About the work
Gerhart Hauptmann wrote this five-act play in 1925. Max Reinhardt directed its premiere on 20 November 1926 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, with Dagny Servaes in the title role and Oskar Homolka as Mario Malloneck; near-simultaneous premieres followed at some seventeen other German-speaking theatres.
Plot
Dorothea, the strictly raised daughter of a prison chaplain, is pressured by her father into marrying her seducer, the cook Mario Malloneck, after becoming pregnant. In America the marriage collapses under Mario's violence and infidelity; Dorothea finds support in the engineer Michael Sever. She is ultimately tried for her husband's death and acquitted.
Cultural significance
Contemporaries such as Alfred Polgar considered the material dated, while others read it as an indictment of bourgeois double standards; Hans Mayer especially praised the unsparing portrait of Pastor Angermann. In 1958–59 Robert Siodmak filmed the story under the same title.