German triumphs

No question about it. If you had to name the 500 brightest periods in the history of human creativity, you wouldn’t include West Germany in the 1970s. What did they give us, those occidental Heinrichs and Helmuts? The Volkswagen Golf, the Baader-Meinhof gang, Boney M and a team of hyperefficient donkeys who fluked the World Cup in 1974. But with the passage of time one star begins to shine more brilliantly in the firmament. You probably haven’t heard of Franz Xaver Kroetz (b. Munich 1946). His work is elusive, undemonstrative and highly subtle and he specialises in unglamorous family dramas. His method was experimental back in the 70s. He interspersed lengthy dramatic scenes with sudden brief snapshots of his characters in revealing attitudes. But this nervy, lopsided method now looks formally exact and rather ingenious. Presentation mirrors substance.

The central character in Mensch Meier (oddly translated as ‘Tom Fool’ where something like ‘Joe Average’ might have done better) is a factory worker who, let’s face it, is incredibly dull. He lives in a drab flat with a plump blonde wife and a clueless, feckless, jobless son. He’s obsessed with saving money and he spends his free hours toying with a radio-controlled aeroplane and delivering lectures about the dignity of work to the deaf ears of the sprawling layabout. He’s going nowhere, in other words. And he knows it. In a quietly self-lacerating soliloquy he acknowledges the full extent of his enslavement to the car factory where he passes his waking life fixing screws into the rear chassis of some mass-produced Eurobox. And, finally, he flips. He goes on the rampage and smashes up everything in his home. His wife responds calmly. She moves the broken furniture to one side, takes out the old 1970s Hoover and vacuums every inch of the stage.