Page:Poet Lore, volume 26, 1915.djvu/84



LATEST TENDENCIES IN GERMAN DRAMA

THE perusal of any ' Wochenplan ', or list of theatrical  productions in Berlin during the past season  would reveal the fact that scarcely a German  dramatist of established reputation is represented  therein by a play on a modern theme. Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Halbe, Frank Wedekind, Ernst  Hardt and Hermann Sudermann, have gone in turn to Homer,  Napoleonic history, the Bible, the Middle Ages, and early Christian history and legend, for their subjects. As Sudermann and Hauptmann have both been skirting history and romance for  some time, it seems as if they had finally decided that modern  life possessed for them no further material or worthy field of  venture.

In the days of 1889, when the old ' Freie Bühne ' was founded, and Naturalism was rampant, Hauptmann and Sudermann,  Schlaf and Holz were the heralded leaders of the new revolt. The last two have practically disappeared from the realm of the foot  lights, while the others have entered into new phases of develop ment—decadence, some say. For the present, without a doubt, the date of problems and theses is over. What the future will hold (for new problems hardly yet perceived), cannot be foretold. We can only examine the symptoms and diagnose from the material ready at hand. It seems that to-day, while the present is becoming the immediate past, that that past is more dead than antiquity. Hauptmann may write more 'Sunken Bells,' but  never another 'Before Dawn'; Sudermann will never write another 'Honor' or 'Magda.'  Whatever the value of these dramatists' latest efforts, their subject matter is of all time. The 'unpleasant' plays of the Naturalistic seem to have ceased for the 72