I was born on November 15, 1862. The place of my birth is Bad Obersalzbrunn, a spa famous for its medicinal springs. The house of my birth is the inn «Zur Preussischen Krone». My father was Robert Hauptmann, my mother Marie Hauptmann, née Straehler. I am the youngest of four children. I remember growing up in an educated and lively middle-class house.

I attended the village school, learned some Latin from a tutor, and had violin lessons. Later I went to Breslau, the capital of our province, where I lived in boardinghouses and attended a Gymnasium. Fortunately, my Breslau school period did not crush me, but it left scars from which I only slowly recovered.

I should have perished if there had not been a way out. I went to the country and began to study agriculture. The tortures of school, begun in 1874, ended in 1878. But agriculture remained an episode. Once in solitude I reamed to stand on my own feet and have my own thoughts. I grew conscious of myself, my value, and my rights. In this way I gained independence, firmness, and a freedom of intellect that I still enjoy today.

Hungry for culture, I resumed to Breslau where I spent a second, happier period. I attended the art academy, did sculpturing, learned what youth, hope, and beauty are, the value of friends, masters, and teachers.

I drew, sculptured, drank, wrote poems, made plans, and built castles in Spain. In this mood I exchanged the art academy of Breslau for the University of Jena in Thuringia. In this mood I exchanged Jena for Rome, and later Rome for Berlin.

Although I still worked as a sculptor in Rome, it was here that I finally decided upon literature. A play Vor Sonnenaufgang [Before Dawn] made me publicly known in 1889.

My later works I wrote partly in Berlin, partly in Schreiberhau in the Riesengebirge, partly in Agnetendorf, partly in Italy: they are the condensation of outward and inward fortunes.

Biographical note on Gerhart Hauptmann
Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) gained fame as one of the founders of German Naturalism. After Vor Sonnenaufgang, which created a scandal and, at the same time, was hailed as the beginning of naturalistic drama in Germany, he wrote his most successful play, Die Weber (1892) [The Weavers], the comedy Der Biberpelz (1893) [The Beaver Coat], the historical drama Florian Geyer (1896), Fuhrmann Henschel (1898) [Drayman Henschel], Rose Bernd (1903), and Die Ratten (1911) [The Rats]. But he also wrote symbolic works like Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1893) [The Assumption of Hannele] and Die versunkene Glocke (1896) [The Sunken Bell]. Hauptmann's later works are often literary in inspiration to the point of being - in the widest sense - revisions of European classics. Der arme Heinrich (1902) [Henry of Auë] is modelled on a German medieval romance; Hamlet in Wittenberg (1935) challenged Shakespeare and Der grosse Traum (1942-43) [The Great Dream] Dante. Greece influenced him deeply, but in his image of Greece archaic and chthonic features predominated: Griechischer Frühling (1908) [Greek Spring], Der Bogen des Odysseus (1914) [The Bow of Odysseus], and above all the Atridentetralogie, of which the last two parts, Agamemnons Tod [Agamemnon's Death] and Elektra, were published posthumously in 1948.

Other works include the erotic novel Der Ketzer von Soana (1918) [The Heretic of Soana], Buch der Leidenschaft (1930) [Book of Passion], a thinly veiled account of his divorce and remarriage in 1904, and the two autobiographical volumes Abenteuer meiner Jugend (1937 and 1949) [Adventure of My Youth]. His collected works in seventeen volumes were published in 1942.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967.

Gerhart Hauptmann died in 1946.