Page:Emma Goldman - Anarchism and Other Essays (2nd Rev. ed.) - 1911.djvu/259

254 New culminates in Magda's defiant words of the woman grown to conscious independence of thought and action: ". . .I'll say what I think of you—of you and your respectable society. Why should I be worse than you that I must prolong my existence among you by a lie! Why should this gold upon my body, and the lustre which surrounds my name, only increase my infamy?  Have I not worked early and late for ten long years? Have I not woven this dress with sleepless nights? Have I not built up my career step by step, like thousands of my kind? Why should I blush before anyone? I am myself, and through myself I have become what I am."

The general theme of Heimat—the struggle between the old and young generations—was not original. It had been previously treated by a master hand in Fathers and Sons, portraying the awakening of an age. But though artistically far inferior to Turgeniev's work, Heimat,—depicting the awakening of a sex—proved a powerful revolutionizing factor, mainly because of its dramatic expression.

The dramatist who not only disseminated radicalism, but literally revolutionized the thoughtful Germans, is Gerhardt Hauptmann. His first play Vor Sonnenaufgang, refused by every leading German theatre and first performed in a wretched little playhouse behind a beer garden, acted like a stroke of lightning, illuminating the entire social horizon. Its subject matter deals with the life of an extensive landowner, ignorant, illiterate, and brutalized, and his ———