Ludwig Thoma's Magdalena: A Transitional Volksstück

The development of a literary genre seldom manifests a completely consistent pattern, for authors, while basing their works on the forms of their predecessors, make changes which expand the constraints of the genre. Thus it is not surprising that the Volksstuck, from its beginnings in the eighteenth century through its continuing growth in the 1970s, should embrace a diverse and seemingly disconnected array of dramatic structures, such as farcical Lokalpossen, musical Zauberstucke, and didactic Besserungsstucke. With the didactic, allegorical plays of Raimund and the witty, satirical comedies of Nestroy the Volksstuck reached its first literary high point. On the verge of dying out in the late nineteenth century, the genre was given new life by Ludwig Anzengruber, who wrote tragedies as well as comedies, and who shifted the setting of his more famous works from the city to the country. As in Nestroy's works, the criticism in Anzengruber's plays takes aim at contemporary reality, but Anzengruber went even further than Nestroy in portraying his characters and their milieu realistically, and his more explicit treatment of specific social problems also sets him apart from his predecessor. Although some twentieth-century authors have written Volksstucke which bear little resemblance to the works of Anzengruber, there are others, including Odon von Horvath, Marieluise Fleiser, and Franz Xaver Kroetz, who have written in a manner which places them in a tradition with him. This tradition is characterized by the trend away from the purely comic and the desire to portray social-critical themes through realistic and naturalistic methods rather than by means of satire. An important result of this change in method has been to present dialect and colloquial speech not simply as a means of rendering accurate portrayals, but as a way of showing that an inability to articulate in meaningful language is a symptom and a cause of the characters' helplessness in the face of their environment. Another important development concerns the composition of the audience : rather than having their works performed