ANZENGRUBER, LUDWIG

(1839-1889)

   Playwright. Known best for his Bauernstücke—plays in rural settings written in local di-alect—Anzengruber had ample opportunity to observe rural life in his native Austria as an orphaned child and as a young man with no prospects. After a series of menial jobs, he tried acting and was engaged by a miserable touring troupe that barely earned enough to pay the expenses of its personnel. Anzengruber began writing plays for the troupe, but none of them was successful. He gave up acting and returned to Vienna, where he got a job working as a police clerk. That position, however, afforded him time in 1870 to write his first play in rural dialect, titled Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld (The Priest of Kirchfeld), which was produced at the Theater an der Wien. The play was an immediate hit with Viennese audiences, making Anzengruber's name well known throughout the city almost overnight and affording him unaccustomed material comfort and security. He completed several more dialect plays in succession, including Der Meineidbauer (The Farmer Forsworn, 1871), Die Kreuzelschreiber (The Cross Makers, 1872), and Der G'wis-senswurm (A Bad Conscience, 1874). They became enormously popular in the new German Reich as well, with hundreds of performances each year. His Das vierte Gebot (The Fourth Commandment, 1878) dealt not with peasants but with civic corruption in Vienna, but it proved to be almost as popular as his earlier plays written in dialect.