“THE CLOWN – SORROW BEHIND THE MASK”

Hans Schiner, our clown, is the son of a really prosperous family. His family owns a coal mine and many other things, but except for the spacious house which he feels being suffocated in and the numerous cars they have, they almost live a life of a poor family. He tells his father when he comes to see him in his downfall, that he never remembered being full after meals as a child. They did not have eggs at home, his mother always said they were very unhealthy and they were not allowed to have a hot bath, hot water was thought to be a great extravagance. His mother keeps repeating “money is eternal.” “Eternal money. An eternal love”, says our clown. She does not hesitate to talk about Nazis as evil and become an important figure in societies against racism, he remembers her being on the side of Hitler during the war, just like most of the people and artists of that time. She even sent her daughter, Henrietta, to visit the troops, who died during her visit, a girl of sixteen. He thinks about her a lot, cannot forgive his parents. He is in a great tragic situation now, he cannot work properly because the only beloved he has, Marie has left him for religious reasons. He is not a believer in the common sense, does not belong to a church, but Marie is a Catholic. They have been living together for three years, she did not like it that way, wanted to get married and raise their children as Catholics. They were very happy actually and he did not interfere with her religious ideas, took her to services in church, they went to religious meetings together. He felt some kind of hypocrisy in the meetings, in the behaviour of the people there. He told the story of a worker, Frehlingen, who lived with a widow with three children and left them because the priest told him to stop living this sinful way of life. Hans believes this was wrong because the widow became a prostitute to be able to look after her children and the man a drunkard because he was really in love with her. People try to explain everything with rules, but if other people are hurt, Hans cannot be satisfied with such rules. He thinks “people would do the good and appropriate thing only when it was beneficial for them, too. “His being a clown is a rejection of the behaviour code and opinions of people actually, people are motivated by the things that are useful for themselves, but they always say they act for the benefit of other people. All he wants is to live his life in the way he feels appropriate for him and Marie is the only person he needs around him. From the beginning of their relationship they faced obstacles, starting with the neighbours whom he described as having eyes sharper than the devil. Marie needed “Catholic air” sometimes, they moved from a city to another because of his job, lived in hotels, but they both loved this way of living. Her house was little, but Hans felt so much spaciousness in those “narrow rooms”.