Hanswurst or Hans Wurst ( German for "Johnny Sausage") was a popular coarse-comic

stock character A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a type of character in a narrative (e.g. a novel, play, television show, or film) whom audiences recognize across many narratives or as part of a storytelling tradition or convention. Th ...

of German-speaking impromptu comedy. He is "a half doltish, half cunning, partly stupid, partly knowing, enterprising and cowardly, self indulgent and merry fellow, who, in accordance with circumstances, accentuated one or other of these characteristics." Through the 16th and 17th centuries, he was a buffoon character in rural carnival theaters and touring companies.

History

The name first appeared in a

Middle Low German Middle Low German is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented in writing since about 1225–34 (). During the Hanseatic period (from about 1300 to about 1600), Mid ...

version of Sebastian Brant's '' Ship of Fools'' (1494) (using the name Hans myst). "Hanswurst" was also a mockery and insult.

Martin Luther Martin Luther ( ; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, Theology, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and former Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. Luther was the seminal figure of the Reformation, Pr ...

used it in his 1541 pamphlet (''Against Hanswurst''), when he railed against the Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick. In 1712, Joseph Anton Stranitzky developed and popularized the role of Hanswurst. The theater historian Otto Rommel saw this as the beginning of the so-called Viennese popular theater. Stranitzky's Hanswurst wore the garb of a peasant from

Salzburg Salzburg is the List of cities and towns in Austria, fourth-largest city in Austria. In 2020 its population was 156,852. The city lies on the Salzach, Salzach River, near the border with Germany and at the foot of the Austrian Alps, Alps moun ...

, with a wide-brimmed hat on. His humor was often sexual and scatological. The character found numerous imitators. In the "Hanswurst dispute" of the 1730s the scholar Johann Christoph Gottsched and the actress Friederike Caroline Neuber strove to banish the buffoon from the German-speaking stage, in order to improve the quality of German comedy and raise its social status, holding a public "banishing" of Hanswurst. This met with resistance, especially in Vienna. However, the staged banishment has generally been regarded as an emblematic moment in German theater history for the transition from popular, improvised, so-called to a modern bourgeois literary mode. The last notable Hanswurst was Franz Schuch, who merged Hanswurst with the stock Harlequin character. The Italian-French Harlequin replaced Hanswurst. In the later 18th century Hanswurst was out of fashion and was only used in the puppet theater. Comical characters like Punch or Staberl replaced him for several decades. At the instigation of Joseph of Sonnenfels after the French Revolution (Memorandum for the future of theater censorship guidelines, 1790) the Emperor Joseph II forbade improvised comedy and burlesque-like buffoon games. Due to authoritarian fear of political agitation, arts were directed towards fixed literary form theater (the "regular theater") and silent, music-accompanied pantomime. In 1775, a 26-year-old

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Polit ...

wrote a farce entitled ''Hanswurst's Wedding''. In his 1797 comedy ''Puss in Boots'' (),

Ludwig Tieck Johann Ludwig Tieck (; ; 31 May 177328 April 1853) was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romanticism, Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early life Tieck w ...

brought back the part of Hanswurst. For the Viennese Musical and Theatrical Exhibition of 1892, the actor Ludwig Gottsleben played Hanswurst.

20th century to present

The German film comedy '' The Comedians'' (1941) by GW Pabst, which was marked by the ideology of the war, portrayed

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (; ; 22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781) was a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the dev ...

, a German national poet, in a victorious battle against the foul-mouthed Hanswurst. The historical Lessing had written Hanswurst into the Hamburg Dramaturgy, and called the banishment "the biggest buffoonery of all" ().

References

{{Authority control Comedy theatre characters Male characters in theatre German humour