This meeting gave Hauptmann one of those
illuminating technical hints which every creative artist knows. It
brought him an immediate method such as neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky
had been able to bring, and decided him for naturalism and for the drama.
He had found himself at last. During a visit to his parents he gave
himself up to intense labour and returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889
with his first drama, _Before Dawn_, completed.
The play might have waited indefinitely for performance, had not Otto
Brahm and Paul Schlenther, both critical thinkers of some significance,
founded the free stage society (_Freie Buehne_) earlier in the same year.
It was the aim of this society to give at least eight annual performances
in the city of Berlin which should be wholly free from the influence of
the censor and from the pressure of economic needs. The greater number of
the first series of performances had already been prepared for by a
selection of foreign plays--Tolstoi, Goncourt, Ibsen, Bjoernsen,
Strindberg--when, at the last moment, a young German dramatist presented
himself and succeeded in having his play accepted. Thus the society, long
since dead, had the good fortune of fulfilling the function for which it
was created: it launched the naturalistic movement; it cradled the modern
drama of Germany.
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