ABSTRACT
Comedy was not a field in which the Naturalists-either German or European-were particularly productive, nor was it one in which they particularly excelled. Gerhart Hauptmann did not begin his first comedy, Kollege Crampton (1892), until after the completion of Die Weber, by which time Naturalism was widely reckoned to be in decline. This is not entirely coincidental, for the veristic doctrine itself necessarily inhibits the exploitation of the conventions and charactertypes which are inherent in the stylisation of the comic genre.1 There are, in addition, certain characteristics of the Naturalist ideology as it developed in Germany, which proved peculiarly hostile to the adoption of a comic view. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the relaxation of the earlier aggression, and an increasing tendency to indulgence or sentimentality, allowed the movement to embrace a form which had not hitherto received a great deal of attention-except in the form of satirical social criticism-from the earnest young writers of this generation.2 The results of this, even in the best Naturalist comedy, Der Biberpelz (1893), testify to a continuing unease in handling the genre. Like many more famous antecedents in the field, the German Naturalists exploited the comic possibilities in the behaviour of the blind, automaton-like monomaniac (von Wehrhahn in Der Biberpelz, Gehrke in Holz’s and Ernst’s Sozialaristokraten), but their comic monomaniacs pale into relative insignificance beside the great sympathetic monomaniacs of Naturalist literature, such as the bigoted old Hilse of Die Weber, the self-flagellating Fuhrmann Henschel, or the pathetic Henriette John of Die Ratten. There is about
the German Naturalist comedy a certain lack of incisiveness which derives, I will suggest, both from an inherent conservatism and from the inhibitions arising from specifically Naturalist convictions; but it is the inherent conservatism, of which I have already spoken on a number of occasions, which prompts the Naturalists to stop short of the ruthless disdain of the greatest exponents of the comic genre.
