SOURCE: "Ferdinand Raimund's Gutenstein Poems," in Essays on German Literature in Honour of G. Joyce Hallamore, edited by Michael S. Batts and Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz, University of Toronto Press, 1968, pp. 128-51.

In the following essay, Krügel explores the imagery of Raimund's Gutenstein poems and studies reflections of the tragic quality of the dramatist's life in these works.

Many critics have shown how the essential optimism of Ferdinand Raimund's dramas is weakened by tragic undertones.¹ Politzer suggests that the Baroque theatre, from which Raimund's plays derive their metaphysical framework, may be seen as the expression not only of belief in a cosmic order, but more disquietingly, of man's insignificance in the larger scheme of things.² Thus, the course of human existence in Raimund's dramas seems largely determined by hosts of spirits and allegorical personifications in constant conflict with one another. In constructing such mythology, Rommel writes, Raimund not...