Der Biberpelz

(Thebeaver Coat) by Gerhart Hauptmann.

   Premiered 1893. Considered among Hauptmann's finest plays and certainly his best comedy, the playwright subtitled it A Thieves' Comedy because it focused not on the stolen object of the title but on the thief who stole it. She was Mother Wolff, whose simple charm and wit are matched only by her dishonest cunning and kleptocentric materialism. She is a wolf in sheep's clothing, but nobody in the pathetic little Berlin suburb where she resides seems to recognize her beneath the clever disguise. Most ignorant of all is the preposterous local magistrate Wehrhahn, who represents Wilhelmine bureaucracy in all its preening, narcissistic complacency. Hauptmann's strategy was to present his characters preying on each other, since he saw in Wilhelmine society a ruinous kind of Darwinian struggle for supremacy. The merciless ingenuity of the Wolffs easily outmatches the strutting smugness of the Wehrhahns (German for "rooster"), with resulting losses for everybody around them. Hauptmann's dialogue is a masterful patois of Berlinese, legalistic cant, and political sloganeering. The comedy is also notable for a near absence of comic devices; Naturalists praised Hauptmann for the play's "authentic" and "unthe-atrical" milieu. It has remained enormously popular in most German repertoires since its premiere, with thousands of performances in each decade since. The characters of Mother Wolff and Wehrhahn have likewise afforded actors and actresses opportunities to develop "signature performances" with historical resonance—though the originals (Else Lehmann and Emmanuel Reicher, respectively) have tended to remain the standards against whom all subsequent Mother Wolffs and Wehrhahns are compared.