The Rats

Hauptmann, the most significant playwright of German naturalism, brings together various storylines on the different floors of a Berlin tenement: the tragic story of the cleaning woman John, who persuades the unwillingly pregnant Pauline to give her newborn child to her, stands in contrast to the bourgeois, "comic" plot involving the former theater director Hassenreuter, who becomes entangled in discussions about whose stories should be told on stage while teaching hopelessly untalented acting students in his costume collection.

Hauptmann depicts a torn society that, while living in the same building, no longer inhabits the same world. The mason's wife John, who loses her own child and thus her husband, Pauline Piperkarcka, who attempts to take her own life because she is unwillingly pregnant, Mrs. John's criminal brother, Bruno Mechelke, who is supposed to manipulate the mother when she wants her child back—these people live before the eyes of the theater artist, yet he does not see them.