“Primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied, and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art”.
It was cold and raining. We had a scenic ride across the lake from Lausanne but it seemed Geneva was not anxious to have us. It seemed we walked for hours finding no lodging within our budget. We settled for shabby if pricy accommodation and vowed to be on our way the next morning. For no particular reason we set our next stop as Lugarno, a small city on a lake in the south east of Switzerland. It proved to be one of the most beautiful and enjoyable spots on our trip. I was there again walking the mountains and looking down on the lake from the Chapel of San Salvatore as I read Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Heretic of Soana. Agreed, I had been there so mental depiction was easy, still Gerhart Hauptmann has the uncanny ability to place the reader in a vivid setting to hear a gripping story.
After the fantasies of Kipling, Lagerlöf and Maeterlinck it is perfectly reasonable that the Swedish academy should take an 180˚ turn to the father of German naturalism. It is not surprising that this youngest son of a Silesian innkeeper should write works which shocked both the German Kaiser and the Catholic Church. His homeland moved from one sovereignty to another throughout his life. He was born a German in a land which was to become a part of Poland and The Czech Republic. After a youth in which he explored careers as a sculptor, agriculturalist, and historian, a bout of sickness sent him to his desk. His short stories Carnival and Lineman Thiel drew attention. In 1888 he went to Zurich to study psychology. While there he wrote the play Before Dawn which made him famous over night. He became “Hauptmann (captain) of the wild band of naturalists.” There followed a long string of dramas, his masterwork The Weavers became famous throughout Europe. The characters of his plays spoke in the appropriate dialect. Scenes were set in environments recognizable to the people in the seats. Often this was not a pleasant entertainment. The Weavers shows the grinding poverty and exploitation of the people who weave cotton webs. The weavers are shown as real people with all the dreams, loves, and faults of our specie. When pushed too far the destitute rebel and the privileged react. Far too often, as in Hauptmann’s depiction, the reaction results in the death of the innocent.
After reading The Heretic of Soana I was hooked on Hauptmann’s yarns. I use that term deliberately as he draws you in with a storyteller’s skill and keeps you there. The Heretic of Soana is a story within a story set in an Alpine paradise. The writer goes into the mountains where he meets a very primitive goatherd wearing glasses. This incongruity struck me as odd but I put it aside. Very shy about visitors, this man of the mountains prefers to live with his charges in a hidden cave on the side of the mountain. On first meeting the goatherd he was surprised when the conversation turned easily to Seneca, the Argentine, and Swiss politics. On the last visit the hermit asked if he could read a manuscript entitled “The Mountain Shepherd’s Tale”. This story is of a young priest, recently assigned to local parish, who was pressured by his bishop to minister to a clan of goatherds on a remote mountainside. When he met the family he was horrified to discover that not only were they not baptized, it was an incestuous relationship, the parents of the children being siblings. He tried to draw them into the church but the mayor of the town would not have “these wicked, mangy beasts” in his town. The bishop directed the young priest to go to the mountains and take personal cognizance of the situation. The bishop did not know of the beautiful daughter who had captured the young priest’s heart. A large part of the middle section of the tale is the besotted cleric’s denial, struggle, and rationalization with this threat to his vow of celibacy. So she might complete the necessary catechism class, the girl enrolls in the school at his church. One evening as he accompanied her home the inevitable happens in beautifully written detail. The next few paragraphs are an equally vivid depiction of the young priests struggle. His calling and his love are at direct odds. The manuscript ends “He felt terrible piercing pains until, when it grew dark, he set out, inwardly shouting with happiness, on the road to the same small island world that had united him yesterday with his beloved and on which he arranged a new meeting with her.” The visitor was outraged that the tale stopped short. What had happened to the two lovers? Did their affair remain secret or become known in the community? The stream of questions was interrupted by the sound of a child’s singing. The song was answered by the equally lovely singing of what could only be the child’s mother. A beautiful blond girl leads her goats around the hillside followed by her mother. “Was this not the man-woman, the Virgo, the Syrian goddess, the sinner who fell out with God to yield herself wholly to man, her husband?” The former priest, now the heretic of Soana, smiled as he greeted his wife and daughter.
Carnival, Lineman Thiel, and The Apostle are three novellas about madness. Each draws the reader into a vivid scene which is as natural as the snow falling outside my window as I write this. Carnival is the madness of youth and irrational self-assurance. A young sail-maker and his wife are the life of every party in their community. They have sufficient for the day and thanks to a miserly mother who lives with them they are confident of future resources. One night, crossing a frozen lake on a sled returning from a masquerade party, they become lost in the fog and fall through the ice to their death. Simple, if tragic, story you think? Not the way Gerhart Hauptmann tells it. This man builds the tension from the first sentence. You know something terrible is going to happen by hint after hint until the ending has all of the shock value of anything written by the likes of Poe.
The Lineman Thiel is a different kind of madness. We meet Thiel, a conscientious, quiet, hardworking railroad employee responsible for a section of track and a crossing not far from the village where he lives. His first wife died leaving him a retarded son on whom he dotes. To care for his son he marries a local milkmaid who turns out to be a shrew who misuses the boy. One day she brings their baby and the boy out to the section of track to till a nearby garden patch. Ignoring the boy he gets onto the track and is run over by the train. Pushed beyond sanity by grief Thiel murders his wife and child then sits n the track waiting for the next train. One paragraph is not nearly sufficient to describe the beauty in this tragedy. Please if you have time for Hauptmann try this one.
The apostle tells from the inside the decent into madness of a person too deeply immersed in religion. It is also beautifully written, the reader is drawn into the madness. It is far too easy to see in this allegory persons I have known.
Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalism is a breath of fresh air. It is all there but done in such a way as not to insult the intelligence. I did not read enough of his plays to get a good picture of this work. I did very much enjoy his novellas. I can see why he received the 1912 Prize.
Now, for the first time, we leave Europe and travel to India. Rabindranath Tagor was a Bengali poet, novelist, short-story writer and playwright. It is time for curry and Darjeeling tea.
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