The Weavers (play)

The play, probably Hauptmann's most important drama, sympathetically portrays a group of Silesian weavers who staged an uprising in 1844 due to their concerns about the Industrial Revolution.

In 1927 it was adapted into a German silent film The Weavers directed by Frederic Zelnik and starring Paul Wegener.

Critic Barrett H. Clark's commented in 1914: "As one of Gerhart Hauptmann's experiments in dramatic form, The Weavers is highly significant.

It is the weavers as a class that is ever before us, and the unity of the play is in them and in them alone; they are only parts of a larger picture which will take shape as the story advances, and are not intended to be taken as important individuals.

[3] Several of these prints were included in Upton Sinclair's history of protest literature, The Cry for Justice (1915).