About the work
Martin Sperr's three-act "Volksstück" was written in 1965 and premiered on 27 May 1966 at Theater Bremen, where the young author himself held his first engagement as an actor. It is the opening part of his "Bavarian Trilogy," which made him instantly famous and, alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Franz Xaver Kroetz, established him as a renewer of the critical folk play.
Plot
In the Lower Bavarian village of Reinöd, everyday life appears to return to normal after the 1948 currency reform, but the community soon finds a new target for its hostility. Abram, a homosexual outsider who has returned from elsewhere, is increasingly bullied and excluded. Driven to despair, he commits murder, while the village celebrates its restored "peace" at the harvest festival that follows.
Cultural significance
Sperr continued the tradition of Ödön von Horváth's interwar critical folk play, turning its unsparing gaze onto the Bavarian provinces of the postwar years. Peter Fleischmann filmed the material in 1968 under its original title; the play has since become a key work of the new German "Volksstück" of the 1960s.