Life
Kroetz attended an acting school in Munich and the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. He worked as a day-laborer and was active in the German political party DKP, Germany Communist Party, from 1971 to 1980.
He became famous when in 1971 the premiere of his plays Heimarbeit (House-work) and Hartnäckig (Persistent) were disrupted by neo-fascists. His plays in the 1970s portrayed people who had been rendered speechless by their own social misery. In the play Das Nest (The Nest), the protagonist is a truck driver. His boss orders him to dump toxic waste into a lake, thus soiling his "nest." He wrote a libretto based on his play Stallerhof (1971) for an opera of the same name which Gerd Kühr composed in 1987/88. It was premiered at the first Munich Biennale) in 1988. The play was staged at the Burgtheater in 2010 by David Bösch.
In her book Franz Xaver Kroetz The Construction of a Political Aesthetic, Michelle Mattson of the Columbia University summarizes:
Franz Xaver Kroetz -- banana-cutter, hospital orderly, fledgling actor and, more significantly, Germany's most popular contemporary dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This study, which situates Kroetz's aesthetics in a political context, focuses on four plays that mark crisis points in his development of a political aesthetic.
Kroetz wrote for the television series Tatort, Spiel mit Karten in 1980 and Wolf im Schafspelz in 2002. He is also known for his role as the gossip columnist 'Baby' Schimmerlos (roughly 'Baby Clueless') in the television series Kir Royal. His income from acting made writing without financial worries possible.
Kroetz was awarded several prizes, including in 2005 the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
From 1992 to 2005, Kroetz was married to the actress Marie-Theres Relin. They have three children. As of 2011, Kroetz lived in the Chiemgau and on Tenerife.
Read more about this topic: Franz Xaver Kroetz
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one’s eyes. It becomes its symbol.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“There is a delicate balance of putting yourself last and not being a doormat and thinking of yourself first and not coming off as selfish, arrogant, or bossy. We spend the majority of our lives attempting to perfect this balance. When we are successful, we have many close, healthy relationships. When we are unsuccessful, we suffer the natural consequences of damaged and sometimes broken relationships. Children are just beginning their journey on this important life lesson.”
—Cindy L. Teachey. “Building Lifelong Relationships—School Age Programs at Work,” Child Care Exchange (January 1994)