In the spring of 1878, Hauptmann left the Realschule to learn agriculture on his uncle's farm in Lohnig (today Łagiewniki Średzkie in Gmina Udanin, Poland).

He was temporarily expelled for "poor behavior and insufficient diligence," but quickly reinstated on the recommendation of the sculptor and Professor Robert Härtel.

They became secretly engaged and she began supporting him financially, which enabled him to begin a semester of philosophy and literary history at the University of Jena, which he soon quit.

Hauptmann returned disappointed to Germany, where he began a brief stint at the Royal Academy in Dresden before beginning to study history at the University of Berlin.

Because the city air bothered Gerhart's lungs, the couple spent the first four years of their marriage in the town of Erkner, where their three sons were born.

Hauptmann prepared the first French performance of his play The Assumption of Hannele and then went after Marie, without even staying for the premiere.

In 1910, Hauptmann's first full-length novel was published, The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint, which told the story of a wandering preacher who mixed sun worship with Christianity.

In 1912, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art", after he had been nominated in that year by Erich Schmidt, member of the Prussian Academy of Science.

He vetoed the awarding of the 1896 Schiller Preis (for The Assumption of Hannele) and at the instigation of his son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, in 1913, a Breslau production of Hauptmann's play Commemoration Masque (Festspiel in deutschen Reimen) was canceled, because in it the hundredth anniversary of the Liberation of Germany from Napoleon was depicted with a pacifistic rather than patriotic tone.

After Germany's military defeat and the fall of the monarchy, Hauptmann fled to the pacifist colony Monte Verità in Locarno, Switzerland.

Several years later, he wrote Till Eulenspiegel, a poetic memorial to Hans Paasche, the pacifist and reformer who was assassinated by ultra-nationalists.

[citation needed] In 1918, he joined a declaration, signed by a number of German intellectuals and published in the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, showing solidarity with the Republic.

During this period, the demand for Hauptmann's work had declined, to the point where, in order to maintain his lifestyle, he had begun to do films and serializations.

In 1932, in honor of the centenary of Goethe's death, he went on a lecture tour of the United States and was awarded and honorary doctorate from Columbia University.

[13] However, he had earlier been a founding member of the eugenics organization the German Society for Racial Hygiene, in Berlin in 1905, and his play Before Sunrise is deeply concerned with hereditary alcoholism, a popular idea with eugenicists, and the main character rejects his fiancée due to concerns about his potential children's genetics.

Because Hauptmann remained highly regarded by the German people, the Nazis did everything to keep him from leaving the country, despite the emigration of many of his colleagues.

The censors of the Propaganda Minister Goebbels kept an eye on Hauptmann's work and even banned a new edition of his novella The Shot in the Park because it featured a black character.

On 6 June, he died of bronchitis in Agnieszków (present-day Jagniątków, a part of Hirschberg im Riesengebirge, now Jelenia Góra).

Only an hour after his death, the local militia had gathered outside the window directly under his deathbed and banging pots and pans and blowing whistles and trumpets.

[18][19] At a funeral service held in Stralsund, near Hauptmann's summer home on Hiddensee island, Wilhelm Pieck, then co-chairman of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany spoke, along with poet Johannes R. Becher, and Soviet official Sergei Ivanovich Tiulpanov all spoke.

His widow mixed a small sack of earth from the Riesengebirge/Karkonosze Mountains (Krkonoše) in Silesia with the sandy soil of the Baltic coast where he was buried.

The society hearkened back to historical examples from the Sturm und Drang movement, especially the circle centered on the Hart Brothers up until the Vormärz period before the revolutions of 1848.

The story The Heretic of Soana, the novel The Fool in Christ Emmanuel Quint, and the final chapter of Till Eulenspiegel deal with his experience of a Dionysian-Jesuanic itinerant prophet.

According to Franz-Josef Payrhuber, Before Sunrise was an epoch-making work, but it is not the representative example of naturalistic drama, that label would go to Die Familie Selicke by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf.

[22] With his most important play, The Weavers, which he had already been contemplating during his stay in Zurich, Hauptmann achieved world renown and reached the high point of his Naturalistic phase.

After many naturalistic-influenced works, Hauptmann's style changed [clarification needed] and he grew increasingly well-received among the educated and upper classes.

Shirer offered in a first-person account: Because he had been an ardent Socialist his plays had been banned from the imperial theaters during Kaiser Wilhelm II's time.

He, like so many other eminent Germans, had made his peace with Hitler, and Goebbels, a shrewd man, had made much effective propaganda out of it, tirelessly reminding the German people and the outside world that Germany's greatest living playwright, a former Socialist and the champion of the common man, had not only remained in the Third Reich but had continued to write and have his plays produced.

The American authorities, believing that Hauptmann had served the Nazis too well, banned his plays from the theaters in their sector in West Berlin.

And on 6 October 1945, Hauptmann sent a message to the Communist-dominated "Kulturbund for the Democratic Revival of Germany" wishing it well and expressing the hope that it would succeed in bringing about a "spiritual rebirth" of the German people.