ABSTRACT
Karl Schonherr was a Tyrolean playwright who nevertheless lived mostly in Vienna. This chapter examines how his plays were appropriated by all regimes and political persuasions, from the Habsburgs to the Nazis, and to what ends. Some revealing conclusions are offered, and Schonherr's own complex responses to the adoption of his plays are analysed. The Heimat values these embrace may be absolute, but the results they have for human beings living with them and bound by them are tragic enough for Schonherr's drama implicitly to question them. Schonherr's dramas were quickly taken up in Vienna by the Deutsches Volkstheater, particularly in the form of regular Gastspiele in the summer and winter months by the Innsbruck-based, family-run troupe the Exl-Buhne. Political abstinence did not stop Schonherr's work from being appropriated by the political Right as a model of 'appropriate' and 'authentic' Austrian-German literature in literary guides or lists, motivated in many cases by anti-Semitism.
