Directing
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The pub “Zum Weißen Lamm” (the White Lamb) is filled to the brim with nasty bores. The innkeeper, played by a sweat-soaked Helmut Qualtinger, and his self-righteous circle of regulars are thrown into turmoil when a quest who is supposedly “the Rasberry picker,” a former SS officer, checks in.
Three upright apprentices - tailor Zwirn, carpenter Leim, and shoemaker Knieriem - win a lottery and get rich overnight. Leim marries his master’s daughter, Zwirn squanders his fortune on the glamorous Signora Palpiti, and Knieriem drinks away his wealth. Horrified, Leim strives to rescue his friends and restore their middle‐class lives.
Writer Charles Condomine invites a fortune teller to his home to study for a planned book and learn her particular jargon. A married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bradman, are also invited to the planned séance. The result of the necromancy is unexpected: Condomine's first wife, Elvia, who died years ago, appears. Was she summoned by her husband's unspoken wish? He is now married to Ruth, which makes his first wife's return from the afterlife somewhat unpleasant. Especially for Ruth, for whom her rival remains invisible for a long time. Meanwhile, Elvira settles down at home and woos her husband. Charles is initially flattered, but gradually two women begin to get on his nerves...
The antihero "Mr. Karl" tells a "young person", the viewer, his life story while he sits at work in the warehouse of a delicatessen. The narrator increasingly turns out to be an opportunistic follower from the petty-bourgeois milieu, who maneuvered his way through life in the changing course of Austrian history from the end of the First World War to the end of the occupation in the 1950s.
Karl Bockerer is a Viennese original. He survives the ‘great times’ – to his own dismay his birthday is on the same day as the one of the “Führer” – by pretending to be more stupid than he really is, and uncovers, over and over again, the hypocrisy and the uptightness of the epic nonsense in his milieu by means of real and phony naivety. Where Schweijk made a mockery of the ruling system by being a presumptive follower, the Viennese butcher strives against the tide. And he is not alone, has family and friends. His personal braveness protects him neither from the rebellion in his own house, nor from the horrors of total war…
Opera by Strauss
