Bahnwärter Thiel

The signalman Thiel lives happily with his wife and son Tobias, always performing his duties responsibly and reliably. When his wife dies, he marries the dominant and overbearing maid Lene, with whom he has a child. Lene mistreats Tobias, and Thiel, in a delusion, imagines his first wife fleeing along the tracks with a bloody bundle. Some time later, Tobias dies on the tracks due to Lene's negligence. One night, the signalman Thiel ultimately kills Lene and his second child and is taken to an asylum. With "Bahnwärter Thiel," Hauptmann wrote a psychological study that realistically depicts the decline of a person from a dutiful churchgoer to a murderer. The "novelistic study," as the subtitle of the work is called, is also enriched by numerous symbols and foreshadowing. When Hauptmann wrote the story in 1887, he was just under 25 years old. Today, "Bahnwärter Thiel" is the most famous prose text by the Nobel Prize winner.