Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist.
Background
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was born on the 15th of November 1862 at Obersalzbrunn in Silesia, the son of an hotel-keeper.
Education
After some desultory schooling and an unsatisfactory attempt at farming, Hauptmann attended the Breslau Art Academy and, for less than a semester, the University of Jena.
Hauptman absorbed many of the new ideas, continued to read widely, attended scientific and historical lectures at the University of Berlin, and in 1888 went to Zürich, where the famous psychiatrist August Forel gave him the medical background for an understanding of the motivating forces in human behavior.
After he failed to pass an officer entry exam for the Prussian Army, Hauptmann entered the sculpture school at the Royal Art and Vocational School in Breslau in 1880.
Career
In October 1889 the performance of Hauptmann’s social drama Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn) made him famous overnight, though it shocked the theatregoing public. This starkly realistic tragedy, dealing with contemporary social problems, signaled the end of the rhetorical and highly stylized German drama of the 19th century. Encouraged by the controversy, Hauptmann wrote in rapid succession a number of outstanding dramas on naturalistic themes (heredity, the plight of the poor, the clash of personal needs with societal restrictions) in which he artistically reproduced social reality and common speech. Most gripping and humane, as well as most objectionable to the political authorities at the time of its publication, is Die Weber (1892; The Weavers), a compassionate dramatization of the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844. Das Friedensfest (1890; “The Peace Festival”) is an analysis of the troubled relations within a neurotic family, while Einsame Menschen (1891; Lonely Lives) describes the tragic end of an unhappy intellectual torn between his wife and a young woman (patterned after the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé) with whom he can share his thoughts.
Hauptmann resumed his treatment of proletarian tragedy with Fuhrmann Henschel (1898; Drayman Henschel), a claustrophobic study of a workman’s personal deterioration from the stresses of his domestic life. However, critics felt that the playwright had abandoned naturalistic tenets in Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1894; The Assumption of Hannele), a poetic evocation of the dreams an abused workhouse girl has shortly before she dies. Der Biberpelz (1893; The Beaver Coat) is a successful comedy, written in a Berlin dialect, that centres on a cunning female thief and her successful confrontation with pompous, stupid Prussian officials.
Hauptmann’s longtime estrangement from his wife resulted in their divorce in 1904, and in the same year he married the violinist Margarete Marschalk, with whom he had moved in 1901 to a house in Agnetendorf in Silesia. Hauptmann spent the rest of his life there, though he traveled frequently.
Although Hauptmann helped to establish naturalism in Germany, he later abandoned naturalistic principles in his plays. In his later plays, fairy-tale and saga elements mingle with mystical religiosity and mythical symbolism. The portrayal of the primordial forces of the human personality in a historical setting (Kaiser Karls Geisel, 1908; Charlemagne’s Hostage) stands beside naturalistic studies of the destinies of contemporary people (Dorothea Angermann, 1926). The culmination of the final phase in Hauptmann’s dramatic work is the Atrides cycle, Die Atriden-Tetralogie (1941–48), which expresses through tragic Greek myths Hauptmann’s horror of the cruelty of his own time.
Hauptmann’s stories, novels, and epic poems are as varied as his dramatic works and are often thematically interwoven with them. The novel Der Narr in Christo, Emanuel Quint (1910; The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint) depicts, in a modern parallel to the life of Christ, the passion of a Silesian carpenter’s son, possessed by pietistic ecstasy. A contrasted figure is the apostate priest in his most famous story, Der Ketzer von Soana (1918; The Heretic of Soana), who surrenders himself to a pagan cult of Eros.
In his early career Hauptmann found sustained effort difficult; later his literary production became more prolific, but it also became more uneven in quality. For example, the ambitious and visionary epic poems Till Eulenspiegel (1928) and Der grosse Traum (1942; “The Great Dream”) successfully synthesize his scholarly pursuits with his philosophical and religious thinking, but are of uncertain literary value. The cosmological speculations of Hauptmann’s later decades distracted him from his spontaneous talent for creating characters that come alive on the stage and in the imagination of the reader. Nevertheless, Hauptmann’s literary reputation in Germany was unequaled until the ascendancy of Nazism, when he was barely tolerated by the regime and at the same time was denounced by émigrés for staying in Germany. Though privately out of tune with the Nazi ideology, he was politically naive and tended to be indecisive. He remained in Germany throughout World War II and died a year after his Silesian environs had been occupied by the Soviet Red Army.
Achievements
Hauptmann was the most prominent German dramatist of the early 20th century. The unifying element of his vast and varied literary output is his sympathetic concern for human suffering, as expressed through characters who are generally passive victims of social and other elementary forces. His plays, the early naturalistic ones especially, are still frequently performed.
Gerhart Hauptmann's marriage to Marie Thienemann in the spring of 1885 freed him from financial uncertainties and permitted him to live comfortably in Berlin.
In the meantime marital difficulties had complicated his life: for more than ten years he was torn between duty to his wife and children and his love for a beautiful, young violinist, Margarete Marschalk, whom he married in 1904.
Wife:
Marie Thienemann
Marie Thienemann was a sister of Adele Thienemann, a wife of Hauptmann's older brother Georg. She married Hauptmann in May 1885.
Wife:
Margarete Hauptmann
Margarete Hauptmann (nee Marschalk) (January 7, 1875 - January 17, 1957) was a german actress and a sister of composer Max Marschalk (1863 - 1940). She married Gerhart Hauptmann in September 1904.
Son:
Benvenuto Hauptmann
Benvenuto Hauptmann, the forth child of Gerhart Hauptmann, was born in 1900, his mother was Margarete Marschalk. Died in 1965.
Son:
Ivo Hauptmann
Ivo (1886–1973) was the oldest of three Hauptman's sons from Marie Thienemann.
Son:
Eckart Hauptmann
Eckart (1887–1980) was the second son of Gerhart Hauptman and Marie Thienemann.
Son:
Klaus Hauptman
Klaus (1889–1967) was the youngest son of Gerhart Hauptman and Marie Thienemann.
Friend:
Josef Block
Josef Block (November 27, 1863 – December 20, 1943) was a German painter. His friendship with Gerhart Hauptmann was established during his time in the Breuslau Art Academy. He continued his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Professor Bruno Piglhein. Biblical histories, realistic genre paintings, portraits were Block's specialization. He liked traveling and was a passionate photographer. Died in Berlin in 1943.
