Not only did he achieve his first triumphs with them, but he continued to succeed in writing such dramas—interspersed with works in other genres and modes—long after radical realism had ceased to be in fashion. He gradually expanded the potential of realistic drama far beyond that recognized by his contemporaries during and after the period of naturalism. He accommodated it to his own changing views of human existence and incorporated into it elements of such subsequent developments as neoromanticism, symbolism, Jugendstil (art nouveau), and expressionism.
Robert and Marie Straehler Hauptmann, who were already the parents of three other children—Georg, Johanna (Lotte), and Carl—have never been viewed as being directly influential on the later artistic success of their youngest child, who was born on 15 November 1862 and was baptized in 1863 Gerhard (sic) Johann Robert Hauptmann. Nor did his formal education contribute to his receiving, in 1912, the Nobel Prize in literature as a successor to such learned countrymen as Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Eucken, and Paul Heyse. Hauptmann's elementary schooling, which began in his birthplace, Ober-Salzbrunn (now Szczawno, Poland), and continued in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), ended abruptly in 1878 as a consequence of his father's loss of the resort hotel he owned.
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