Gerhart Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang: On Alcohol and Poetry in German Naturalist Drama

Abstract

When Karl Marx equates religion with opium in Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1844), he captures with quotable brevity a sentiment shared by his poetic contemporaries of the postand often anti-idealist Vormirz years. Just as Marx attacks traditional religion for its stultifying effect on social criticism and progress, writers like Georg Btichner and Heinrich Heine criticize similarly deleterious tendencies in the romantic and idealistic poetry of earlier generations. In doing so, they often attribute an inebriating or narcotic effect to such poetry. This is true in Die romantische Schule and in Dantons Tod, for example, but it is especially so in Heine's verse-epic Deutschland. Ein Wintermdrchern, a work coeval with Marx's Hegel critique. There the link of romantic songs and dreams to bouts of drunken delirium fosters critical reflection on the gap between the heady poetry of an earlier age and the sobering realities of political action.' A century later the Marx-disciple Brecht places a similar emphasis on the intoxicating dangers of traditional poetry as part of his campaign against the emotional fix, against the berauschte Einfiihlung of traditional drama's cathartic effect. For by drawing the reader or the audience into sympathetic identification with suffering figures, it hinders critical reflection on the sociopolitical causes of their catastrophes.2 Between Heine and Brecht, Naturalist works, both seminal and typical, also give a prominent place to the motifs of alcohol and poetry. This can be seen in Holz and Schlaf's prose work Papa Hamlet and their drama Die Familie Selicke as well as in Gerhart Hauptmann's dramas Vor Sonnenaufgang and Die Weber. They refer frequently to drunkenness and alc hol abuse. They are also rich in refernces to traditional art and literature, citing r alluding to other works or depicting figures involved in artistic or poetic acts. For all of Naturalism's realistic focus, they show an i tens ty of critical and self-conscious interest in h w literature relates to social problems.3 Often these motifs might seem disparate and secondary elements of each workthe alcohol references part of a realistically depicted social milieu, the art references a vehicle for Naturalist polemics. Yet I propose that the works in question relate the two elements to make important statements about poetry's relationship to social and political complexities with Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang seminal in this respect for German Naturalist drama. These statements are essential to the understanding of each work's message. They are also revealing as to the place of Naturalist drama in the development of nineteenth-century literature toward social realism. By initiating critical reflection on how poetry can resemble alcohol as a means of narcotic flight from social problems, these dramas anticipate -despite Brecht's doubts about Naturalist dramasbasics of his epic theater.4 This aspect of German Naturalism is generally overlooked or even contested by critics. Marxists and non-Marxists alike have often seen Naturalism's deviation from the line of development linking the Jungdeutschland era of Heine and Marx to Brecht's achievements. They stress its tendency to retreat from its literary revolution into dramatic convention or from its social concern into bourgeois caution: Die Weber with a conventional dramatic