ABSTRACT
By 1898 Gerhart Hauptmann was Germany’s most respected dramatist, although the works of Sudermann were more popular with the general public. He had behind him one undisputed and well-deserved success in Die Weber, perhaps the finest of all his works, but his other popular successes, Der Biberpelz, Hanneles Himmelfahrt, and Die versunkene Glocke, were much slighter works. The very real merits of the austere Das Friedensfest had not been fully appreciated, and his most ambitious play, Florian Geyer, had, to Hauptmann’s great disappointment, met with a cool response from public and critics alike. It is to the works of the next ten or so years, which include Und Pippa tanzt! (1906) and the novel, Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint (1910), as well as the later Naturalist dramas, that Hauptmann owes his enduring reputation. These dramas, the four most important of which I shall examine in this chapter, were widely regarded as marking a return by Hauptmann to his earlier Naturalist style, perhaps even the culmination of this style, although they were, of course, written when Naturalism had long ceased to exist as a closely-knit literary movement, and when Hauptmann himself was no longer writing exclusively in the Naturalist vein.1 The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of the Naturalist experiment for Gerhart Hauptmann; to consider how much of the original scientific-rationalist impulse remains, and in what way this is responsible for the excellence or the shortcomings of these later works.
