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with Robert Dassanowsky, ed. Günter Bischof. New Orleans, LA: 
UNO Press, 2015. 95 pp.  

In spite of the ongoing ministrations (and subventions) by the Goethe-
Institut to bring German literature to a reading audience in the United 
States, there is a marked dearth of German-language drama available 
for American audiences in print, and the record of contemporary 
German theatre texts being staged this side of the Atlantic is nothing if 
not lamentable. Blame partly the habitually very selective attention of 
U.S. literary culture to foreign works, but also the enormous aesthetic 
gap between European “postdramatic” performance practices in which 
texts are only the point of departure (and sometimes the point of no 
return) for the inventions and interventions of Regietheater and an 
American taste for drama that is often stultifyingly mired in conventions 
of Realism and representation. Little wonder that, quite apart from the 
linguistic challenges they present, works by Elfriede Jelinek, René 
Pollesch, or Falk Richter are rarely seen here. 

So the present translation of Felix Mitterer’s 2013 drama 
Jägerstätter, which has the potential to bridge that gap, is a most 
welcome enterprise. Mitterer has been a productive and award-winning 
playwright and screenwriter (notably for the TV crime series Tatort) 
since the mid-1970s. Frequently produced in Vienna as well as in a 
number of Austrian regional theatres, wider recognition of his work, 
even in the German-speaking countries, has probably suffered 
because he thinks of himself as a Heimatdichter, a regionalist writer. 
Like his countryman Ödön von Horváth—he received the eponymously 
named literary prize—Mitterer’s genre is the critical popular play 
(kritisches Volksstück) which through episodic structure and folk idiom 
reveals the blinkered attitudes and reactionary politics of the provincial 
milieu.  

Franz Jägerstätter, the historical protagonist of this play, is 
however no less than a heroic figure whose courageous and ultimately 
fatal act of resistance against the Nazi war machine sets him in stark 
relief to the cowering acquiescence of his compatriots. A young, rather 
impetuous and carefree farmer in the Austrian town of St. Radegund 
(he had fathered an illegitimate child), Jägerstätter was by 1943 
married and the father of three when the Wehrmacht annulled his 
deferral from the draft and insisted that he join the badly faltering 
German war effort. Recognizing the horrors of the slaughter and the 
moral insanity of the war, Jägerstätter, a pious Catholic whose 
Christianity was more than lip-service, became a conscientious 
objector. In spite of pleas by his family, his priest, his lawyer, and even 
the Bishop of Linz (who, quite in line with ecclesiastical complicity, all 
but commanded Jägerstätter to enlist), Jägerstätter held out in the face 
of certain annihilation, and was tried and executed in Berlin in 1943. 

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That Jägerstätter’s fate, unlike that of the much more familiar 
Hans and Sophie Scholl (who were also guided by religious faith), is 
largely unknown in Austria and Germany is no coincidence. As the 
useful preface by Günter Bischof and introduction by translator Gregor 
Thuswaldner explain, Jägerstätter’s martyrdom ran afoul of Austria’s 
post-war victim complex in which the myth persisted that the country 
had been irresistibly conscripted into the evil machinations of an 
outside power. The young farmer’s sacrifice gave the lie to the 
narrative of the untarnished heroism of the Austrian soldiers. Neither 
the Church nor the Left, though for very different reasons, wanted to 
own his act of resistance. His widow Franziska was subjected to 
hostilities after the war and denied a widow’s pension. It was not until, 
ironically, an American scholar, and later a television documentary, 
picked up his cause that Jägerstätter’s case was reexamined, 
culminating with his beatification in 2007. 

Mitterer’s play, drawing on letters and other historical 
documents, sets the story out in a mostly linear and simply suggestive 
style, though, a good Brechtian, he tells us right at the start that 
Jägerstätter will perish. In Mitterer’s episodic drama, Jägerstätter is a 
fallible character, tender-hearted but irascible, proud and clear-eyed, 
unimpressed by intimidation, whose stiffening resolve against the 
gathering storm rises to the inexorable heights of tragic fate. This 
Catholic martyr aligns with the imperturbable creed of Martin Luther—
“Here I stand, I can do no other”—or with the immovable conviction of 
Michael Kohlhaas in Kleist’s story. As Arthur Miller says in his well-
known essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” “we are in the 
presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life . . . to secure 
one thing, his sense of personal dignity.” Indeed, there is even a 
chorus of townspeople in Mitterer’s play, though it represents less the 
moral wisdom of the polis, as in ancient tragedy, than the wheedling, 
bellicose voice of conventional conformity, shot through with pious 
nostrums and Nazi platitudes. 

Thuswaldner’s translation (aided in the process by Robert 
Dassanowsky and Jeff Miller) is more than serviceable; it is for the 
most part both accurate in its particulars and broadly playable. He 
acknowledges in his introduction that the play presents the translator 
with several inherent difficulties owed to its “folkloristic undertones” and 
“non-standard varieties of Austrian-German” (xxv-xxvi). Indeed, much 
like the language of Horváth or, in its German equivalents, of Brecht, 
Fleisser, or Kroetz, Mitterer’s is a Kunstsprache, a linguistic construct 
evocative of popular speech rather than a transcription of Upper 
Austrian sociolects. In the original, this language has subtextural 
flexibility and subtlety as it does both the work of concealing and 
revealing, depending on the speaker. It can come across as blunt and 
hostile, but also as deeply honest and even lyrical. Thuswaldner does 
his best (and his best is indeed very good) to render the connotations 

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