Carl Zuckmayer criticism

Together with Bertolt Brecht and Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Zuckmayer (1890-1977) was one of the most popular and significant German dramatists of the twentieth century. His folk play The Merry Vineyard (1925) marked the end of German expressionism; his comedy The Captain of Kopenick (1931), a scathing satire on German militarism, and his drama The Devil's General (1946), about a Nazi general and German resistance, were some of the most frequently performed plays in recent German theater history.

During the Third Reich Zuckmayer's works were banned in Germany while their author lived as an exile in the United States, trying to survive as a farmer in Vermont. For that reason, Zuckmayer scholarship was off to a slow start. Wagener demonstrates that it received its main impetus from the United States where the majority of dissertations on Zuckmayer were written.

He shows the development of scholarship from reviews to general assessments, from positivistic biographical fact finding to the New Criticism and finally to recent modes of critical assessment, including feminist criticism. Wagener draws particular attention to the role of the Carl Zuckmayer Society in critical discourse about this neglected author.