Hochwälder, Fritz

Hochwälder, Fritz (1911–86), Austrian dramatist, born in Vienna, but resident since 1938 in Switzerland, where he had his first success in the theatre with Das heilige Experiment (1945), which as The Strong are Lonely was seen in New York in 1953 and in London, with Wolfit in the chief part, in 1955. It deals with the destruction of the Jesuit Community in Paraguay in the 18th century, and displays considerable theatrical skill in dramatizing a moral issue. After Der Flüchtling (The Fugitive, 1945), set in modern times, Höchwalder again used a historical setting for Der öffentliche Ankläger (1947; London, also 1947, as The Public Prosecutor), in which the eponymous character, briefed to conduct a case against an anonymous ‘enemy of the people’, finds that he himself is the accused. Donadieu (1953) depicts a man giving shelter to his wife's murderer; Die Herberge (The Inn, 1956) shows the investigation of a theft leading to the discovery of a far greater crime; in Der Unschuldige (The Innocent Man, 1958), a comedy with serious undertones, a man realizes that though innocent of the murder of which he is accused he might very well have committed it; Der Himbeerpflücker (The Raspberry Picker, 1965) satirizes the latent Nazism of a small Austrian town; and in Der Befehl (The Command, 1968) Hochwälder returns to the situation of The Public Prosecutor. His Die Prinzessin von Chimay was performed in 1981. Hochwälder was concerned with a conflict of ideas, emphasized not by the use of modern stage techniques but by a strict adherence to the classical unities.