Kasimir und Karoline (Casimir and Caroline)

The Oktoberfest with its fairground rides, roundabouts, beer tents, cabinet of curiosities and hippodrome is a place of amusement and welcome distraction, even in the midst of the global economic crisis of the early 1930s. But it is a place that puts the love between Casimir, a redundant chauffeur, and Caroline, an office worker, to the test. Wanting to escape her everyday life, if only for a moment, Caroline leaves Casimir behind and falls in with some «finer gentlemen» – yet in her hopes of social advancement she is only selling herself. At a time when unemployment is increasing at an explosive rate, love is just another deal, because «futures are a matter of relationships». In the world of the petit bourgeois, who – to quote the Austrian writer Franz Werfel – «Horváth described less as belonging to a class than someone who resists their own spirit, the epitome of stubbornness», people seek comfort in alcoholic excess as the hour gets late and the chasms between them are revealed.  Horváth’s kaleidoscope of characters, whose monstrosity lies in their banality, shows the people of their time and how they are subject to economic necessity. The Austrian literary scholar Alfred Doppler concluded pointedly that «Horváth’s folk plays are plays about people as they do not see themselves and do not want to be seen». Ödön von Horváth himself described his play as the «ballad of the unemployed chauffeur Casimir and his bride with the ambition of being a ballad full of silent grief, softened with humour, and with the everyday realisation that: ‹We all have to die!›».

An addition to Ödön von Horváth, with Irmgard Keun, Heinrich Mann and Anna Gmeyner the repertoire features writers who displayed a seismographic awareness in their ability to reflect the socio-political upheavals at the beginning of the 20th century at an early stage