HAUPTMANN, Gerhart, German drama tist: b. Salzbrunn, Silesia, 15 Nov. 1862. While his family was comparatively well-to-do, they were of lowly origin, and still preserved the tradition of the uprisings of the linen-weavers of Silesia, which had attracted universal atten tion in the forties of the 19th century, and ap pear to have been the precursors of the un successful German Revolution of 1848. Ger hart, as well as his two brothers, Karl (q.v.) and Georg, was permeated at an early age with artistic tendencies, which led them to undertake the most varied studies and travels, and pre vented them from finding a permanent liveli hood until comparatively late in life. A tem porary impoverishment of the family led Ger hart to try farming for a time, which he pur sued under the direction of a relative at Jauer (Silesia). Here he became acquainted with the sudden wealth of the Silesian peasants who had discovered that their lands held treasures of coal and oil, and with the disastrous and de moralizing effects of such sudden wealth on minds untrained in its intelligent application. Later he took up sculpture (1880-82) at the Art Academy of Breslau, where he learned to know the life and temptations of the artist. A pronounced bias toward sociology and the natural sciences led him to enter the University of Jena as an auditor (he had not the neces sary gymnasium training to be matriculated as a regular student), where he absorbed his first radical views through the medium of science, only later to apply them in the realm of poetry. His first work is an epic, Byronic in versification as well as in spirit, embodying the impressions of a long Italian tour in 1883, (The Lot of a Promethean, 1885), full of re bellious and acrimonious arraignment of the injustice of modern society, uttered by Selin (Hauptmann), has peered into the terrible abyss of the wretchedness of our time, and perishes through excess of compassion and the overflow of his desire to rescue? He made few other attempts in verse, outside of the drama, although he did pen some mildly patriotic poems in 1914 and 1915, which he would probably not consider to be among his best productions.
His importance in the literature of Europe is in his dramas. He was not well acquainted with the world's dramatic literature (except Goethe and Schiller, for whom his worship was boundless) before the production of his early works, and it is to this fact that they may owe a certain formlessness, a lack of constructive skill within the acts and an invariably incon clusive termination of the play. But these qualities may also be the result of a dogma learned (1889) from Arno Holz (q.v.), which required that the naturalism of the dramatist should be consistent and complete, ((der konse quente Naturalismus.° Hauptmann's first play presents these qualities in form so striking ( Sonnenaufgang,> before Sunrise, 1889), that it aroused an immediate artistic battle in German literary circles, of which he remained for a long time the chief subject of dispute. It portrays the depravity of a family of suddenly enriched Silesian peasants, among whom alco holism and incest are rampant, unrelieved ex cept by the innocence of the heroine (Helene, a member of the stricken family) and the theoretical socialism of the hero, who is also permeated to saturation with doctrines of he redity and moral responsibility. Hauptmann
was for a number of years a member of the German Social-Democratic party and an elector PWahlman0) for the party. In the same year Sudermann (q.v.) had his first play, 'Die Ehre) (Honor), performed in Berlin, and although the two men are altogether different in substance and technique, they and the year 1889 are fre quently associated in the popular mind as rep resenting the beginnings of the naturalistic movement in German literature. Hauptmann's next play,
Weber' (he also wrote an earlier version, entirely in the Silesian dialect,