Carl Zuckmayer Carl Zuckmayer ( 27 December 1896 – 18 January 1977 ) was a German writer and playwright . Life and career . Born in Nackenheim in Rhenish Hesse , he was the son of Amalie ( née Goldschmidt ) and Carl Zuckmayer . When he was four years old , his family moved to Mainz . With the outbreak of World War I , he ( like many other high school students ) finished school with a facilitated " emergency " - " Abitur " and volunteered for military service . During the war he served with the German Army ' s Field Artillery on the Western Front . In 1917 , he published first poems in the pacifist journal " Die Aktion " . By the end of the war in 1918 Zuckmayer held the rank of a " Leutnant der Reserve " ( Reserve Officer ) . After the war , he took up studies at the University of Frankfurt , first in humanities , later in biology and botany . In 1920 , he married his childhood friend Annemarie Ganz , but they were divorced just one year later , when Zuckmayer had an affair with actress Annemarie Seidel . His first ventures into literature and theatre were complete failures . His first drama " Kreuzweg " ( 1921 ) fell flat and was delisted after only three performances , and when he was chosen as dramatic adviser at the theatre of Kiel , he lost his new job after his first , controversial staging of Terence ' s " The Eunuch " . In 1924 he became dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin , jointly with Bertolt Brecht . After another failure with his second drama " Pankraz erwacht oder Die Hinterwäldler " he finally had a great public success with the comedy " Der fröhliche Weinberg " ( " The Merry Vineyard " ) in 1925 , which won him the Kleist Prize . Also in 1925 , he married the Austrian actress Alice Herdan , and they bought a house in Henndorf near Salzburg in Austria . Zuckmayer ' s next play " Der Schinderhannes " was again successful . In 1929 , he wrote the script for the movie " Der blaue Engel " ( starring Marlene Dietrich ) based on the novel " Professor Unrat " by Heinrich Mann . That year , he was also awarded the Georg Büchner Prize , another prestigious German language literary award . In 1931 , his play " Der Hauptmann von Köpenick " premiered and became another success , but his plays were prohibited when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 ( Zuckmayer ' s maternal grandfather had been born Jewish and converted to Protestanism ) . Zuckmayer and his family moved to their house in Austria , where he published a few more works . After the " Anschluss " , he was expatriated by the Nazi government , and the Zuckmayers fled via Switzerland to the United States in 1939 , where he first worked as a script writer in Hollywood before renting Backwoods Farm near Barnard , Vermont in 1941 and working there as a farmer until 1946 . In 1943 / 44 he wrote " character portraits " of actors , writers and other artists in Germany for the Office of Strategic Services , evaluating their involvement with the Nazi regime . This became known only in 2002 , when the approximately 150 reports where published in Germany under the title " Geheimreport " . In January 1946 , after World War II , Zuckmayer was granted the US citizenship he had applied for already in 1943 . He returned to Germany and traveled the country for five months as a US cultural attaché . The resulting report to the War Department was first published in Germany in 2004 ( " Deutschlandbericht " ) . His play " Des Teufels General " ( " The Devil ' s General " ; the main character is based on the biography of Ernst Udet ) , which he had written in Vermont , premiered in Zürich on December 14 , 1946 . The play became a major success in post - war Germany ; one of the first post - war literary attempts to broach the issue of Nazism . It was filmed in 1955 starring Curd Jürgens . Zuckmayer kept writing : " Barbara Blomberg " premiered in Konstanz in 1949 and " Das kalte Licht " in Hamburg in 1955 . He also wrote the screenplay for " Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach " , the German - language version of Otto Preminger ' s 1953 film " The Moon is Blue " . Having shuttled back and forth between the U . S . and Europe for several years , the Zuckmayers left the U . S . in 1958 and settled in Saas Fee in the Valais in Switzerland . In 1966 , he became a Swiss citizen , and he published his memoirs entitled " Als wär ' s ein Stück von mir " ( " A part of myself " ) . His last play " Der Rattenfänger " ( music by Friedrich Cerha ) premiered in Zürich in 1975 . Zuckmayer died 1977 in Visp and was interred on January 22 , 1977 in Saas Fee . Zuckmayer had been granted numerous awards , such as the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt in 1952 , the " Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern " in 1955 , the Austrian " Staatspreis für Literatur " in 1960 , " Pour le Mérite " in 1967 , and the Austrian " Verdienstkreuz am Band " in 1968 . Adaptations . " The Moons Ride Over " is an adaptation and reenactment of the original novel in Facebook by artist Jeff Gabel , where multiple Facebook accounts serve as the actors and narrators . The adaptation was promoted by Spencer Brownstone Gallery in 2009 in conjunction with the group exhibition " Are You Sure You Are You ? "