Sonnenpartituren
Abstract The article describes forms of solar orientation in dramas of German Naturalism. Starting from Ibsen’s Gengangere and Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang, it claims that the crisis of drama is reflected in the ways in which the sun is related to the dramatic process and involved in dramatic finalization. By staging and addressing the sun, Naturalist dramatists discuss problems of temporal organization and energetical maintenance of a form in dissolution. In an array of dramas and in a densely woven network of intertextual references, they experiment with evocations of negative solarity. The modern sun is no longer a resource of meaning and source of life, it has turned into an indifferent, disenchanted and even hostile star that no longer addresses the human world.