Hasemanns Töchter

(Hasemann's Daughters) by Adolph L'Arronge.

   Premiered 1877. L'Arronge based his play on Victorien Sardou's La Famille Benoîton, which had premiered in 1865 in Paris. His version is less complex than Sardou's and features fewer characters, but the theme of female frivolity and the disdain of aristocrats for self-made men remains. Frau Hasemann and Mme. Benoîton are nearly identical, while Herr Hasemann has a much clearer sense of moral uprightness than does M. Benoîton; the former is outraged that his daughter should forsake her marriage vows, while the latter is only momentarily chagrined.

   Hasemann is a familiar Second Reich type—one whose wife and daughters cause him no end of grief. His relative prosperity (he had been the proprietor of a gardening business but had become rich as a stock market speculator) allows him to indulge his wife Albertine with luxuries and the promise of an ocean cruise. Their eldest daughter Emilie is married to a prosperous locksmith but as yet they have no children; that does not prevent them from quarreling over how their children should be raised, however. Albertine Hasemann complains that Emilie married beneath her station, and she has therefore given her second daughter Rosa a good education so she may meet higher-class marriage prospects. There are three such prospects in view: Baron Zinnow, a shy pharmacist named Eduard Klein, and a plain-spoken but solid 40-year-old factory owner named Körner. Rose loves none of them, but her mother prefers the Baron. Rosa realizes that the Baron is merely toying with her, however, and on impulse agrees to marry Körner.

   Their marriage grants Rosa and Albertine the money to move upward in society; they host parties, buy new clothes, and indulge themselves frivolously. Baron Zinnow, however, still entertains notions of an affair with Rosa, and Körner begins to suspect something is going on between his wife and her former suitor. Körner thinks his suspicions are confirmed when he discovers a letter from Zinnow suggesting a rendezvous. Meanwhile the third and youngest Hasemann daughter, Franziska, has taken ill, and pharmacist Klein delivers medication to the household himself. There he encounters Rosa, and they both realize they should have married. Hasemann becomes exasperated with the whole pretentiousness his daughters have learned from their mother and decides to assert his paternal authority. He orders the youngest daughter, Franziska, to take up knitting and cooking, in order to attract the right kind of man as her husband.