ABSTRACT

On the evening of 9 November 1918, the day the Republic was proclaimed, a hastily convened 'Council of Intellectuals', consisting mainly of avant-garde artists, met in the Reichstag building to assess the situation and to decide on common course of action. The beginnings of the golden age of German drama go back to the 1890s, when in Berlin Brahm and Schlenther staged Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann, and the avant-garde theatre of the day found it’s most prominent and gifted exponents. Hauptmann demonstrated an astonishing versatility, showing the capacity to adapt himself to all the prevailing styles of the day, including Neo-Romanticism. The plays of the German Naturalists and their successors, such as those of the young Hauptmann, shocked many spectators, who reacted violently to the portrayal on the stage of poverty, alcoholism and prostitution. The sound of the death-knell could be heard on the German stage well before 30 January 1933. There was no sudden end, only a gradual decline.