ABSTRACT
Arno Holz was all his life long a fanatical theorist experimenting out in the cold. The harvest of the new idea was reaped by GERHART HAUPTMANN (1862-1946) and his disciples. Gerhart Hauptmann was born in the Silesian health resort of Obersalzbrunn; his father was the landlord and owner of the hotel Z11r Preussischen Krone. Silesian birth and upbringing and the events of his youth are of importance in the work of this poet, for his use of Silesian dialect belongs to the history of the development of literature, and his adolescence comes into the subject-matter of work after work. He was educated at Obersalzbrunn, and then at the Realschttle of Breslau. He was so negligent or unreceptive at his studies that he was sent to his uncle’s farm to learn practical farming. But he was too dreamy for this business, and was taken back and sent to be trained as a sculptor at the Kunstschule at Breslau, from which he was sent down for insubordination. At this period it was feared that he might be consumptive. Then he joined his brother Carl, who was studying at the University of Jena; here he attended lectures by Haeckel. Too restless for methodical study, he set out on a sea voyage from Hamburg to Spain and Italy; his impressions made up his first book of verse, Promethidenlos (1885), an imitation of Childe Harold; noteworthy is the marked sympathy in the book with the outcast. On his return, Gerhart married a well-to-do woman, whose means enabled him to live in Erkner, a Berlin suburb. Before settling down to domesticated reading he had, however, made a last attempt at being a sculptor in Italy. His studies at Erkner were mainly scientific or economic; he read Darwin and Marx. His social feeling was in the best sense religious: at the base of it was the goodness of his mother, who had been brought up in the Moravian creed. He planned an epic on Jesus of Nazareth; it remained an idea, but his religious conception (in the main pity for suffering humanity) materialized years later in his novel Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint. In 1887 his short story Bahnwiirter Thiel appeared in Die Gesellschaft; a man who tends a railway crossing is incapacitated by dependence on his virago of a wife. In these moods of social pity the theories of Holz unlocked Hauptmann’s creative power: Sekundenstil, he thought, gave him the means of showing truth by depicting humanity in the raw; plan, development, selection, effect were not needed; what the artist had to do was to let situation follow situation; the situation would be vivid because actual, and pregnant with meaning because all life is full of tragic pity. He had been present at the historical performance in 1887 oflbsen’s Ghosts in Berlin, and had been deeply moved. He set to work and produced Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889). Alfred Loth, a Socialist agitator, comes to a Silesian mining village to do research in economic conditions. He is invited to stay in the home of a farmer enriched by the working of mines under his fields. The farmer is a dipso-maniac; his wife is unchaste; one of his two daughters, also alcoholic, does not appear on the stage, as she is expecting her confinement; the other, Helene, pure in spite of her environment, falls in love with Loth, the first clean man she has met. Loth, still unaware of the general degeneration of the family, makes a love-match with Helene; but when he learns the state of things he breaks off the engagement and goes away – for he is a teetotaller and believes in heredity, – and Helene kills herself with a hunting-knife.
