Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Use and Abuse of the Unborn Child

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Franz Xaver Kroetz was arguably the most popular West German playwright of the seventies, and at the same time, one of the most explicitly political authors of that decade. His work sought to confront West German society with the victims of its own economic successes. And yet his aesthetic strategies and thematic emphases always seemed to hamper the realization of his political ambitions. Works of art that are generated on the basis of an explicitly political aesthetic are generally just as self-contradictory as are works of art that have no pretense to an expressed political foundation, and it is at points of inner contradiction that an analysis of an explicitly political aesthetic strategy can often be most productive. Such an analysis of Kroetz's overall political aesthetic project uncovers contradictions between his avowedly radical leftist position throughout the seventies and early eighties and his presentation of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and birth in his plays of that period. This article examines the following questions: How do the discrepancies between Kroetz's political aesthetic objectives and his perception of socio-political realities manifest themselves within one specific thematic area such as pregnancy? How does he construct the (unborn) child to crystallize certain views on contemporary society or to further his own political, aesthetic project? Where does the unborn child fit into his overall portrayal of interpersonal relations generally and relations between the sexes specifically? Kroetz became the dramatic sensation of the West German stage when two of his early one-act plays premiered to a scandalized German audience in 1971. One scene that met with vehement vocal opposition was the onstage attempt by one of the characters in Heimarbeit to perform an abortion on herself. The view of a young woman wielding a knitting needle with the explicit intent of using it for a home-abortion, albeit facing away from the audience, proved too much for staid West German theatre audiences. The attempted abortion incited intense protest within the West German public, and the demonstrations clearly expressed the public's outrage with the author's work. Yet the scandal itself may very well