Fritz Hochwälder

Known for his spare prose and strong moralist themes, Hochwälder won several literary awards, including the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1966.

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.

Martin Esslin, the renowned drama professor and theater critic, wrote in the introduction to The Public Prosecutor and Other Plays: "No one who has come into contact with Hochwälder's dramatic work, no one who has been privileged to meet him in person, can fail to be impressed by the integrity, the sheer straightforward commitment to the highest value of decency and civilization that are the hallmarks of the writer and craftsman as well as the man."

"Again and again the message that his plays leave with the attentive reader and spectator is one of the humanity, forgiveness, reconciliation, and a refusal to fall into the trap set by the violent to the nonviolent, of converting them to their own methods."

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.