About the work
Hauptmann wrote this verse drama, initially under the working title "Das Totenopfer" (The Offering to the Dead), between August 1942 and January 1944; it forms the third part of his Atreus cycle. It premiered together with "Agamemnons Tod" on 10 November 1947 at the Kammerspiele of Berlin's Deutsches Theater, directed by Heinz Wolfgang Litten.
Plot
At the temple of Demeter near Mycenae, Orestes, Electra and Pylades meet. Electra urges her brother to avenge their father Agamemnon, murdered by their mother Clytemnestra, and hands him the axe used for the killing. After Pylades kills the usurper Aegisthus, Orestes finally kills his own mother.
Cultural significance
Scholars have described Hauptmann's Orestes as a hesitant, Hamlet-like figure who acts only once his sister pushes him to it; Electra's "demonic hysteria" is regarded as Hauptmann's own addition to the ancient material. Together with the cycle's other three parts, the play appeared in the collected "Atriden-Tetralogie" published by Propyläen Verlag in 1959.