Gerhart Hauptmann
in full Gerhart Johann Robert
Hauptmann
born Nov. 15, 1862, Bad Salzbrunn,
Silesia, Prussia [Germany]
died June 6, 1946, Agnetendorf, Ger.
[now Jagniątków, Pol.]
German playwright, poet, and novelist
who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1912.
Hauptmann was born in a
then-fashionable Silesian resort town,
where his father owned the main hotel.
He studied sculpture from 1880 to 1882
at the Breslau Art Institute and then
studied science and philosophy at the
university in Jena (1882–83). He worked
as a sculptor in Rome (1883–84) and
studied further in Berlin (1884–85). It
was at this time that he decided to make
his career as a poet and dramatist.
Having married the well-to-do Marie
Thienemann in 1885, Hauptmann settled
down in Erkner, a suburb of Berlin,
taking lessons in acting and associating
with a group of scientists,
philosophers, and avant-garde writers
who were interested in naturalist and
socialist ideas. Hauptmann began writing
novellas, most notably Fasching (1887;
“Carnival”), but his membership in the
literary club Durch (“Through”) and his
reading of the works of such writers as
Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev led him to
start writing plays.
In October 1889 the performance of
Hauptmann’s social drama Vor
Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn) made him
famous overnight, though it shocked the
theatregoing public. This starkly
realistic tragedy, dealing with
contemporary social problems, signaled
the end of the rhetorical and highly
stylized German drama of the 19th
century. Encouraged by the controversy,
Hauptmann wrote in rapid succession a
number of outstanding dramas on
naturalistic themes (heredity, the
plight of the poor, the clash of
personal needs with societal
restrictions) in which he artistically
reproduced social reality and common
speech. Most gripping and humane, as
well as most objectionable to the
political authorities at the time of its
publication, is Die Weber (1892; The
Weavers), a compassionate dramatization
of the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844.
Das Friedensfest (1890; “The Peace
Festival”) is an analysis of the
troubled relations within a neurotic
family, while Einsame Menschen (1891;
Lonely Lives) describes the tragic end
of an unhappy intellectual torn between
his wife and a young woman (patterned
after the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé)
with whom he can share his thoughts.
Hauptmann resumed his treatment of
proletarian tragedy with Fuhrmann
Henschel (1898; Drayman Henschel), a
claustrophobic study of a workman’s
personal deterioration from the stresses
of his domestic life. However, critics
felt that the playwright had abandoned
naturalistic tenets in Hanneles
Himmelfahrt (1894; The Assumption of
Hannele), a poetic evocation of the
dreams an abused workhouse girl has
shortly before she dies. Der Biberpelz
(1893; The Beaver Coat) is a successful
comedy, written in a Berlin dialect,
that centres on a cunning female thief
and her successful confrontation with
pompous, stupid Prussian officials.
Hauptmann’s longtime estrangement
from his wife resulted in their divorce
in 1904, and in the same year he married
the violinist Margarete Marschalk, with
whom he had moved in 1901 to a house in
Agnetendorf in Silesia. Hauptmann spent
the rest of his life there, though he
traveled frequently.
Although Hauptmann helped to
establish naturalism in Germany, he
later abandoned naturalistic principles
in his plays. In his later plays,
fairy-tale and saga elements mingle with
mystical religiosity and mythical
symbolism. The portrayal of the
primordial forces of the human
personality in a historical setting
(Kaiser Karls Geisel, 1908;
Charlemagne’s Hostage) stands beside
naturalistic studies of the destinies of
contemporary people (Dorothea Angermann,
1926). The culmination of the final
phase in Hauptmann’s dramatic work is
the Atrides cycle, Die
Atriden-Tetralogie (1941–48), which
expresses through tragic Greek myths
Hauptmann’s horror of the cruelty of his
own time.
Hauptmann’s stories, novels, and epic
poems are as varied as his dramatic
works and are often thematically
interwoven with them. The novel Der Narr
in Christo, Emanuel Quint (1910; The
Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint) depicts,
in a modern parallel to the life of
Christ, the passion of a Silesian
carpenter’s son, possessed by pietistic
ecstasy. A contrasted figure is the
apostate priest in his most famous
story, Der Ketzer von Soana (1918; The
Heretic of Soana), who surrenders
himself to a pagan cult of Eros.
In his early career Hauptmann found
sustained effort difficult; later his
literary production became more
prolific, but it also became more uneven
in quality. For example, the ambitious
and visionary epic poems Till
Eulenspiegel (1928) and Der grosse Traum
(1942; “The Great Dream”) successfully
synthesize his scholarly pursuits with
his philosophical and religious
thinking, but are of uncertain literary
value. The cosmological speculations of
Hauptmann’s later decades distracted him
from his spontaneous talent for creating
characters that come alive on the stage
and in the imagination of the reader.
Nevertheless, Hauptmann’s literary
reputation in Germany was unequaled
until the ascendancy of Nazism, when he
was barely tolerated by the regime and
at the same time was denounced by
émigrés for staying in Germany. Though
privately out of tune with the Nazi
ideology, he was politically naive and
tended to be indecisive. He remained in
Germany throughout World War II and died
a year after his Silesian environs had
been occupied by the Soviet Red Army.
Hauptmann was the most prominent
German dramatist of the early 20th
century. The unifying element of his
vast and varied literary output is his
sympathetic concern for human suffering,
as expressed through characters who are
generally passive victims of social and
other elementary forces. His plays, the
early naturalistic ones especially, are
still frequently performed.
