Class 11 English Lesson 20: Refund by Fritz Karinthy

 

3 Play: Refund by Fritz Karinthy (page 316)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxJRT_XFvFY (Drama)

About the Playwright 

 

Fritz Karinthy (1887-1938) was a Hungarian satirical writer. He excelled as a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright. Fritz Karinthy is a well-known short story writer who wrote the one-act play “Refund” in the year 1938. 

Theme of the Play

This is the story of a former student, Wasserkopf, who demands his tuition, which must be refunded because he feels his education was worthless. But he loses his fight when he is tricked by the mathematics master.  The play “Refund” is full of humour and deals with an extraordinarily absurd situation.

Casting Characters

a.      The Principal	b.     Wasserkopf
c.      The Servant	d.     The Mathematics Master
e.      The Physics Master	f.       The Staff
g.     The Geography Master	h.     The History Master

Summary of the Play

Wasserkopf is a 40-year-old man who is unable to get a job. Wherever he goes, people say he is good for nothing. One day, he meets a man known as the Leader and asks him about his profession. When the Leader explains foreign exchange and Hungarian money, Wasserkopf doesn’t understand anything. The Leader then mocks him and says he should return to school and ask for a refund of his tuition fees because he didn’t learn anything.

Wasserkopf, being jobless and poor, finds the idea interesting. He decides to go to the school where he studied 18 years ago and demand his money back, claiming the school failed to teach him properly. When he arrives at the school and explains his demand, the principal is shocked. He calls for an emergency meeting with all the teachers to decide what to do. The teachers understand that Wasserkopf is trying to trick them. They believe he plans to fail an exam and use it as proof that the school didn’t educate him well. To stop this, they come up with a clever plan. They decide to give him an oral exam, and no matter what answers he gives—right or wrong—they will prove him correct and mark him excellent in all subjects.

The exam begins. The History Master asks Wasserkopf how long the Thirty Years’ War lasted. Wasserkopf, trying to be wrong, says “seven meters.” The teacher is confused, but the Mathematics Master helps by explaining that, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time and space can be measured together. So, the war could be said to have lasted seven years in a symbolic sense. They accept the answer. Next, the Physics Master asks if church clocks look smaller from a distance because they are smaller or due to an optical illusion. Wasserkopf rudely calls him an “ass.” The teacher cleverly replies that this metaphor is correct because an “ass” doesn’t suffer from illusions, so Wasserkopf’s answer is accepted as insightful.

Then, the Geography Master asks for the name of a city with the same name as the capital of the German province of Brunswick. Wasserkopf answers “Same.” The teacher supports this by telling a made-up story about Emperor Barbarossa mistaking the word “Same” for the city’s name when a peasant girl replied to his greeting. Again, the answer is accepted. Each teacher, in turn, accepts Wasserkopf’s rude and wrong answers as correct by giving strange explanations, pretending he is a genius. They mark him “excellent” in every subject.

Finally, the Mathematics Master asks two questions: one simple and one hard. Wasserkopf gives the wrong answer to the easy one, and the teacher angrily says he has failed and should get a refund. Then he asks Wasserkopf how much money he expects to receive. Wasserkopf proudly gives the exact amount. The Mathematics Master laughs and says that was the difficult question—and he got it right!

With that, they declare Wasserkopf an excellent student and throw him out of the school. He is left speechless. The play ends showing the smart teamwork of the teachers who protect the reputation of their school and teach a lesson to a dishonest student.

 

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEVLRpdIh_A

Understanding the text

Answer the following questions.

a.      Why does Wasserkopf demand a refund of his tuition fees from the school?

Wasserkopf demands a refund of his tuition fees from the school because he claims that he didn’t learn anything from the school, and his 18 years of education made him nothing but an incompetent ass.

b.     Why does Wasserkopf consider himself good for nothing?

Wasserkopf considers himself good for nothing because his school taught him nothing, and he becomes a failure many times in his life, in the matter of getting a job, too.

c.      What did the teachers decide to do when Wasserkopf asked for a refund?

The teachers approved Wasserkopf’s request for a re-examination and passed him in all subjects, even if his answers were incorrect. They agreed to prove Wasserkopf’s answers to their questions correctly.

d.     Why did Wasserkopf give ridiculous answers? Why did the teachers accept these answers?

Wasserkopf gave ridiculous answers so that he could fail the exam by any means necessary and receive a refund. Teachers accepted his answers because they wanted him to pass the exam to preserve the school’s reputation.

e.      How does the Mathematics Master describe Wasserkopf’s character?

The Mathematics Master describes Wasserkopf’s character as a sly and crafty individual who intends to deliberately fail his exam to recoup his tuition fee. He is a unique individual who irritates all of the teachers with his abusive language.

f.       How did the teachers outwit Wasserkopf?

He gave wrong and ridiculous answers to fail the test. But the teachers were cleverer than him. After asking Wasserkopf the easy question, the mathematics teacher said that he had failed the exam and asked him to calculate the amount the school had to refund. He did it very well. The mathematics teacher said that he solved the difficult question because he was a mathematical genius. The teachers declared that he passed the exam. In this way, they outwitted Wasserkopf.

g.     What is the final judgment on Waserkopf’s demand for a refund?

At last, he gets nothing on his demand for a refund. The principal declares that Wasserkopf has passed the re-examination with distinction in every subject and has again shown that he is entitled to the certificate they awarded him on his graduation.

 

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