plays.

The Difficult Man

The Difficult Man is Hofmannsthal’s only play that takes place in contemporary Vienna. The principal characters are members of the Austrian aristocracy who have survived World War I. The protagonist (the “difficult man” of the title) is Count Hans Karl Bühl, aged thirty-nine, whose essence almost defies description: In some ways, he is simple, like a child, and yet he is highly complex. He is truthful and highly sensitive to the confusions that arise every time he opens his mouth. Because of his profound distrust of language, he prefers to remain silent, but the entire plot of the comedy depends on his having to speak, to convey important messages to other characters.

During the afternoon before a big party in the house of Count Altenwyl, Hans Karl has a series of conversations in his own house. He has declined an invitation to the party but is persuaded by his older sister, Crescence, to attend after all, in order to ask for the hand of Helen Altenwyl on behalf of his nephew Stani (Crescence’s son). From the conversation between Hans Karl and Crescence, the audience learns that Helen has been in love with Hans Karl and probably still is, but he denies that he is in any way attached to her. Hans Karl’s decision to attend the party is also motivated by his wish to speak to Antoinette Hechingen, with whom he had had a brief affair two years earlier. During the war, he had become a friend of Count Hechingen, and he now wishes to reconcile Antoinette to her husband. During the party (act 2), Hans Karl has two important conversations, one with Antoinette and one with Helen. At the conclusion of the party (act 3), there occurs the crucial conversation between Helen and Hans Karl that culminates in their engagement.

Throughout the play, Hans Karl is the pivotal figure around whom everything revolves and with whom most of the play’s other characters interact. Both the comedy and the serious implications of the play arise from the fact that none of the many other characters, except Helen (and Hans Karl’s faithful servant, Lukas), understands Hans Karl’s “difficult” personality, and they invariably draw the wrong conclusions from his words and actions. The dramatic structure of the play is not complex: Serious scenes are invariably followed by comical ones, until the final ritualistic embrace provides comedy’s traditional affirmation of life through marriage and the promise of procreation.

The three serious conversations in the play reveal the mature poet’s views on the central issues of man’s life in society. During the encounter with Antoinette, Hans Karl at first asserts a grateful acceptance of beautiful, if fleeting, moments and warns her against seeking permanence in such necessarily transient pleasures. According to him, human relationships, particularly relationships between men and women, are haphazard, and “everyone could live with everyone else if chance so decreed.” This reality, however, is so difficult to accept that humanity had to invent the institution of marriage, which “transforms the accidental and the impure into necessity and permanence.” In his attempt to lead Antoinette back to her husband, Hans Karl describes what a man’s love for a woman means: “That a man loves a woman he can demonstrate only through . . . one single thing on earth: Through permanence, through constancy.” Elaborating on the idea of “necessity,” he says that wherever it exists between men and women, “there is a drawing together, and pardon and reconciliation and staying together. And there may be children, and there is a marriage and sanctity in spite of everything.” The irony of Hans Karl’s words at this point is that, on a conscious level, he means to apply them to Antoinette and her husband, but on a subconscious level he is speaking about Helen and himself, a fact that is intuitively perceived by Antoinette. Their conversation ends with a halfhearted promise by Antoinette that she will try to live with her husband, provided that Hans Karl will visit her often to encourage her.

In spite of a few intervening scenes, Hans Karls’s statements on love and marriage have prepared the audience for his first important conversation with Helen. It is a tender and delicate encounter between two sophisticated and sensitive people who are in love with each other but are prevented by social conventions and their own psyches from admitting this fact. Ostensibly, Hans Karl wants to speak to Helen about his nephew Stani, who wants to marry her, but their conversation is curiously muted, and Stani is mentioned only in passing. Eventually Hans Karl says that Helen should marry “a good, noble human being—and a [real] man.” He believes that he himself does not have these qualities and rises, as if to terminate the conversation. Helen feels that he is trying to say good-bye to her forever and quickly tells him about a sort of déjà vu experience: She feels that in her thoughts, she and Hans Karl once stood in a similar setting, with the same music being played in the background, and he said farewell to her. This prompts him to tell her of an experience during the war when he thought he would die, and, for thirty seconds, he had a vision of his entire life, and she was his wife: “Not my future wife. That is the strange thing. Simply my wife. As a fait accompli.” As Helen grows ever more agitated, Hans Karl presents a Claudio-like interpretation of his vision: “In a chosen moment it was to be impressed on my mind what the happiness looks like that I forfeited.” He goes on to tell her how he had a vision of her marriage but did not know to whom she was married. At this point, he realizes that she is so upset that she is close to collapsing. He apologizes for “all his confused talk” and bids her farewell. She also says good-bye, and they try to shake hands, but their hands do not meet. A pompous “Famous Man” and Crescence provide comic relief as Hans Karl rushes offstage. When Helen almost collapses into Crescence’s arms, Crescence once more misunderstands the situation, believing that Helen has agreed to marry her son Stani.

In the third act, there occurs an excellent example of a psychological process that Hofmannsthal called “allomatism”—that is, the transformation of one character through the influence of another. Hans Karl has left the party. Helen totally discards all social conventions as she prepares to leave her father’s house so that she can look for Hans Karl. She hands a letter addressed to her father to an old manservant and asks him to stay with her father when he reads it. At this moment, Hans Karl reenters the vestibule. During the ensuing conversation, Helen has the leading role; she has an uncanny air of authority and of psychic power about her as she explains Hans Karl’s own self to him: “Your will, your self . . . turned you around when you were alone and led you back to me. . . .” Then she becomes unabashedly a woman in love, as she lays claim to him and at the same time gives herself to him. Helen’s psychic strength, her intellect, and her charm are thus able to release Hans Karl from his preexistential “difficultness” and to lead him into existence.

To varying degrees, Hofmannsthal’s serious dramas continued to deal with the problem of preexistence versus existence. In order to combat the deterioration of political, social, and moral values so prevalent in Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and in order to fill a spiritual void, he wrote a number of religious dramas. Their heroes leave the plane of preexistence and enter the second (temporal) plane of existence. Having entered the second plane, they lose their claim to the first one, but if their activity is of an extraordinary quality, they transcend the temporal plane and attain the third plane, that of the “superego,” which encompasses all the knowledge and insight of preexistence, as well as the actual experiences of temporal life.

In Hofmannsthal’s earlier religious dramas, the evils of contemporary society are represented by allegorical, universal figures. For example, the ruthlessness of modern capitalism is exemplified by Everyman in the play of that title, and the mindless brutality of revolution is embodied in the Beggar in The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World. In these religious dramas, the protagonists eventually reach a point at which they transcend their human limitations, attaining the superego. Their attainment of the superego invariably results from their acceptance of Christian ethical standards. Because of the allegorical quality of these plays, the protagonist’s attainment of his superego must always be extended to suggest some sort of salvation for man, for contemporary society.

The Tower

Toward the end of his life, Hofmannsthal no longer considered this optimistic solution acceptable. This change in his Weltanschauung had a profound effect on the final version of his tragedy The Tower. The author’s main concern in this play is again preexistence, or rather, the fate that befalls humans once they leave preexistence and pass into “real life.” This fate is portrayed as a ruthless and anonymous power that crushes the individual. Hofmannsthal described his intentions regarding the theme of the drama in the following manner: “To portray the truly merciless elements of our reality into which the soul passes from a dark, mythical realm.” The span of temporal life through which the protagonist, Prince Sigismund, must pass presents Hofmannsthal with the opportunity to portray the evils of society with utter realism, while the figures who perpetrate these evils are again drawn as allegorical, universal figures.

The Tower may be divided into three parts, corresponding to Sigismund’s three stages of existence. The first part concerns his confinement in the tower (preexistence), the second part deals with his temporal life until his renunciation of worldly power, and the third part relates the remainder of his temporal life, during which his soul has already attained the superego. Throughout the play, society and the evil forces dominating it are juxtaposed with the purity of Sigismund.

It is noteworthy that during the first part, Sigismund’s preexistence is represented as a painful confinement from which he yearns to be released. The tower, whose symbolic value changes throughout the play, is at this point a prison situated at the very frontier of the realm. Sigismund is a captive there, not only physically but also spiritually. The geographic remoteness of the tower from the king’s court symbolizes Sigismund’s spiritual remoteness from the rest of humanity.

In the course of the play, Sigismund comes to recognize both the necessity for engagement and the futility of any temporal programs—especially political programs—that seek to alter fundamentally the lot of humankind. In the final scenes of the revised version of The Tower, Hofmannsthal concedes the possibility of salvation for exceptional individuals, but he presents the rest of humanity as so evil as to be beyond redemption.

Having the doubtful benefit of hindsight, today’s reader is awed by the prophetic quality of Hofmannsthal’s vision, grounded in his early diagnosis of the self-imposed isolation of the artist. In his attempt to come to grips with the realities of the modern world, Hofmannsthal rejected aestheticism, yet he ended by investing such despairing faith as he possessed in his notion of a spiritual elite, an aristocracy of the soul.