Fuhrmann Henschel

(Teamster Henschel) by Gerhart Hauptmann.

   Premiered 1899. Hauptmann wrote this play originally in the distinct German dialect of his native Silesia as part of his attempt to make the play a Naturalist emblem. Henschel's costume is accordingly soiled with the dust of the roads and the manure of his horses even as he attends to his dying wife and their newborn daughter. At death's door, his wife notices Henschel's attraction for the housemaid Hanne Schäl; her dying wish, extracted from Henschel, is that Hanne leave the household. Yet the wife's death occasions hardship for Henschel and he marries Hanne anyway, in the hope that she will manage his house and children for him. She does so at first, but soon takes up with a local lout as her lover. Henschel begins an inevitable physical and psychic decay, combined with remorse and guilt. His downward spiral ends in suicide.