipes “like babies.” But in spite of the endless work and the brutal, depressing winters, Alice found that in America she had at last discovered her “native land.” This generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a best seller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of an unlikely romantic comedy.

Both works in this volume - a play by Carl Zuckmayer (1896-1977) and an unusual contemporary study of Nazi Germany by Sebastian Haffner (1907-99) - bear testimony to the disturbing events that were to change German history in the aftermath of World War I. The abridged translation of The Devil's General, which was approved by Zuckmayer himself, is about a World War I flier who commits suicide as he comes to realize the unintended havoc he has wrought in his obsession to fly. Sebastian Haffner, whose real name was Raimund Pretzel (which was changed with the publication of Germany: Jekyll and Hyde), remained a controversial journalist all his life, working for both left-wing and right-wing journals. The work excerpted here was written in 1940 when Haffner, reared in a liberal tradition, was in a British detention camp as an enemy alien.

Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.