"The reception of Hauptmann's first produced play was 'tumultuous', according to Lewisohn; literary historians agree that it was 'sensational'. Today the play reads like an adolescent effort to be impressive by being shockingly different. It protests a bit too much the grievances of labor, the perils of alcohol, and the righteousness of the Icarians (one of a spate of Utopian colonies in America during the mid-19th century). But it was written by Hauptmann and Hauptmann could already write."
Obviously the IWE editor is revealing some of his own biases here, but his criticisms are all, or mostly, things that did mildly occur to me in the course of reading the play, but that I let pass, and did not put together at all to inform my view of the whole. It was all a little over the top, but Hauptmann was something of a genius, and a German genius to boot, so it must have been in the service of a much grander point. Such was my thought process anyway. I do wonder why the IWE people included this on the program while leaving off The Weavers, which today at least seems to be considered Hauptmann's best and most important play (and also, as it is about textile workers made obsolete by industrial technology, topical). I am pretty sure we are done with him altogether after this.
After being too uncertain of my steps to make any notes on The Beaver Coat, I took a few this time.
Dr. Schimmelpfennig, in Act V, perhaps an early example of what continues to be a defining theme of our own age:
"...humankind is in agony and our sort with our narcotics manage to make things more tolerable."
Both the drunken, newly prosperous peasant woman Frau Krause and the anti-establishment Loth character take swipes at Goethe and Schiller, traditionally thought of by me as the unassailable quasi-divinities of German literature. "Schiller an' Goethe (wildly mispronouncing these names)--a couple of useless ninnies if there ever were away," opined the lady, while later on Loth proclaims to the somewhat dim but nice and earthily alluring farmer's daughter that Werther is "a stupid book...it's a book for weak people." With regard to Zola and Ibsen (whom I said Hauptmann reminded me of in the last post), Loth says "They are not writers but necessary evils...I'm not sick, and what Zola and Ibsen offer is medicine."
The insistent belief in the hereditary nature of alcoholism struck me as strange, not because there is not any truth to it, but because it was presented as an inevitable doom for the inheritor. Thinking back to the introduction, the postwar period out of which this list originated was probably the time, certainly in recent history, when skepticism about anti-alcohol crusaders was at its height, the memory of Prohibition being well within the lifetimes of many adults. I do see signs that these kinds of attitudes may be returning, in tandem with the increase as a percentage of the population of people who come from cultures with strong biases or even prohibitions against drinking.
I thought this was leading to a revelation of some kind of rape which word I cannot make out now (paternal?), incest, or secret pregnancies, and the IWE summary does indicate that we are to understand that Helene was "seduced" by her brother-in-law, but the translation I have (in a 1963 Penguin paperback published in England only of "Three German Plays", including The Threepenny Opera and Woyzeck by Georg Buchner) is unclear to me on this point where Dr Schimmelpfennig says that "Things aren't so far gone that he has actually ruined her, but he has certainly ruined her name by now." I could look up the original online if I wanted to and see if I could make more sense of that statement. I don't know German particularly well, but I know it somewhat, and I had gotten to a point in my 20s where I could read some of Kafka's stories only having to look up a handful of words on the page. But I don't have time to do that now. I barely have any time even to read these books.
Hauptmann died in 1946 at the age of 83, remaining in Germany throughout the Nazi period, so I suppose it is worth looking into how he spent those years. He of course would have been an old man then, and in the introduction to the book in which The Beaver Coat was included, it was claimed that he was "too old" to have relocated to another country. According to Wikipedia he signed a loyalty oath of the German Academy of Literature and applied for membership in the Nazi party (and was rejected). This was not mentioned in the other book. Film versions were made, albeit allegedly heavily censored, of the two plays I have written about here. I put a clip from The Beaver Coat on that post and will see if I can find one for this one. He had a novel rejected for publication during the war on the grounds that it depicted a black character, though a 17 volume edition of his works was printed in 1942 and a tetralogy of novels in 1944, which would seem to indicate that he was in fairly good stead with the regime. He was in Dresden during the firebombing of that city, when he was past 80, and wrote that "I stand at the end of my life and envy my dead comrades, who were spared this experience", which I can certainly believe was a sincere statement. This was noted in the 1950 introduction. He lived in Silesia, the southeastern part of Germany that was incorporated into Poland at the end of World War II. In May of 1946, he was informed that all Germans were to be expelled from Poland, without exception. At this point, he finally became very sick and died on June 6, 1946, before being expelled. The 1950 essay (by a German--I don't have that book in front of me so I cannot remember whether he was personally acquainted with Hauptmann himself) referenced some writings published after the war that were anti-Nazis and everything that happened during these last years, though Wikipedia doesn't list or refer to them. On the whole, one could get the idea that Hauptmann would not have missed much if he had died at age 70, though I don't know whether there is considered to be anything of great value in his later writings. While not as infamous perhaps as Knut Hamsun or Marshal Petain in his end of life Nazi associations, he doesn't appear to have covered himself in much glory, either. Not that I would have either, most likely, if I had been there, but everyone who found himself in that situation is held accountable to some degree, especially if he was a prominent figure such as Hauptmann certainly was.
The Challenge
This draw produced a rather wild Challenge. Matchups will be decisive
.
1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass...............................................................3,116
2. Howard Zinn--A People's History of the United States..............................................3,019
3. Alice Hoffman--The Marriage of Opposites...............................................................2,115
4. Alice Hoffman--The Dovekeepers: A Novel................................................................1,969
5. Karyl McBride--Will I Ever Be Good Enough............................................................1,042
6. Charles Dickens--Little Dorrit........................................................................................328
7. Michael C. Ruppert--Crossing the Rubicon....................................................................281
8. Karl Rove--Courage & Consequence.............................................................................255
9. Roger Kerin--Marketing, 12th Edition............................................................................177
10. Dr. Joanna McMillan--Get Lean, Stay Lean.....................................................................2
11. Marx & Engels--Collected Works, Vol. 38: Letters 1844-51............................................1
12. Highlights: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Kimmel, Season 4 (TV Show)................1
13. Alcoholism: Analysis of a Worldwide Problem (ed. Golding)...........................................0
14. Richard Chizmar--The Girl on the Porch..........................................................................0
15. Susan Chair Imbarro (?)--Declarations of Independency..................................................0
1st Round
Frederick Douglass gets to sit this one out with a much-coveted bye.
#2 Zinn over # 15 Imbarro
#3 Hoffman over #14 Chizmar
#4 Hoffman over #13 Alcoholism
#5 McBride over #12 Kimmel
#6 Dickens over #11 Marx/Engels
Little Dorrit is not one of the nine Dickens books selected for the IWE list, so it is eligible for the Challenge.
#7 Ruppert over #10 McMillan
#9 Kerin over #8 Rove
Kerin is a textbook in a subject I have a limited interest in studying, but he has an upset card to play.
Round of 8
#9 Kerin over #1 Douglass
Kerin had an allotment of 2 upsets in this tournament.
#2 Zinn over #7 Ruppert
A battle of 600+ page books. My library has Zinn, it does not have Ruppert, which is the decisive factor in the contest.
#3 Hoffman over #6 Dickens
Dickens too falls victim to an upset.
#4 Hoffman over #5 McBride
A mild upset. McBride was a shorter book, but Hoffman had upset in hand for this book too.
Final 4
#2 Zinn over #9 Kerin
#3 Hoffman over #4 Hoffman
Championship
#3 Hoffman over #2 Zinn
This Hoffman, whom I've never heard of, appears to be an extremely popular writer of some approximately mid-list fiction. I have dipped into Zinn before and I cannot say that I am a fan. His approach struck me as disingenuous and not respectful of any accomplishment in our national history that could not be attributed to some oppressed party resisting or overcoming the rapacity of the devils making up the dominant elements of society. Perhaps there are truths in his version of events, and if you are familiar with the opposing narratives perhaps there is good to be gotten out of reading Zinn, though I am not wholly persuaded of this. If he is your introduction to or main lens through which to understand American history, I feel sorry for you.
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