A short life of the author
Carl Zuckmayer (27 December 1896 – 18 January 1977) was a German-Austrian dramatist, screenwriter, and memoirist whose plays — combining popular accessibility with moral seriousness — made him one of the most successful German-language playwrights of the twentieth century. His two masterpieces — Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain of Köpenick, 1931), a comic satire on Prussian authoritarianism, and Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1946), a tragedy about moral compromise under Nazism — are landmarks of German theatre.
Life
Zuckmayer was born in Nackenheim, in the Rhineland wine country — a landscape that pervades his work. He served in the German Army during World War I, experiencing the Western Front at Verdun and the Somme. After the war, he studied at Heidelberg and Frankfurt and entered the theatre, working briefly as a dramaturg under Max Reinhardt in Berlin.
His early play Der fröhliche Weinberg (The Merry Vineyard, 1925) — a boisterous comedy of rural life — was a popular sensation and won the Kleist Prize. Its earthy humour and celebration of Rhineland peasant life established Zuckmayer’s reputation as a populist playwright.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Zuckmayer’s work was banned (he was partly Jewish by Nazi racial classification). He fled first to Austria, then, after the Anschluss, to Switzerland, and finally to the United States, where he settled on a farm in Vermont. He lived in America from 1939 to 1958, working sporadically in Hollywood and farming to survive.
After the war, he secretly compiled detailed character profiles of over 150 prominent figures in German cultural life for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services — assessments of their political reliability under Nazism — which were published posthumously as Geheimreport (Secret Report, 2002) and are a remarkable document of moral judgment under pressure.
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931)
Zuckmayer’s most enduring play is based on the true story of Wilhelm Voigt, a cobbler and ex-convict who, in 1906, dressed in a Prussian captain’s uniform, commandeered a squad of soldiers, occupied the town hall of Köpenick near Berlin, arrested the mayor, and confiscated the municipal treasury. The incident exposed the German reverence for uniforms and authority: soldiers and officials obeyed Voigt without question because he wore the right clothes.
Zuckmayer turns the story into a comic parable about the dehumanising effects of bureaucracy and militarism. Voigt is not a criminal but a man trapped in a system that denies him papers, employment, and identity. The only way to become a human being in Prussia is to become a captain. The play premiered just as the Nazis were rising — its satire of blind obedience to authority was prophetic.
Des Teufels General (1946)
Written in Vermont and first performed in Zurich, The Devil’s General is set in wartime Berlin and follows General Harras — based loosely on the real Luftwaffe general Ernst Udet — a charismatic, apolitical pilot who serves the Nazi regime without sharing its ideology. Harras enjoys the power, the flying, the camaraderie; he despises the Nazis but does nothing to oppose them. When he discovers that an anti-Nazi saboteur has been tampering with aircraft production, he must choose between loyalty to the regime and loyalty to his conscience.
The play was one of the first major German-language dramas to address collaboration and moral complicity under Nazism, and it was enormously popular in postwar Germany, where audiences recognised their own compromises in Harras’s dilemma.
Memoir
Als wär’s ein Stück von mir (A Part of Myself, 1966) is Zuckmayer’s autobiography — warm, vivid, and generous. It covers his Rhineland childhood, the war, Weimar Berlin, exile, and return, and is widely regarded as one of the finest German-language memoirs of the twentieth century.
Critical Standing
Zuckmayer is less well known outside the German-speaking world than Brecht or Dürrenmatt, partly because his dramatic method — realistic, emotionally direct, accessible — is less theoretically interesting. But his best plays are powerful theatre, and his treatment of moral complicity in Des Teufels General remains relevant.
Collecting Zuckmayer
German first editions from Fischer and Bermann-Fischer bring €30–€150. Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931) is the most sought after. English translations are published by academic presses.