Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946)

Hauptmann's best-known works include The Weavers (1893), a humanist drama of a rebellion against the mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution, and Hannele (1884), about the conflict between reality and fantasy.
 

Gerhart Hauptmann was born in Ober-Salzbrunn (now Szczawno Zdroj, Poland), a fashionable resort in Silesia. His father was Robert Hauptmann, a hotel owner, and mother Marie (Straehler) Hauptmann. After failing at the gymnasium in Breslau, Gerhart was sent to his uncle's estate. There he became aware of Pietism and learned to know the peasants with whom he worked. Already as a child Hauptmann had started to draw, and he entered the art academy in Breslau, intending to become a sculptor. At the age of twenty he moved to Jena, where he studied history at the university.

From 1883 to 1884 Hauptmann studied art in Rome and wrote a romantic poem based on the myth of Prometheus. Ill health forced him to return to Germany. In 1885 he married Marie Thienemann; they had four children. Marie Thienemann was a beautiful, rich heiress, whom he had met in 1881, and who supported him through the four years of their engagement. Hauptmann settled with Marie in Berlin. She admired her husband, but did not much understand literature and was devastated when Gerhart's attention strayed. However, her wealth gave him the freedom to start his career as a writer. In 1885 he set up a home with his wife in the little lakeside village of Erkner. Hauptmann rejected his early romantic ideals and became convinced that life should be depicted as it is. From the intellectual currents of his day he adopted a belief in scientific causality and materialism. His early stories 'Fasching' (1887) and 'Bahnwärter Thiel' (1888) were naturalistic tales of simple people.

In Berlin Hauptmann came in contact with progressive intellectuals, among them the poet and dramatist Arno Holz (1863-1929), whose play Neue Gleise (1892) deeply influenced him. Holz had earlier published Die Kunst, ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze (1891), in which he tried to give naturalism a theoretic base. Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889), Hauptmann's his first play, with its shocking realism, created an uproar among the audience when it was first performed in Freie Bühne in Berlin. In the play, Alfred Loth, a young socialist, falls in love with Helene Krause, the sister-in-law of his former college friend, a ruthless coal-mining engineer, and is corrupted by his power. Alfred leaves Helene, who kills herself. "He is not a realist who sporadically suffers from whimsical fits of philosophical romanticizing", wrote Theodor Fontane later, "but a realist in good style, which is to say that from the beginning to the end he is always the same."

Hauptmann's early plays reflect the influence of Henrik Ibsen but the production of Die Weber, a dramatization of the Silesian weavers' revolt of 1844, brought him fame as the leading playwright of his generation. The play was at first banned. Hauptmann did not only want to give realistic details, but he paid a great deal of attention to historical accuracy, and studied various dialects. His weavers are "flat-chested, coughing creatures of the looms, whose knees are bent with much sitting." The women's clothes are ragged, but some of the young girls are not without charm - they have "delicate figures, large protruding melancholy eyes." Structurally the play was innovative - there is no single, individual hero in the cast of more than 70 characters.
In Der Biberpelz (1893), a comedy set in the neighborhood of Berlin in the 1880s, and in Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1894), Hauptmann began to try to abandon the naturalistic style, but still focused on the life of ordinary people. The heroine of Hannele is an abused, motherless child who escapes hard reality into dreams and fantasies. After scrupulous studies Hauptmann wrote the passionate and lively Florian Geyer (1896), which dealt with the peasant wars of the sixteenth century. It was not as successful as Hauptmann had expected, but later on it has been considered among his major works. Die Versunkene Glocke (1897), a symbolic story of a master bell founder and his struggle as an artist, has been one of Hauptmann's most popular plays. After this Hauptmann wrote the tragedies Furhmann Henschell (1899), MICHAEL KRAMER (1900), and  Rose Bernd (1903). These works also reflected the personal turmoil Hauptmann was then in - he had fallen for a fourteen-year-old girl, a promising violinist Margarete Marschalk. In 1904, after a long period of agonising thought, Hauptmann divorced Marie Thienemann. He married in the same year Margarete Marschalk, with whom he had a child. Und Pippa Tanzt (1906), about the fragility of beauty, is one of Hauptmann's most poetical works.

Hauptmann's journey to Greece in 1907 inspired the travel diary Griechischer Fruhling (1908), where he brought up the theme of Christian heritage and paganism. Hauptmann returned to the theme in two novels, Der Narr in Christo Emmanuel Quint (1910), a summation of his lifelong interest in the figure of Christ, and Die Insel Der Grossen Mutter (1912). Kaiser Karls Geisel (1908) dealt with nymphomania. Der Bogen Des Odysseus (1914) the hero regains his power through the contact with his native soil.

"Thanks to this elemental feeling for his fellow men, Hauptmann has remained the foremost social poet of Germany. And thanks to this deep feeling for humanity he is counted among those modern dramatists who, like Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, have outlasted the changes of time and fashion." (Horst Frenz in 'Introduction' to Gerhart Hauptmann's Three Plays, 1977) In the 1920s Hauptmann took the subjects for his plays from fantasy, mythical symbolism and folklore. He himself considered Till Eulenspiegel (1928) his greatest. Vor Sonnenuntergang (1932) was a tragic love story of an old man and a young girl, which had some autobiographical basis. Im Wirbel Der Berufung (1936), Hauptmann's last novel, was followed by a book of memoirs of his first 26 years, Das Abenteuer Meiner Jugend (1937). Hauptmann remained in Germany throughout the Nazi regime. The Third Reich refused to allow him to receive the Schiller Prize, for which he was almost continuously recommended. In 1942 a complete seventeen- volume edition of his works appeared. Hauptmann died on June 6 1946 of pneumonia, at his home in Agnetendorf. His last work, the unfinished Der Neue Christophorus (1943) was again a story of suffering humanity.