About the work
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's one-act comedy was premiered in spring 1793 at the Weimar Court Theatre and is Goethe's most immediate dramatic reaction to the French Revolution. The work was composed in continuation of Goethe's revolutionary satires and combines peasant comedy with political parody.
Plot
The work-shy village barber Schnaps has acquired the cockade and uniform of a French citizen-general and struts through the village in them to demand respect and free meals. When he bullies old farmer Märten, whose daughter is engaged to Jörge, a political denunciation for revolutionary agitation looms — which would bring the whole village into trouble. The lord of the manor orders the situation with wisdom and clemency and lets Schnaps go rather than report him. The play ends with a conservative formula of peace.
Cultural significance
Der Bürgergeneral is Goethe's politically most problematic work and was mostly rejected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literary criticism as reactionary farce. Georg Forster attacked the play as naive trivialisation of the Revolution. Despite the political criticism the work remains interesting as document of German revolutionary reception and is occasionally shown in student productions as historical mirror of its epoch.