Fritz Hochwälder

Esslin, who coined the term "Theatre of the Absurd", may well have found compelling Hochwälder's often paradoxical plot twists. For example, Der Himbeerpflücker (The Raspberry Picker, 1965) shows how the leaders of an Austrian town mistake a small town crook for a Nazi war criminal and treat him as a returning hero. This play was undoubtedly a homage to Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector, but Hochwälder was able to put his own historical spin and moral message on the saga of mistaken identity.

After he left the camps, he lived in Zurich where he met and was influenced by Georg Kaiser, another exiled playwright. Kaiser was his senior by several decades and also wrote tightly constructed plays with psychological underpinnings and a strong moralist stance. Hochwälder's 1945 play Der Flüchtling (The Refugee) was attributed by the author to a suggestion from the German dramatist.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Hochwälder wrote social and political dramas, using historical themes in his plays. One of his earlier works Das Heilige Experiment (1942; adapted for the screen in 1959: The Strong Are Lonely) drew on the violent dismantling of a utopian Jesuit settlement by the Spaniards in Paraguay in the 1760s and Der öffentliche Ankläger (The Public Prosecutor, 1948) delved into the violence of the French Revolution. The theme of violence was a major factor in his own life—in fact, without the Nazi rise to power, Hochwälder may not have become a successful playwright.

Before the beginning of World War II, Hochwälder worked as a craftsman (an upholsterer's apprentice) in Vienna. In 1938, Hochwälder escaped Austria and the Nazis by entering Switzerland illegally. He escaped after waiting futilely for an entry visa from any country and in this way his experiences reinforced the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann's ironic quip that in those days the world was divided into two kinds of countries: countries that wanted to be rid of Jews and those that refused to accept them. (Hochwälder's parents were both murdered in Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic.)

Fritz Hochwälder (28 May 1911 – 21 October 1986) also known as Fritz Hochwaelder, was an Austrian playwright. Known for his spare prose and strong moralist themes, Hochwälder won several literary awards, including the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1966. Most of his plays were first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna.