Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Thomas Berger
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE DRAMATIC WORKS
OF
GERHART HAUPTMANN
(Authorized Edition)
Edited By LUDWIG LEWISOHN
Assistant Professor in The Ohio State University
VOLUME TWO: SOCIAL DRAMAS
1913
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONBy the Editor.
DRAYMAN HENSCHEL (Fuhrmann Henschel)Translated by the Editor.
ROSE BERND (Rose Bernd)Translated by the Editor.
THE RATS (Die Ratten)Translated by the Editor.
INTRODUCTION
The first volume of the present edition of Hauptmann's Dramatic Works isidentical in content with the corresponding volume of the German edition.In the second volume The Rats has been substituted for two early prosetales which lie outside of the scope of our undertaking. Hence these twovolumes include that entire group of dramas which Hauptmann himselfspecifically calls social. This term must not, of course, be pressed toorigidly. Only in Before Dawn and in The Weavers can the dramaticsituation be said to arise wholly from social conditions rather than fromthe fate of the individual. It is true, however, that in the seven playsthus far presented all characters are viewed primarily as, in a largemeasure, the results of their social environment. This environment is, inall cases, proportionately stressed. To exhibit it fully Hauptmann uses,beyond any other dramatist, passages which, though always dramatic inform, are narrative and, above all, descriptive in intention. The silentburden of these plays, the ceaseless implication of their fables, is theinjustice and inhumanity of the social order.
Hauptmann, however, has very little of the narrow and acrid temper of thespecial pleader. He is content to show humanity. It is quite conceivablethat the future, forgetful of the special social problems and thehumanitarian cult of to-day, may view these plays as simply bodying forththe passions and events that are timeless and constant in the inevitablemarch of human life. The tragedies of Drayman Henschel and of RoseBernd, at all events, stand in no need of the label of any decade. Theymove us by their breadth and energy and fundamental tenderness.
No plays of Hauptmann produce more surely the impression of having beendipped from the fullness of life. One does not feel that these men andwomen—Hanne Schäl and Siebenhaar, old Bernd and the Flamms—are calledinto a brief existence as foils or props of the protagonists. They ledtheir lives before the plays began: they continue to live in theimagination long after Henschel and Rose have succumbed. How doesChristopher Flamm, that excellent fellow and most breathing picture ofthe average man, adjust his affairs? He is fine enough to be permanentlystirred by the tragedy he has earned, yet coarse enough to fall back intoa merely sensuous life of meaningless pleasures. But at his side sitsthat exquisite monitor—his wife. The stream of their lives must flow on.And one asks how and whither? To apply such almost inevitable questionsto Hauptmann's characters is to be struck at once by the exactness andlargeness of his vision of men. Few other dramatists impress one with anequal sense of life's fullness and continuity,
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