Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1915 — KNEW HIS WORLD OF FICTION [ARTICLE]

KNEW HIS WORLD OF FICTION

Hauptmann Wrote From Experiences Which He Had Gathered in His Own Life. Hauptmann in one of his many phases may be regarded as the Murger of Germany, said Andre Tridon in a recent lecture on the German novelist and playwright. No less than six of Hauptmann’s dramas have for their subject the struggles of artists and writers before they “arrive” or resign themselves to obscurity. “Lonely Lives.” “The Sunken Bell,” “Michael Kramer,” “The Rats,” “Colleague Crampton” and “Gabriel Schilling’s Flight” present to us a gallery of types infinitely richer than those in “La Vie de Boheme.”

Hauptmann knew the bohemian life from experience; he had studied art in Breslau, opened a sculptor’s studio in Rome, spent many hours with the young revolutionists who wrote for Die Gesellschaft and received them in his Ergner home. He delighted in depicting those people at war with their own environment, finding no happiness in their art that disappointed them, in their married life nor in their extra-matrimonial adventures. The stories are told without bitterness; in fact we find in them an undercurrent of humor and satire. Hauptmann knows how the world ought to be, but he recognizes the tremendous fact of the world as it happens to be. The memory of his own struggles does not blind him to the ridiculous side of the artist constantly hampered by his unpleasant affectations.