Atlantis

Gerhart Hauptmann

2005년 12월 · Wildside Press LLC

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The three of them together now walked a rather long distance to a wild section of the garden, where it had turned completely dark. The wind began to rush, and the shrubs, trees and bushes of the garden swished like breakers on the shore. The stoker beckoned to them, and they squatted on the ground in a circle. It seemed as if the stoker with his bare hand had taken a bit of burning wood from his pocket. He held it close to the ground, to illuminate a round opening, something like the burrow of a marmot or a rabbit.

"Legno santo," said Peter Schmidt, pointing to the glowing piece of charcoal. "Now, Frederick, you will get to see those antlike little elves that are called noctiluci or night-lights. They pompously call themselves Toilers of the Light. But whatever their name, it must be admitted that they are the ones that take the light hidden in the entrails of the earth, store it up, and sow it in fields, the soil of which has been especially prepared; and when it has grown to its full size and has borne fruit a hundredfold in the shape of gold sheaves or nuggets, they harvest it and save it for the darkest of dark times."

And, actually, looking through a crevice, Frederick saw something like another world, with a subterranean sun shining on it. A multitude of little elves, the Toilers of the Light, were mowing with scythes, cutting stalks, binding sheaves, loading carts, and storing in barns. Many cut the light out of the ground, like nuggets of gold. Undoubtedly it was the gold meant for the mint in Washington that was haunting Frederick's dreams.

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Hauptmann, Germany's outstanding playwright of the naturalist school, was by nature an experimenter. He was a strange mixture: sometimes a revolutionary, as in his greatest play, The Weavers (1892); sometimes the compassionate creator, as in Hannele (1893), about a beggar girl dreaming of heaven. The Sunken Bell (1897), his most famous drama, is an allegorical verse play on the quest for an ideal, similar in theme to Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912 and was given an honorary degree by Columbia University in 1932, at which occasion he delivered an oration on Goethe. Hauptmann is one of the most widely performed German playwrights. He stands as a landmark between the classic and the modern theater. "The heroes of his plays were not from either the ruling class or the bourgeoisie, but almost always from the masses....By 1913, Hauptmann's naturalism was known throughout the world" (N.Y. Times). Hauptmann deserves no less fame as a writer of prose. His earlier works, such as Thiel the Crossing Keeper (1888), show him at his strongest in the naturalistic mode. His characters are enslaved by their environment and by their own drives, especially the sex drive. In the Heretic of Soana (1918) Hauptmann concentrates on the power of the sexual urge in man in the story of the priest who gave up his church for the love of a woman, but he has moved away from the brooding excesses of naturalism. Frowned upon by the Nazis for having been a prominent figure under the Republic, which once favored nominating him for the presidency, Hauptmann never spoke out against Nazi tyranny but shook hands with Goebbels and accepted a medal. Yet when he died at his home in the Silesian Mountains, he had been about to move to East Berlin at the invitation of the Soviet Military Government. These events were forgotten or ignored during the 1962 centennial celebrations of his birth in the two Germanys.