Gerhart Hauptmann

Gerhart Hauptmann was born in 1862 in Obersalzbrunn, in Silesia, now Szczawno-Zdrój in Poland, where his parents ran a hotel. An unhappy pupil at the Realschule in Breslau, he tried farming, then sculpture at the Breslau art school and in Rome, and drifted through studies at Jena and Berlin without settling. His marriage in 1885 to Marie Thienemann, whose money supported him, allowed him to write; the couple lived at Erkner, outside Berlin, and he joined the naturalist literary club Durch.

The novella Flagman Thiel (1888) was followed by Before Sunrise (1889), whose premiere under Otto Brahm launched naturalism in the German theatre. The Weavers (1892), on the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844, made a whole community its protagonist and became his most famous play abroad, while The Beaver Coat (1893) showed him an equally sharp comic writer. He moved freely beyond naturalism, into the dream-play of The Assumption of Hannele, verse drama and the novel The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint (1910). Kaiser Wilhelm II disliked his work and vetoed a Schiller Prize for Hannele.

The Nobel Prize followed in 1912. Hauptmann supported the war in 1914 and later the Weimar Republic, becoming the representative figure of German letters. His record after 1933 is compromised: he remained in Germany, signed a loyalty declaration and accepted official honours, though some of his work was censored. He survived the firebombing of Dresden and died in June 1946 at his house in Agnetendorf, by then Polish Jagniątków, as Silesia’s Germans were being expelled. He was buried on the Baltic island of Hiddensee.