I read this in connection with writing a review of the now-over-one-hundred-years-old film adaptation by F.W. Murnau. I found it scanned on archive.org and I wasn’t really planning to finish it, but was curious to see about details like setting and characters’ names, but I got pulled in pretty quickly, and it was a fairly fast read (by my generally very slow standards). I haven’t looked at it in German, but the translation seemed quite good and the few notes sprinkled through the text demonstrated that the translator knew contemporary German culture well.
The story in both the film and the book is about a young city clerk who falls in love and ruins himself over his hopeless obsession. At least, that is the generous interpretation, but Hauptmann seems to deliberately suggest that the repressed nature of the family and work life of middle-class Germans disguises a boundless desire for corruption and crime that seethes just under the surface. In the book, the girl he is enthralled by is just thirteen when he first sees her on the street, and even his supposed “redemption” at the end (after serving a well-deserved jail sentence for his involvement in a robbery which ended in the death of his aunt) feels a bit dubious, like the beast has just been caged for the time being. Given events in Germany at the time (the book was being published in serial form during the rise of the Nazi party and various related far-right militias), Hauptmann may have been prescient, or it may just be too easy to read our knowledge of the future into the text. Nevertheless, I found it a fascinating read.