Kasimir und Karoline

Universitätsring 2

1010 Wien

 

“And love never stops” is the motto of Horváth’s “Ballad” from the Munich Oktoberfest in the early 1930s. However, the love between Kasimir, who was fired as a chauffeur that day, and Karoline, who doesn't want to let go of her higher ambitions, ends in the third of one hundred and seventeen scenes with the words: “Get lost!” And so it comes true the sentence about love that doesn't stop, which at first sounds simply malicious, continues throughout the course of the piece. The fact that love is viewed and used in this piece primarily as a vehicle for social advancement and decline only makes it more enduring in a certain sense. But not more permanently, because every new ride to an (even) better life must be used immediately and there is no time to look back: “What is dead is dead and there are no ghosts, especially between the sexes.”
Karoline, who goes from being with a fired chauffeur, to being with a commercial councilor for a moment and finally ends up with the cutter from the children's department, tries to do with calculation what obviously cannot be achieved with feeling: "People without feeling have it much easier in life."
They will still need the coldness that Horváth's characters display in this 1932 play.

 

(Source: burgtheater.at)