Vildanden and Hanneles Himmelfahrt. Two Plays about Denied Childhood

Résumé 0

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. I have then explained how, even in the years following Hauptmann’s naturalistic debut, Ibsenian echoes still resonate in the Silesian writer’s literary output, albeit in a more personally elaborate way. In this regard, I have paused to reflect on Hauptmann’s oneiric drama Hanneles Himmelfahrt. The play shows a large number of correspondences with Ibsen’s Vildanden, which, curiously enough, have not been analysed yet. In this essay I have paid particular attention to certain themes that are well represented in both plays and that establish a strong connection between them. I have then directed my attention to the way Ibsen and Hauptmann described the characters of Hedvig and Hannele, respectively, by stressing the playwrights’ use of a similar array of symbolic elements and by examining the aspects of dream-escape and dream-like transfiguration of space.