Hanswurst
The buffoon ( and buffoon ) is a coarse - comic figure of the German-speaking impromptu comedy since the 16th century. As popular peasant figure of the buffoon occurred in pieces of carnival theater and touring companies. " Buffoon " was (and still is) as mockery and insult in use.
Physical description
After his most famous performer Josef Anton Stranitzky the buffoon was as follows: His costume consists of a red, open jacket with puffy sleeves, blue patch on the chest and in the middle it between the red, green framed suspenders a green heart; he has a wide yellow trousers, only extends to the ankles, low crude leather shoes and wide leather belt with a large buckle made of metal on which head the green pointy hat and a wooden sword.
History
The name first appears in a Middle Low German version of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools ( 1519) ( which was used hans myst in the original version of the name). Martin Luther used it in 1530 in an Admonition to the Clergy Assembled at the Diet of Augsburg in 1541 and wrote the pamphlet Wider Hans Worst. In the 16th and 17th centuries you meet these character names occasionally in carnival plays and comedies. 1775 wrote the 26 -year-old Johann Wolfgang Goethe a farce entitled buffoon wedding.
The traveling doctor and tenants of Kärntnertortheatre in Vienna since 1712, Josef Anton Stranitzky, made with his band " Teutscher comedians " the Commedia dell'Arte troops competition and developed to the buffoon as " German " comic figure. The theater historian Otto Rommel saw it as the beginning of the so-called Viennese popular theater. Stranitzky buffoon wore the garb of a peasant Salzburg ( Lungau Sauschneider ), had a hat with a wide brim and a fool bunk. Stranitzky wrote parodic "Main and State Actions " in which the buffoon mostly as servants Figure drove his stage mischief. This buffoon found numerous imitators. As the successor to the son-in Stranitzky, Gottfried came Prehauser (1699-1769) in 1725 from Salzburg to Vienna, where he replaced as the " New Wienerischer buffoon " Stranitzky on Kärntnertortheater.
In the " buffoon dispute" since the 1730s the scholar Johann Christoph Gottsched tried together with the actress Friederike Caroline Neuber to banish the buffoon of the German stage to improve the quality of German comedies and raise especially their social status. This came mainly in Vienna resistance. Even Caroline Neuber could not quite give up the buffoon as Prinzipalin a troupe of actors for economic reasons. The fighters against buffoon like Johann Friedrich Beautiful man in Germany were still a kind of forerunner of the educated middle-class German city theater.
The last important buffoon was the 1763 deceased Franz Schuch, who again approached the buffoon the Italian-French Harlequin. In the later 18th century, the clown came out of fashion and was only used in the puppet theater. Comic characters like Punch or Staberl replaced him for several decades. At the instigation of Joseph of Sun Rock after the French Revolution ( memorandum for the policies of the future theater censorship, 1790) forbade the Emperor Joseph II in a hand the ticket impromptu comedy and burlesque -like buffoon games and introduced the theater censorship. From authoritarian fear of political agitation, the impromptu comedy turned into a literary theater fixed (the " regular theater ' ) and in the mute, music accompanied pantomime. In his 1797 written comedy Puss in Boots Ludwig Tieck can again buffoon occur. On occasion, the Vienna Music and Theatre Exhibition 1892 buffoon experienced by the actor Ludwig God lives again a rebirth.
In the German film comedians of GW Pabst ( 1941), was influenced by the ideology of the interwar period, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing occurs as a German national poet to a victorious battle against the foul-mouthed buffoon. - The historical Lessing, however, had spoken out in the Hamburg Dramaturgy for the buffoon.