Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria

Martin Sperr was born in 1944 in Steinberg, Lower Bavaria to teaching parents. He didn’t finish his studies as an industrial merchant and became a student of the Max-Reinhardt Seminar. However, he did not complete that study either. In 1965 he went to work for the Bremen Kammerspiele. In 1966, he staged his folk play Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria at the theatre and immediately became one of the most successful young German playwrights. He wrote the play when he was only 18, and it was rich with his own life experiences.

The play is written in a Bayern dialect in which he turns against the bigotries and hypocrisies of village life. Sperr set his drama in the Bavarian village of Reinod in 1948. His subject is the virulent sickness of Nazi Germany - a sickness that, in the playwright's view, did not even begin to end with the demise of Hitler. As the villagers try to survive the social dislocations and economic deprivations of the post-war period, they sink into an amoral state that knows no bounds and experience the complete disintegration of moral codes. Parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors all turn on each other. Sex is cruel and murder is casual; greed and vigilantism are the characters' daily bread. The people of the village drive a mentally retarded youth to the point of suicide and a homosexual to the point of murder.

Peter Fleischmann made a film version of the play in 1968, making Sperr internationally famous.