Ökonomien der Parodie am Wiener Vorstadttheater: Unterhaltungsdramatik in politischen und sozioökonomischen Krisenzeiten (1813–1830) by Matthias Mansky (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ökonomien der Parodie am Wiener Vorstadttheater: Unterhaltungsdramatik in politischen und sozioökonomischen Krisenzeiten (1813–1830) by Matthias Mansky Jeffrey A. Hertel Matthias Mansky, Ökonomien der Parodie am Wiener Vorstadttheater: Unterhaltungsdramatik in politischen und sozioökonomischen Krisenzeiten (1813–1830). Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2022. 640 pp. The raucous farces, satires, and parodies of the Viennese Vorstadttheater have been an area of continual but ultimately limited research interest. The field remains understudied in spite of the stage being the primary mode of literary production for mass consumption during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Habsburg monarchy was at its zenith of influence in Europe. Though this period is often described as a time of reactionary censorship, Biedermeier retreats into the domestic sphere, and apparent disinterest in social and political issues, there is reason to question this received narrative. One of the most important recent attempts to complicate the image [End Page 103] of Ruhe and Ordnung arrives with the publication of Matthias Mansky's Ökonomien der Parodie am Wiener Volksstadttheater. Combining a survey of the parodic "economies" of the Viennese stage with their relationship to bread-and-butter questions of the day, the volume introduces, contextualizes, and reproduces six of the most biting parodies of the time. The work ends with commentary on the parodies by reviewers in the original context and editorial remarks on the texts. Taken as a whole, Mansky offers an illuminating presentation of an important yet arcane corner of the nineteenth-century Viennese stage and the accompanying public sphere quite in line with recent critical approaches to the period from more researched areas of German Studies. With few exceptions, previous studies of the Viennese Vorstadttheater have focused on a handful of authors (Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy) and their relationship to received morality and government censorship. While these basic interpretive elements still animate Ökonomien der Parodie, the volume compounds the traditional picture by walking readers through the intertextual network of the parodic stage, where works exist in close relationship to referents outside of that which is on stage. This extends not just to other texts but also to the lived experiences of audiences. In this way, Mansky manages to recreate the most salient socioeconomic and discursive spheres in which parody acted as an intellectual and cultural currency of the time, offering a welcome addition to studies like Meike Wagner's Theater und Öffentlichkeit im Vormärz (Akademie Verlag, 2013). One example of the importance of Mansky's revision of established discourses comes in explaining the backhanded nature of many of the dramas' "Happy Ende." Many parodies are peopled by figures of low class status, and many of the works end with that most quintessential of happy endings: a wedding. While this is a trope almost universal to the comic stage, Mansky makes a crucial point: Most of the people getting married are poor, a circumstance that aims a satiric barb directly at a legally binding "obrigkeitliche Heiratserlaubnis" that, aiming to prevent a "Vermehrung der unerwünschten verarmten Massen," "sollte sicherstellen, dass die Existenz des Paares von vornherein finanziell abgesichert war" (44). This sort of insight extends the approach championed by Patrick Eiden-Offe in Poesie der Klasse (Matthes und Seitz, 2017), who argues, using the example of Ludwig Tieck, that the supposedly apolitical nature of Unterhaltungsliteratur can be [End Page 104] productively reframed by considering the socioeconomic implications of myriad topics in Biedermeier literature. Tongue-in-cheek references to Missstände in the reigning sociopolitical circumstances abound throughout the period and come into sharp relief through this volume's six parodies. The works lampoon a range of material from highbrow dramatic works such as Schiller's Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua and Die Jungfrau von Orleans—retooled as Fiesko der Salamikrämer by Joseph Alois Gleich and Die Jungfrau von Wien by Hermann Herzenskron—to more lowbrow fare like August von Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue, reinterpreted by Adolf Bäuerle as Der Leopoldstag oder: Kein Menschenhass und keine Reue. In each of these titles, we see one of the most salient mechanisms by which parodic culture flourished: the localization or parodic provincialization of aesthetic content, which ridiculed a universal aesthetic and simultaneously made...