_Translated by the Editor._




INTRODUCTION


I

Gerhart Hauptmann, the most distinguished of modern German dramatists,
was born in the Silesian village of Obersalzbrunn on November 15, 1862.
By descent he springs immediately from the common people of his native
province to whose life he has so often given the graveness of tragedy and
the permanence of literature. His grandfather, Ehrenfried, felt in his
own person the bitter fate of the Silesian weavers and only through
energy and good fortune was enabled to change his trade to that of a
waiter. By 1824 he was an independent inn-keeper and was followed in the
same business by the poet's father, Robert Hauptmann. The latter, a man
of solid and not uncultivated understanding, married Marie Straehler,
daughter of one of the fervent Moravian households of Silesia, and had
become, when his sons Carl and Gerhart were born, the proprietor of a
well-known and prosperous hotel, _Zur Preussischen Krone_.

From the village-school of Obersalzbrunn, where he was but an idle pupil,
Gerhart was sent in 1874 to the _Realschule_ at Breslau. Here, in the
company of his older brothers, Carl and Georg, the lad remained for
nearly four years, having impressed his teachers most strongly, it
appears, by a lack of attention. For this reason, but also perhaps
because his father, injured by competitors and by a change in local