Vildanden and Hanneles Himmelfahrt. Two Plays about Denied Childhood

The present article offers a comparative reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hanneles Himmelfahrt. By giving a short description of the literary environment in which Hauptmann made his debut as a young playwright, I have illustrated the importance of Henrik Ibsen’s work for the development of the German writer’s own poetic. In doing so, I refer to Georg Brandes’s article Henrik Ibsen and his School in Germany, which shows how strongly Ibsen’s dramas contributed to and influenced the thematic choices of German naturalist writers and playwrights – Hauptmann amongst them.... Mehr ...