Franz Xaver Kroetz

Franz Xaver Kroetz (born 25 February 1946 in Munich) is a German author, playwright, actor and film director. His plays have been translated and performed internationally.

Kroetz attended an acting school in Munich and the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. He worked as a day-laborer and was active in the German political party DKP, Germany Communist Party, from 1971 to 1980.

He became famous when in 1971 the premiere of his plays Heimarbeit (House-work) and Hartnäckig (Persistent) were disrupted by neo-fascists. His plays in the 1970s portrayed people who had been rendered speechless by their own social misery. In the play Das Nest (The Nest), the protagonist is a truck driver. His boss orders him to dump toxic waste into a lake, thus soiling his "nest." He wrote a libretto based on his play Stallerhof (1971) for an opera of the same name which Gerd Kühr composed in 1987/88. It was premiered at the first Munich Biennale in 1988. The play was staged at the Burgtheater in 2010 by David Bösch.

In her book Franz Xaver Kroetz The Construction of a Political Aesthetic, Michelle Mattson of the Columbia University summarizes:

Franz Xaver Kroetz – banana-cutter, hospital orderly, fledgling actor and, more significantly, Germany's most popular contemporary dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This study, which situates Kroetz's aesthetics in a political context, focuses on four plays that mark crisis points in his development of a political aesthetic.

Kroetz wrote for the television series Tatort, Spiel mit Karten in 1980 and Wolf im Schafspelz in 2002. He is also known for his role as the gossip columnist 'Baby' Schimmerlos (roughly 'Baby Clueless') in the television series Kir Royal. His income from acting made writing without financial worries possible.

Kroetz was awarded several prizes, including in 2005 the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

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