100th birthday of Carl Zuckmayer - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1996 - 100 Pfennig

Grown up on December 27, 1896 Nackenheim born Carl Zuckmayer in good middle-class conditions in Mainz. After graduating from high school, he, like many of his peers, went to war with "trance-like lust." The front experience quickly led to disillusionment, Zuckmayer grasped a "greed for knowledge, education, knowledge", at the end of the war he was a pacifist idealist. With the popular play "Der fröhliche Weinberg" (1925), which earned him the Kleist Prize, Zuckmayer found his own dramatic style and made the breakthrough to success on stage. This was followed by "Schinderhannes" (1927), a dramatic robber ballad about the rebel Johann Bückler, and "Katharina Knie" (1928), a romantic piece from the circus milieu. In 1929 Zuckmayer received the Georg Büchner Prize. Zuckmayer celebrated his greatest theatrical triumph with the "Captain von Koepenick" (1931), a satirical comedy on German authority. In 1933, Zuckmayer retreated to his home near Salzburg, escaped to Switzerland in mid-March 1938 and, a year later, went into exile with his family in the United States. There he lived for several years as a farmer in Vermont. In 1943 he began work on the play "The Devil's General", which premiered in Zurich in December 1945, became the most successful play of the early post-war years and one of the first public discussions about the recent past in Germany. In 1958 Zuckmayer moved to Switzerland. His autobiography appeared in 1966 "As if it were a piece of me." Carl Zuckmayer died on 18 January 1977 in Visp (Switzerland). (Text: Eckart Oehlenschläger, Königswinter)