Besides blank verse, the only other garb in vogue for the serious
drama was prose: this was not only used for realistic pictures of
conditions of a decidedly cheerful type (since Lessing had introduced
the _bourgeois_ dramas of Diderot into Germany), but also for pathetic
tragedies, the vital power of which the lack of stylistic disguising
of language was supposed to increase. This was the form employed in
the Storm and Stress drama, and therefore in the prison scene of
_Faust_, as also in Schiller's youthful dramas, and again we find it
adopted by Hebbel and the Young Germans, and by the naturalistic
school under the leadership of Ibsen. The Old German rhymed verse
found only a temporary place between these two forms. It was glorified
and made almost sacrosanct by having been used for the greatest of our
dramas, Goethe's _Faust_; Wildenbruch in particular tried to gain new
effects with it. Other attempts also went hand in hand with
deeper-reaching efforts to reconstruct the inner form of the drama;
thus the tendency to a veiled polyphony of language in the folk-scenes
of Christian Dietrich Grabbe and in all the plays of Heinrich von
Kleist; this in Hofmannsthal's _Oedipus_ led to regular choruses, of
quite a different type, however, from those of the _Bride of Messina_.
Gerhart Hauptmann's _Weavers_ and _Florian Geyer_ may be considered
the culminating points of this movement, in spite of their apparently
entirely prosaic form.

Modern German drama, which in its peculiar style is still largely
unappreciated because it has always been measured by its real or
supposed models, is, together with the free-rhythm lyric, the greatest
gift bestowed upon the treasure of forms of the world-literature by
the literature of Germany which has so often played the part of
recipient.