DIE HOSE

Die Hose: translation

(The Underpants) by Carl Sternheim.

   Premiered 1911. The first in a series of five plays about the Maske family that Sternheim called "From the Heroic Life of the Middle Class." Family members wear masks of manners that facilitate their rise through the ranks of German society to unprecedented levels of material comfort and financial affluence. Their rise ironically begins with the fall of Frau Maske's underpants, as she watches "the king" (Sternheim was forbidden to use the word kaiser) go by in a parade. Two men (named Scarron and Mandelstam) witness the incident and are stimulated to rent rooms from Herr Maske, an upstanding civil servant. Maske was initially concerned that gossip about his wife's underpants might cast a shadow upon his respectable standing in Wilhelmine society, or even cost him his job, but when he realizes that the rent from the rooms creates a small rise in the Maske living standards, he announces to his wife that they can now start a family. Frau Maske reluctantly agrees, perhaps because she knows that she may already have conceived a child by either Mandelstam or Scarron.