Der Hauptmann von Köpenick

France under German occupation in 1043. While a French Resistance group celebrates Christmas in a castle, it is sourrounded by German field police and a fire is lit. The French men burn to death singing the Te Deum like the biblical men in the furnace. This event (which actually took place) gets enhanced by Zuckmayer into a parable beyond all nationalities: German and French soldiers are played by the same actors; two angels denounce the sacrilege and urge for reconciliation. “Father Wind”, “Mother Frost”, “Brother Fog” symbolise cosmic forces. A French chaplain speaks Zuckmayer’s message: “We have to choose, here and now, whether we want to debase life to a blind function – or whether we can love it as God’s gift in everyone of his creatures, even in the enemy, even in death and destruction!”

During the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic at the beginning of the 1920s, a troupe of acrobats is experiencing an existential crisis. Alongside worries about making a living, old Knie is distressed by his daughter Katharina, who does not feel at home in a circus wagon and longs for a completely different life. During a performance in a small town in Rheinland-Palatinate, Katharina steals a few sacks of oats for her donkey from a local landowner, Rothacker. When Rothacker gets to know the girl, he withdraws his complaint to the police and offers her a position as a pupil on the farmstead. Karl Knie lets his daughter go, with the firm belief that she will come back.
One year later, the troupe is back in town, and Katharina comes to tell her father that she is going to stay on the farm and marry Rothacker. But Karl Knie believes that his daughter has come to take up her old mantel again, and dies before he learns of his error. Through this tragic event, Katharina realises where she really belongs. She breaks off her engagement with Rothacker and saves her father’s company from ruin.

1879, Colorado. The local head of the post office and tavern patron Tabor makes his fortune by trading a gallon of whiskey for 2/3 of the claim of two starving Germans. He takes to abusing his workers at the silver mine, moves on to the office of governor of Colorado, and equally from his homely wife „Lady“ to his new mistress „Baby“ Doe. He gets blackmailed by Baby’s pimp and, after divorcing „lady“, marries her. He ends up losing in the stock market and returns to the block hut of his beginnings, where he is cared for by both Lady and Baby and dies, amidst his new and old wife, a poor, but happy death.

“In the drama die Uhr schlägt eins the man Carl Zuckmayer can be recognised with cruel clarity: where he comes from, what he has experienced, what he can do, who he was, who he is. It cannot only be seen in his style, but also in the plot, the characters. "La pièce est l´homme même", as Buffon would say.
Carl Zuckmayer and how he involuntarily presents himself to us in this play: A German who is stunned that his fellow countrymen successfully try to overcome the past without having dealt with it. An emigrant stunned that the Jewish people, who were such an important part of the German nation, only haunt that same nation as a shadow or a memory or an unspecified relic anymore. A poet who is stunned that the lie of prosperity covers everything in our politically and morally very torn times. Carl Zuckmayer: a man who is as bewildered as are the times which he cannot cope with anymore.” (Peter Weiser about the world premiere at the Burgtheater iin Vienna in 1961)

„The Pied Piper, Bunting, as I call him in this play, is not a messianic character, not a prophet, no preacher or demagogue, none of the above. He is a free individual. In a society bound in place- for in this play everyone is bound by their poverty or their personal passions, by their greed or some other circumstance – he is the only free individual. His bond is with his freedom, freedom that develops by dealing with life. This freedom is the prospect he is offering the children he leads out of town. He can only offer them to endure poverty hunger and anguish, in the hope of finding a land where people govern themselves and no one has to let himself be pinched by another .“( Carl Zuckmayer )

„It’s a big joke. In the first act when the song about „Rehlein“ is sung; when the Rhinelanders are quarreling about what to sing; then, when the big fight breaks loose and when they drink to it, and this resonates in German hearts: then the audience roars even more than the actors.
I don’t spoil the fun. Why? Because it might save the theatre today from the unbridled literary rubbish: from the ambitious powerlessness, from the drivelling chaos…. and it might build a last dam against the already predominant cinema.” (Alfred Kerr on the world premiere in 1925)

Twenty years ago, Barbara Blomberg was the mistress of Karl V. in Regensburg and became the mother of his son Don Juan d’Austria; now she is married and run down in Brussels with a boozy, small major, but determined to rise into the life at court at all costs. Her illegitimate son is a world famous admiral already. Without scruples and with diplomatic finesse, she manages to be recognised as an indirect member of the royal family and to be allotted a castle near Brussels. For her son’s sake and his position as viceregent of the Netherlands, and also to save her lover Ratcliff, she renounces the privilege in the end and enters a solitary life in Castilia. The Spanish poet Cervantes speaks the epilogue of this striking plays of roles and intrigues: a declaration of the belief in the fullness of being, in the “heart and womb and smile of a woman”.

Zuckmayer took the medieval epic plot strait from „ German folk legends of the lower Rhine“. The Schelm ( rascal ) von Bergen, the headman’s son Vincent, unknowingly falls in love with the young beautiful empress, who in her turn has no idea of his lowly origins. When it turns out she is carrying his child, he is exposed during festivities at court and brought before the emperor. Who against expectations refrains from punishing him but instead knights him and elevates him to nobility. The same grace is awarded the wayward wife, when the emperor proclaims: „Never could her body or soul be besmirched by the touch of a lowly hand, but whom she deigns to touch – becomes noble! “
Zuckmayers version highlights the humanitarian aspect of the story. Originally the aging emperor’s humane forgiveness is also a calculated move to ensure his dynasty at the last minuter. This comical political motive is not repressed by the author, but the main focus lies on how the headman’s son is able to escape the awful plight of his profession just by pure unconditional love.

General Harras is an opponent of the Nazi regime but serves it nonetheless because he loves to fly. When he discovers that his subordinate and friend chief engineer Oderbruch is sabotaging the war effort out of the conviction that Hitler’s dictatorship can only end if the Germans loose the war. True to his character Harras can neither endorse this nor live with himself: „ Who served as the devil’s general on earth by bombing him a path – will have to serve him in hell also“ He commits suicide by knowingly flying a sabotaged aircraft and receives a state funeral.

Carl Zuckmayers play about the morality of a nuclear physicist’s work in the face of its destructiveness was first staged in 1955 by Gustav Gründgens and performed in 29 other theatres still in the same year. The plot draws a parallel to the story of Claus Fuchs who was convicted of espionage in the UK for helping the USSR construct their own warheads after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby counteracting the advantage of the US and establishing the system of mutually assured destruction a reality of the late 20th century.

„The quintessence of the play is not the splitting of atoms, but the crisis of trust, and, in broader dimensions, the crisis of thought and belief of today.“ (Carl Zuckmayer)