Franz Xaver Kroetz (; born 25 February 1946) is a German author, playwright, actor and film director. He achieved great success beginning in the early 1970s. Persistent, Farmyard, and Request Concert, all written in 1971, are some of the works conventionally associated with Kroetz. Kroetz is part of a generation of playwrights who modified the critical folk-piece, emphasizing in his works of the early 1970s the underside of West Germany's affluence through realistic portrayals of the lives of the poor. He later began writing for television, which led to a wider audience. His more analytical, Brecht-influenced plays were generally not well-received, though Upper Austria (1972) and The Nest (1974) achieved critical and commercial success. Some later works of social realism like Through the Leaves (1976) and Tom Fool (1978) are also highly regarded. Kroetz's plays have been translated and performed internationally. Simon Stephens argued in 2016, "Kroetz was identifying how poverty can give rise to brutality, to cynicism, despair and fear. His plays are as resonant now as they've ever been." Life Kroetz was born in Munich and did poorly in high school. He attended an acting school in Munich and the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. He worked as a day-laborer. In the late 1960s, when he was unable to enter mainstream theater, he was active in the alternative theater scene in Munich, and also wrote and acted in works of the Bauerntheater (peasant farces with figures who act out stock situations). He became a member of the German Communist Party (DKP) in 1972, leaving in May 1980 when it had negligible political influence in West Germany. He was affiliated with Suhrkamp Verlag until 1974, with his radical politics being problematic for the publisher. Kroetz admitted in a 1978 interview to being a somewhat combative person. Michael Toteborg wrote in 1978 that the best-known of the early plays are Wildwechsel (Game Crossing or Jailbait, 1968), Mannersache (Men's Business, 1970), and Farmyard. He said that in Munich Child "Kroetz [gives] a convincing political dimension to the private experiences of his characters." His plays in the 1970s portrayed people who had been rendered speechless by their own social misery. He has named Marieluise Fleißer as a major influence on his early writing, as well as Ödön von Horváth. He became famous when in 1971 the premiere of his plays Heimarbeit (translated as "House-work" or "Houseworker") and Hartnäckig (Persistent) were disrupted by neo-fascists. Houseworker