PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

While Hauptmann's final naturalistic drama is a highly self-reflective, autopoietic and modern work of art, it captivates audiences with its realistic qualities. The play molds social stratifications of articulation and speech, and its figures in their entirety, as radically constructed -and also inverses them. Given that the symbolism of high and low, bright and dark, tragedy and comedy are continuously subverted and suspended by one another, The Rats thus shifts from portrayals of reality to those of mythological transformations.