Greece as a Spiritual Home: Gerhart Hauptmann’s Travel Diary Griechischer Frühling

From the end of March to the middle of May 1907 Hauptmann visited among many other places in Greece Corfu, Athens, Delphi and Sparta. Hauptmann, who was well versed in Greek mythology, did not focus on Greece’s classical art that had previously so impressed such Germans as Winckelmann and Goethe. Instead, Greece was for him sensuous and mystical. Like Nietzsche, he was interested in the preclassical archaic period of Greece rather than in the harmony of the classical period. He stresses the Dionysian and rejects notions of classical antiquity as the embodiment of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. Hauptmann’s is not a scholarly approach to Greece. He was overwhelmed by Greece’s beauty that appealed to his senses: the landscape with its myriad flowers and brilliant colors; the fragrance of oranges, pomegranates, eucalyptus and thyme; the sounds of flowing water and the bells on the sheep; the songs of the birds and the buzzing of bees. Wherever he went, he felt the closeness of the gods and thought of Odysseus and Homer. Hauptmann was drawn to what he saw in the Greek tradition as the life affirming as well as the destructive Dionysian forces. He viewed Greek tragedy as the breaking through of the chthonic powers of the abyss into the light and also as a divine offering to the gods. For him Greece felt like a spiritual home. I focus here on Hauptmann’s reception of Greece in his travel diary Griechischer Frühling (1908; Greek Spring).