Berlin

Germany’s capital, the kai ser believed, offered too few examples of cultural uplift and all too many of moral debasement. Berlin’s theatrical scene was a case in point, he thought. Although the Royal Theater had traditionally been a bastion of artistic conservatism, theatrical companies outside the royal orbit were busily experimenting with new and innovative forms of drama. “1889 was the year of the German theatrical revolution, just as 1789 was the year of the revolution of humanity,” wrote Otto Brahm, founder of Berlin’s Free Stage movement. Operating as a private theatrical club, the Free Stage was not subject to the rigid censorship that hamstrung the official state theaters. Thus the first play it produced was Ibsen’s Ghosts, which heretofore had been banned in Berlin because it dealt with the taboo topic of syphilis.

Ghosts raised the eyebrows of conservative theatergoers, but the controversy was mild compared to the scandal inspired by the Free Stage’s next production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Dawn

, a realistic exploration of daily life among the lower classes. As the play progressed, some members of the audience began yelling catcalls, while others rose to cheer. Soon verbal duels between the rival claques gave way to fisticuffs. Once the smoke had cleared, however, it became evident that the protesters had managed only to assure the play’s triumph and to confirm Hauptmann’s emergence as the new star of the Berlin theater.

Emboldened by his success with the Free Stage, Brahm acquired a public venue, the Deutsches Theater, and began directly challenging the political establishment with more plays by Hauptmann and other naturalists. In 1894 the Deutsches Theater announced a production of Hauptmann’s Die Weber (The Weavers), a bleak depiction of the plight of Silesian textile workers in the 1840s. The Berlin police banned the play on the grounds that it was likely to stir up the lower orders. The ban was soon overturned in court, however, because the judges realized that workers were unlikely to attend an event with a high admission charge.

The Weavers premiered on September 24, 1894, and enjoyed an enormous success.

Official Berlin was aghast over Hauptmann’s rise to prominence. After seeing the playwright’s Hanneles Himmelfahrt

, a chronicle of a poor girl’s unsuccessful fight against tuberculosis, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, the future chancellor, wrote in his diary: “This evening at Hannele. A frightful concoction, Social Democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, uncanny, nerve-rattling, altogether awful. Afterward we went to Borchardt to put ourselves back into a human state of mind with champagne and caviar.” To the kaiser, Hauptmann’s triumph was a violation of everything the theater should represent. The stage, he said, ought to constitute a “useful weapon against materialism and un-German art.” People should leave a dramatic production “not discouraged at the recollection of mournful scenes of bitter disappointment, but purified, elevated, and with renewed strength to fight for the ideals which every man strives to realize.” Declaring Hauptmann a willful purveyor of gloom, Wilhelm ordered him arrested for subversion in 1892. When the courts proved unwilling to keep the writer in jail, the kaiser resorted to petty acts of revenge, going so far as to cancel the playwright’s award of the Schiller Prize for dramatic excellence and giving the prize instead to one of his favorite conservative hacks, Ernst Wildenbruch.