[2] The playwright Kroetz is known for his plays featuring severely mentally or emotionally impaired characters, often set in his native Bavaria.

[3] Act 1 The mentally retarded, shortsighted Beppi is regarded as a social disgrace by her parents, the farmer Staller and his wife.

He tells her a touching story about North American Indians in which a woman outcast by her tribe is rescued by a white man.

Stallerhoff and Geisterbahn, both first published in 1971,[4] (although Geistbahn was not performed until 1975) are plays which are known for their sex and violence, with "graphic scenes of rape, defecation, masturbation, nudity, and an infanticide".

[5] The premiere of the stage play was in Hamburg's Deutsches Schauspielhaus on 24 June 1972, directed by Ulrich Heising [de], who was known for social criticism.

Reinhard Baumgart [de] wrote on June 26 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the Beppi played by Mattes gained an aura that Kroetz had probably not even planned.

In The Boston Phoenix, Carolyn Clay noted that "The events of this play are simple, scatological, and crude; the language is (in critic Richard Gilman's words) 'maimed' and 'stricken'; and the feelings are like bare, anguished faces without any mouths.

[11] After attending a 2006 performance at the Southwark Playhouse, Philip Fisher argued that the work "can hardly be described as cheerful but it is moving and puts on stage a stratum of society rarely thrown into the limelight.

In 1988 the Austrian composer Gerd Kühr wrote an opera of the same title, on a libretto by Kroetz, closely modeled on the original.