Gerhart Hauptmann--The Beaver Coat (1893)

I have been writing about wanting to read more German literature on these blogs for some time, so, finally, here we are. Gerhart Hauptmann was a prolific writer in many forms and the 1912 recipient of the Nobel Prize, though he is mainly famous for his dramas of the 1890s. He is reminiscent to me of Ibsen, though in this country his books are hard to find and his plays rarely if ever performed, while Ibsen and his works remain fairly broadly know. The IWE thought highly of Hauptmann, and called The Beaver Coat "a serious play and a major work of literature." It certainly reads like a serious work of literature. There is a fineness in the dialogue and the construction of scenes, a restraint in the revelation of action, that is bracing enough. I wonder, as I do whenever I come upon such books, why I do not devote a much greater portion of my time, especially now, to reading late 19th century continental authors, who seem to me so invariably sure in their language, their images, their people, their themes. I feel to some extent as if I have come home when encountering one of these books.

The Beaver Coat is not so much difficult to understand as it is easy to be led to different expectations as to where it is going. It is unconventional because the conflicts and the climax and the consequences that the plot would seem to be building towards never materialize, the characters occupying the roles of civic authorities are completely unfocused on what would appear to be the driving dramas of the play and miss them entirely (the beaver coat of the title was stolen from a property owner by a washerwoman for a ragged boatman plying the Spree River near Berlin. The crime is given scant attention by the presiding judge and is unrectified at the end).....


Unfortunately I was not able to finish this post before I went on vacation for about nine days. It seems to me that every year at this time when I go away, my reading schedule is the midst of a string of plays instead of one of the many 1,000 page books this list requires me to read, which would be much more convenient. So I don't remember anything else that I especially wanted to say on the subject of The Beaver Coat. I did not make any notes on it. My edition, which I will talk more about further, includes an introduction by the translator, Horst Frenz, timestamped Indiana University, May, 1951. He notes that Hauptmann "likes to make fun of the law and its ministers...it is almost an obsession with him that policemen and judges are of necessity imbeciles or charlatans." His concluding paragraph reads:


"...Hauptmann does not give a definite conclusion to his conflict. More than once, he has pointed out that true drama has no ending and that a decision is often imposed upon a playwright who finds no clear-cut ending in life, who always sees new variations, new possibilities for breaking off the action. All that is closely connected with Hauptmann's belief that man's inner struggle is more important and more dramatic than the outcome of the struggle, his searching after truth more significant than the truth itself. It is because of this fundamentally new approach to the problem of dramatic structure that the modern English-speaking drama can hardly be imagined without the pioneer work of Gerhart Hauptmann."


I admit in reading this that I thought it carried a lot of characteristically German unnecessary pomposity and grandiosity with it, as if it contained such ideas as have never occurred to anyone who did not pass though a top Gymnasium. The play lingers in my mind to the extent than it does because of the cleanness of the construction and dialogue and because works from the Imperial Germany of 1871-1914 period have a haunted quality about them for me, because of the power and wealth and cultural might of a sudden, freshly created nation/empire in the heart of Europe that was destined to be so short-lived, and whose contemporary influence, so pronounced just a century ago, has shriveled to almost nothing, in my life anyway.

My English copy of this play came in a library bound Rinehart Edition of 3 Hauptmann plays, The Weavers and Hannele also being included, though I don't believe either of these appear on my list. There don't appear to have been many, if any, later editions of this published in the United States. I am well read in the literature published in the Rinehart Editions. Of the specific titles (i.e., not collections) listed in this series, I have read 65 out of 98! For the record, the first five I have not read are The Tatler (Addison and Steele), The Trojan Women (Euripides), The Frogs (Aristophanes), The Menaechni (Plautus), and The Rope (Plautus). Despite the library binding the book is a little wobbly and brittle, but the type and layout, like so many printed series from the immediate postwar years, is ideal for reading.




This is not the only Hauptmann we will encounter on the IWE list, and the wait to become re-acquainted with him will be a brief one.



Challenge Time


This challenge gave us almost nothing to work with.


1. William Kent Krueger--Sulfur Springs............................................344
2. Mo Hayder--Wolf.............................................................................258
3. Rick Perlstein--The Invisible Bridge................................................202
4. Alison Gaylin--If I Die Tonight.........................................................68
5. Joan Wolf--The Counterfeit Marriage.................................................0
6. American Literature to 1900 (ed. Lewis Leary)...................................0
7. Princeton Review--1,027 GRE Practice Questions.............................0
8. T. R. Kenneth--A Room Full of Night..................................................0


Quarterfinals


#1 Krueger over #8 Kenneth


The Kenneth book isn't actually out yet, I don't think. It looks like a genre book, as is the Krueger.


#7 Review over #2 Hayder


I really don't like generic genre novels.


#3 Perlstein over #6 American Literature


Perlstein is a writer of popular histories, which is a genre I actually like. The subject of this book appears to be the transition of the Republican party between the disgrace of the Nixon resignation and the triumph of Ronald Reagan 6 years later, which mirrors almost exactly the first years of my consciousness, though I have no recollection of the Nixon presidency or resignation itself, which happened when I was 4.


#5 Wolf over #4 Gaylin


Wolf's book looks to be a romance novel circa 1980. It qualified for an upset, which I would like to get out of the way here, as I desperately need something readable to win.

Semifinals


#7 Review over #1 Krueger


Did I mention how much I hate genre fiction?


#3 Perlstein over #5 Wolf


Final


#3 Perlstein over #7 Review


This is a big book, clocking in at around 800 pages, but it is really the only choice in this field.