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Notes
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Wilder came to know Vienna and Austria in 1928, established a close friendship with his translator Herbert Egon Herlitschka and repeatedly returned to Vienna. He was an admirer of the Salzburg Festival and he benefited greatly from the theatre tradition in Austria. He was inspired by his reading of Nestroy and visits to the Wiener Volkstheater. His 1938 play “The Merchant of Yonkers” was an adaptation of Nestroy’s play “Einen Jux will er sich machen” (1842). Under the direction of Max Reinhardt, the play premiered on Brodway in 1938 but was not met with much commercial success, unlike Wilder’s rewriting of it, which was published under the title “The Matchmaker” in 1954. During WWII, Wilder helped (or, in some cases, tried to help) many of his friends and acquaintance to emigrate. (see Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. Transatlantic Networks and the Perception and Representation of Vienna and Austria Between the 1920s and 1950s. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Science Press, 2018).
Wilder was eager to explain his duties to other friends and aquaintances and he mentioned a number of people whom he had met socially during his sojourns in Vienna or Salzburg and who had been ostracized in Austria after the Nazi takeover, reduced to indigence, and had fled. The ties of friendship that had developed pompted Wilder’s characteristic generosity in helping those in need. He listened to their appeals. In a letter to his friend Herbert Herlitschka he mentioned his own efforts on behalf of "a number of Viennese ... trying to help them find work." He listed Dr. Bermann, Dr. Franz Lehner, Hertha Schweiger, Dr. Ernst Waldinger and others.
Wilder had established a close relationship with the Jewish (Austrian) dramatist and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, whose precarious existence in his American exile is reflected in Beer-Hofmann’s letters to Wilder in German. Notes of thanks bear witness not only to Wilder’s generous support of exiled friends but also to his sharing news about the progress of Wilder’s adaptation of the material from the "Wiener Volkskomödie" for the stage with the exiled writer, who had lost his audience. Wilder supported not only the publication of a translation of Beer-Hofmann’s complex play "Jaakobs Traum", for which he composed an introduction, but also tried to promote its staging with prominent actors. Furthermore, Wilder had a very personal correspondence with Beer-Hofmann’s daughters in the 1950s which reflects his loyalty and ongoing support for the family of his exiled peer and his legacy, as well as his interest in their efforts to reclaim confiscated property in Austria.
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References
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Niven, Penelope. Thornton Wilder: A
Life, New York: Harper Collins, 2012 [Foreword by Edward Albee]
Thornton Wilder Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University Library. Yale U, New Haven.
Donald Gallup, The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939-1961, New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.
Horst Oppel, Thornton Wilder in Deutschland: Wirkung und Wertung
seines Werkes im deutschen Sprachraum, Akademie der Wissenschaften und
der Literatur Mainz (1976 /77) and the relevant articles in Horst Frenz and
Hans-Joachim Lang, eds., Nordamerikanische Literatur im deutschen
Sprachraum seit 1945, München: Winkler, 1973, 80-4, 185-6, 225-40. Discussions of individual plays, for instance, by Rudolf Haas and Franz Link, in Hans Itschert, ed., Das
amerikanische Drama, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1972, 209-19, and
177-94, by Rudolf Germer in Paul Goetsch, ed., Das amerikanische Drama,
Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1974, 170-82, and a review of research by Heinz Kosok in
Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 9 (1964), 196-227
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