Matthew Blanchard

Dr. Leder

GERM 2075 Summer 2017

24 July 2017

The Weavers Evaluation

Though Gerhart Hauptmann did not come from a destitute family, he constructed a heart-

rending view of the working mans struggle with his play The Weavers. As the son of a hotel owner,

Hauptmann spent his young adult life studying art and philosophy before becoming a writer. He married

into a wealthy family and surrounded himself with socially-minded progressive thinkers (Gerhart

Hauptmann). His compassion for the common man stemmed from his socialist ideals. By his own

account, his teenage years in secondary school were painful, which likely developed within him a

compassion for others suffering (Gerhart Hauptmann Biographical).

Hauptmanns The Weavers belongs to the literary movement of naturalism, which aims to put

on display the tragedies of societys victims in its raw form. The play is set in the 1840s during the

Industrial Revolution. Hauptmanns choice to write The Weavers as a play bolsters his aim of explaining

the plight of the workers in an accessible way. Dialogue is the only tool by which the story progresses.

The reader is presented with the conversations of the lower class workers describing their struggles

without any prose to get in the way. The pacing of the play, therefore, is akin to normal conversation.

When reading the play, and certainly when seeing it performed, one is confronted head on with human

suffering from the perspective of the victims. As seen in the play, the middle class does not fully

comprehend what hardships the lower class goes through. As a winner within the capitalist system,

Dreissiger likely views success as deterministic result of hard work. He cannot adequately understand

the new structural hindrances to success brought about by the Industrial Revolution he has never

fallen prey to them. The Weavers serves to inform the public of hardships they may not understand or
be aware of. The Industrial Revolution began an ever-decreasing demand for human labor, and

Hauptmann wants the suffering resultant of this change to be understood.

Naturalist literature differs heavily from traditional literature in that there is no hero to resolve

the conflict. The Weavers ends with the mob successfully driving away the soldiers and ransacking

Dittrichs house. Though the weavers were successful in their revolt, it remains unanswered what

became of the weavers. Given that Hauptmann published The Weavers in 1892, Germany was well into

the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. As an increasing number of agricultural workers fled to the

cities for factory jobs, living and working conditions suffered. The government had begun instituting

social policies to help workers; Bismarcks health, accident, and pension programs were all in effect by

the time The Weavers was published. At this point in history, it was clear that industrialization is a fact of

life and would continue to change how society works at a fundamental level. Hauptmanns The Weavers

displayed the suffering that industrialization can bring if the lowest in society are forgotten. By

conveying this suffering on a visceral level, Hauptmann likely sought to push society to continue fighting

to protect workers from social forces which they have no control over. His work was a crowning

achievement of the naturalist movement, and furthered literatures influence as a tool for social

commentary. He brought the common mans problems to the realm of popular literature so that society

would recognize how industrialization brings about suffering; further, his work shows how the workers

are not to blame for their condition, in hope of inspiring sympathy and a desire for improvement.
 Works Cited

1. The Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica. "Gerhart Hauptmann." Encyclopdia Britannica.

Encyclopdia Britannica, inc., 22 Dec. 2016. Web. 25 July 2017.

<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gerhart-Hauptmann>.

2. "Gerhart Hauptmann - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 25 Jul 2017.

<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1912/hauptmann-bio.html>