Carl Zuckmayer chose the Salzburg Flachgau as his home. He lived near Henndorf am Wallersee from the mid-1920s until the Nazis marched into Austria in March 1938, gathering writers including Stefan Zweig at his farmhouse and writing some of his most important work against a backdrop of Alpine meadows and Wallersee water. When he fled, he left behind the most productive decade of his life.
The Story
Zuckmayer had established himself as one of the most successful playwrights in the German-speaking world by the time he arrived in the Salzburg Flachgau. Der fröhliche Weinberg (1925) had won the Kleist Prize. Der Hauptmann von Kopenick followed in 1931, a sharp satirical play about the absurdity of Prussian militarism that became a national sensation. The decision to buy the Wiesmühl, a former mill on the edge of the Wallersee near Henndorf am Wallersee, was partly practical: it was cheap, quiet, and far from Berlin. It was also, quickly, a home.
The house attracted writers. Stefan Zweig came. So did Ödön von Horvath, Franz Werfel, and Franz Theodor Csokor. The gathering that formed around Zuckmayer's farmhouse became known loosely as the Henndorfer Kreis, a literary circle that combined genuine friendship with the unease of watching German politics deteriorate. Not all the visitors were anti-Nazi; Emil Jannings and Werner Krauss, who later made their peace with the regime, also came. The atmosphere was tense in ways Zuckmayer later described with unusual honesty in his autobiography.
He continued writing at the Wiesmühl through the mid-1930s, even after his plays were banned in Germany in 1933 and his books were burned in Berlin. The farm was simultaneously a refuge and a waiting room. On the night of March 15, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, a Nazi squad arrived at the house. Zuckmayer and his wife Alice got out and boarded a night train through Feldkirch, crossing into Liechtenstein and then Switzerland before dawn. The Wiesmühl was subsequently Aryanized. It was returned to the family after the war and sold in 1950.
His autobiography, Als war's ein Stuck von mir (A Part of Myself, 1966), contains the most vivid account of what those years near Salzburg were actually like: the lake in summer, the literary arguments, the creeping dread, the night of flight. The book is one of the finest memoirs of the inter-war period in the German language. A literature walk and a literary house in Henndorf now mark his connection to the region.
