ABSTRACT
Hauptmann began the first plans of Die Weber at the same time as Vor Sonnenaufgang when he was in Zürich in 1888. But it was not until 1890 and 1891, when he made two trips into the Eulengebirge, that he first began working seriously on this, his fourth play. The dialect version, De Waber, was completed by the end of 1891, and the more familiar version, adapted to make it closer to high German, prepared from it by March 1892. In the meanwhile Hauptmann had completed Kollege Crampton with remarkable speed, and had seen it performed at the Deutsches Theater on 16 January 1892. He was now an established dramatist and could also have expected a public première for Die Weber, but a protracted dispute with the authorities necessitated the resurrection of the Freie Bühne, and the play was given its first performance on 26 February 1893.1
Hauptmann deeply resented the ban on his play. The label of Socialist was becoming increasingly embarrassing to the Naturalists, and Hauptmann insisted that his drama was ‘indeed social, but not socialist’.2 In his efforts to secure the lifting of the ban Hauptmann’s advocate, Richard Grelling, himself the author of a minor social drama, Gleiches Recht (1892), went even further than this. He claimed that the author of Die Weber was on the side of law and order, for he had allowed the authorities to triumph through the intervention of a few soldiers, and that the play could not be a danger in contemporary circumstances since current legislation for the protection of workers was sufficient to prevent the recurrence of such poverty. For good
measure he also pointed out that a performance of the play could do little harm, since three-quarters of the audience in the public theatres came from the upper-classes, and that censorship could, in any case, do nothing to prevent the performance of the play before the workingclass audiences of the Volksbühnen.3
