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Part of the book: Character, Ideology, and Symbolism in the Plays of Wedekind, Sternheim, Kaiser, Toller, and Brecht

M. Helena Gonçalves da Silva

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 21

Modern Humanities Research Association

GermanDramaopen

Abstract.  Carl Sternheim. A nostalgic view of the late bourgeois. A comedy of masks. The bourgeois type revitalized and vindicated in his social drives with consequent softening of caricature. The bourgeois as a foil to other social types. Sternheim's ambivalence and the historical limitations of his standpoint. Die Hose: The petit bourgeois triumphs in his domestic environment through conformism. Der Snob: The bourgeois outdoes the aristocrat through wealth and style. 1913: Sternheim's mistrust of the monopolist power of the bourgeoisie in the years before the war. Carica- ture of the revolutionary. Bürger Schippel: Schippel, the caricature of the worker with the ambition to become middle-class. Escape into nineteenth-century provincial Bürgertum. Tabula Rasa: The worker fulfils his bourgeois aspirations by being simultaneously sentimental and brutal. The materialistic justification of the mask.

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