Gerhart Hauptmann

Childhood and Youth

Gerhart Hauptmann was born in 1862 in Obersalzbrunn, today Szczawno-Zdrój, in Lower Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia and now in Poland. His parents, Robert and Marie Hauptmann, ran a hotel in the area. As a boy he had a reputation for taking liberties with the truth. His elder brother, Carl, would also turn to literature.

From 1868 he attended the village school and in 1874 entered the Realschule in Breslau, having only just passed the entrance examination. Settling into the city was difficult. He lived with his brother in a rather shabby student boarding house and later with a pastor. The Prussian-influenced school weighed on him: he resented the strictness of the teachers and the favourable treatment of noble classmates. His dislike of the place and frequent illnesses kept him from class so often that he had to repeat his first year. In time he came to value Breslau, chiefly for the chance to visit the theatre.

In the spring of 1878 he left the Realschule to learn farming on his uncle's estate at Lohnig, today Łagiewniki Średzkie in Poland. After a year and a half he had to abandon the apprenticeship. He was not physically fit for the work and had contracted a serious lung complaint that could have been fatal and troubled him for the next twenty months.

Studies and First Attempts as a Sculptor

After failing an officer entrance examination for the Prussian Army, Hauptmann entered the sculpture school of the Royal School of Art and Crafts in Breslau in 1880. There he befriended Josef Block, a friend for life. He was briefly expelled for "bad conduct and insufficient application", but was readmitted on the recommendation of the sculptor and professor Robert Härtel. He left the school in 1882.

For his brother's wedding he wrote a short play, Liebesfrühling, performed the night before the ceremony. At the wedding he met the bride's sister, Marie Thienemann, and they became secretly engaged. She supported him financially, which allowed him to begin a semester of philosophy and literary history at the University of Jena, which he soon left. Marie then paid for a Mediterranean trip with his brother Carl. There he resolved to settle in Rome as a sculptor, with little success. He failed to establish himself within the German expatriate community, and a large clay statue of a German warrior collapsed. He returned to Germany disillusioned, spent a brief period at the Royal Academy in Dresden and began studying history at the University of Berlin, though his interests drifted towards the theatre.

Marriage and First Works

He married Marie Thienemann in Radebeul on 5 May 1885. The first four years of their marriage were spent in Erkner, a suburb of Berlin, where their three sons were born, since the city air troubled his lungs. Around 1889 they moved to Charlottenburg. There he joined the naturalist literary club "Durch", which included Karl Bleibtreu and Wilhelm Bölsche, and he began writing in earnest. His novella Bahnwärter Thiel appeared in 1888.

His first play, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), was staged in 1889 under Otto Brahm's direction and inaugurated the naturalist movement in modern German literature. Its subject is the social rot that follows the sudden wealth of a Silesian mining community, and its frank depictions of alcoholism and sexuality caused one of the largest scandals in German theatre history, shocking the bourgeois audience. It was followed by Das Friedensfest (1890), Einsame Menschen (Lonely People, 1891), which recalls Ibsen, and Die Weber (The Weavers, 1892), a powerful drama about the rising of the Silesian weavers in 1844, and the work for which he is best known outside Germany. With it he created the genre of the social drama. He also wrote comedies such as Kollege Crampton (1892) and Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat, 1893).

In 1891 he moved to Schreiberhau in Silesia. Around 1893 he took the actress Margarete Marschalk as his lover. Marie left for the United States with their sons. Hauptmann prepared the first French production of Hanneles Himmelfahrt, then went after Marie without staying for the premiere. The rift could not be healed, and after several years apart the marriage was dissolved in July 1904, though Marie continued to live in the villa he had built in Dresden.

Maturity and International Success

From 1901 he lived with Margarete Marschalk at Agnetendorf, today Jagniątków in Poland, which he called "the mystical protective sheath of my soul". A year earlier she had borne him a son, Benvenuto. They married in 1904, and this second marriage lasted until his death, though it passed through a serious crisis in 1905 and 1906 caused by his affair with a sixteen-year-old actress, Ida Orloff.

In his maturity his work turned towards symbolism and mysticism. Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell, 1896), a symbolist drama about an artist harassed by the world who, denied happiness, resigns himself to the judgement of others, and Und Pippa tanzt! (1905) belong to this phase. In 1910 he published his first full-length novel, Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint, about a wandering preacher who mixed sun worship with Christianity, and in 1912 Atlantis, which inspired a Danish silent film. The novel was written a month before the sinking of the Titanic, and its coincidence with the disaster led to the film being banned in Norway.

In 1912 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art", after nomination by Erich Schmidt of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, regarded the poet with suspicion for his social democratic sympathies. He vetoed the Schiller Prize awarded for Hanneles Himmelfahrt in 1896, and in 1913 a Breslau production of his Festspiel in deutschen Reimen was cancelled because its pacifist tone clashed with official patriotism.

The First World War and the Republic

Despite his earlier criticism of militarism, Hauptmann signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914, in which German scientists, scholars and artists declared their unequivocal support for German military action at the outset of the war, and he published supportive poems, many of which he later crossed out in the manuscripts. In 1915 the Kaiser awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle, Fourth Class. After military defeat and the fall of the monarchy he fled to the pacifist colony Monte Verità at Locarno, Switzerland. Some years later he wrote Till Eulenspiegel, a poetic memorial to Hans Paasche, the pacifist reformer assassinated by ultra-nationalists.

In 1918 he joined a declaration by German intellectuals supporting the Republic. In the early years of the new state he was considered a candidate for the presidency of the Reich and was offered the chancellorship, both of which he declined. He received the Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches, an award for distinguished artistic or scholarly achievement. Demand for his work had fallen, and to sustain his lifestyle he turned to screenplays and serialisations. Abroad he continued to be seen as the representative of German literature: in 1932, marking the centenary of Goethe's death, he toured lecture venues in the United States and received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University.

The Nazi Era

After the Nazis took power in 1933, Hauptmann signed a loyalty declaration of the German Academy of Literature. According to the writer and historian Ernst Klee, he applied that summer for membership of the Nazi Party, but the regional party office rejected his application. He regarded himself essentially as a poet standing above political strife, and nothing of Nazi ideology entered his works. Yet he had been a founding member in 1905 of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, a eugenics organisation, and Before Sunrise deals with hereditary alcoholism, a subject dear to eugenicists.

Because he remained highly esteemed by the German public, the Nazis did their utmost to keep him in the country, though Goebbels's propaganda censors watched his output closely. They banned a new edition of the novella Der Schuss im Park because of a Black character, and censored the film adaptations of Der Biberpelz and Vor Sonnenaufgang. For his eightieth birthday in 1942 the regime staged honours and celebrations, and his publisher presented him with the first copy of his seventeen-volume Complete Works. During the war he wrote the Atreus tetralogy, on which he had worked for four years. In 1944 his name appeared on the Gottbegnadeten list, which named artists considered indispensable to German culture and exempt from military service.

Final Years and Death

During the bombing of Dresden he was in a sanatorium there, seriously ill with pneumonia. He said of the inferno: "Whoever had forgotten how to cry learned again at the destruction of Dresden. I stand at the end of my life and envy my dead comrades, who were spared this experience."

After the war Silesia became part of Poland. Hauptmann was temporarily allowed to stay under a letter of protection, but in April 1946 the Soviet military authorities told him that the Polish government demanded his resettlement. Before the expulsion he fell gravely ill. He died of bronchitis on 6 June 1946 at Agnieszków, today Jagniątków, near Hirschberg, now Jelenia Góra. His reported last words were: "Am I still in my house?" Despite his wishes, he was not buried at his home. A formal letter from the Soviet administration in his favour proved ineffective, though the family was allowed to take its belongings. An hour after his death, local militia gathered beneath his window, banging pots and pans and blowing whistles and trumpets.

The funeral took place in Stralsund, near his summer house on Hiddensee, with speeches by Wilhelm Pieck, co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party in the Soviet occupation zone, the poet Johannes R. Becher and the Soviet official Sergei Tiulpanov. He was buried on 28 July, fifty-two days after his death, in the cemetery on Hiddensee. His widow mixed a small sack of earth from the Riesengebirge mountains of Silesia into the sandy soil of the Baltic coast where he lies. In 1951 a granite stone was unveiled bearing, as he had wished, only his name. In 1983 Margarete's remains, she having died in 1957, were moved to lie beside his.

Work and Style

Hauptmann's theatre rests on observation of social reality. His naturalism aims to portray the poor and the conflicts of his age without idealising them, yet his work moved in later decades towards symbolist, legendary and mystical forms. The Weavers, Florian Geyer (1896), a historical drama about the Peasants' War that ran over four hours and filled the stage with crowds, and his monumental theatre of the whole anticipate devices of distancing later associated with Bertolt Brecht. Throughout, his drama oscillated between social criticism and the pursuit of the transcendent.

The drama Der weiße Heiland (The White Saviour, 1908), based on Marina, a work by the painter Justus W. Schottelius, centres on the rivalry of the Spanish captain Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor Montezuma, amid which appears the indigenous princess Malinche, baptised in Spanish as Marina. Montezuma appears as a gentle, melancholy man who seeks peace for himself and his people, while the critic Marco Bahr sees in Cortés not a saviour but a colonist.

Hauptmann gained a reputation as a radical intellectual that stayed with him for many years, though in personal terms he was an aristocratic ascetic who came through the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich with relative equanimity. Thomas Mann drew on some of his personal traits in creating the character Mynheer Peeperkorn in The Magic Mountain.