At the hotel ZUR SCHÖNEN AUSSICHT, there is a lack of guests – or at least paying guests. Music makes its listeners long for faraway places. The bubbly flows like water, the bills go unpaid. There is a waiter but no food. A salesman makes bad business deals. A dishevelled aristocrat has gambled away everything but his pistol. A place where time stands still. Rien ne va plus.

Only Baroness Ada still has some money, and she dictates the rules – for inebriation and interaction. He who pays the piper calls the tune. But can money really overturn the outdated gender roles of patriarchy that easily?

Horváth conceived his ‘comedy in three acts’ in 1926 as a model of a society in which people treat each other primarily as competitors and everyone they meet as a means to an end. The product of the failures in our economic model, they, they losers, run the gamut from destruction to self-destruction.

‘One had to leave’ says Christine

In the early 1920s, findings from the field of ethnology gave rise to the rumour that there was such a thing as sexuality without guilt in other contemporary cultures. In his field research on islands in the Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski described family structures in which there was no rivalry, guilt or repression associated with sexuality. Property and kinship were handed down matrilineally. The control of female sexuality, which is a mandatory prerequisite for the Western concept of private property and its heredity through the male line, was alien to these societies. Did this mean there was a place on the other side of the world where men and women were able to live in equal happiness? Horváth translated this question into a kind of container experiment in the hotel ZUR SCHÖNEN AUSSICHT – with a sobering denouement.

‘I have a whole hotel in my head’ says Strasser

The hotel lobby is the birthplace of the modern service society. Here what was previously just personal attention and part of being social is treated as a commodity to be sold. In traditional societies, hospitality wasn’t limited by time or money – often to the point of ruin – but now it’s calculated in purely monetary terms: the guest is only given what they have paid for. No one breathes a word about the truth of them being nothing more than buyers and sellers – as long as the bills are paid, that is. In the service society, everyone is putting on an act …

‘If only the good Lord hadn’t helped me’ says Christine

Where everything has its price, a gift that doesn’t demand anything in return becomes a subversive act that upsets the apple cart. When Christine arrives, Strasser does not see in her the possibility of another life and is instead blinded by his fear of incurring additional costs. In contrast, Christine finds her new life such a staggering and unexpected occurrence that it is ‘like an act of God’. She has had good fortune and wants to share it, but she doesn’t let on how much. Strasser should be free to choose her and not just the better option.

That would be what he could give in return – but he won’t even accept the gift she offered him in the first place.

‘But I gave no quarter!’ says Müller

Christine’s demand for an equal share hits the glass ceiling.

Strasser gives up and leaves matters to his subordinates. Ada plays no role here. She brings Müller, an outsider up to that point, into the inner circle and then disappears. The authoritarian and his fantasies of annihilation now drive the storyline. The male mob knows what needs to be done.

‘There were fewer than a hundred’ says Christine

For the mob, there’s something in the rumour ‘about women’. They find them guilty. Women no longer need to be saved by men. Is Horváth outdated in this point? Hardly. Double standards apply not only to men and women … and they have shifted rather than being dismantled under the postulate of sexual liberation and freedom of identity.