"Bahnwarter Thiel" (1988), by far the best story ever written by Gerhart Hauptmann, follows the principles of the Naturalist movement in its detailed study of the life and milieu of a humble and apparently unexceptional Prussian railwayman. Yet in its exploitation of symbolism, of techniques sometimes close to Impressionism, and in its subtle use of a changing narrative perspective, this Novelle goes beyond the essentially 'scientific' Naturalist approach: Hauptmann thus succeeds in exploring the complex interaction of suppressed social, psychological, physiological, and religious impulses...

A title in the Bristol Classical Press German Texts series, in German with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. Thomas Mann (1875-1955), was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and "Tonio Kroger" occupies a central position in his spiritual and artistic development. A study of youth, it draws together many strands of his life and work: the duality of his parentage; his abhorrence of discipline; and the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner on his early phase of writing.

Thomas Mann, Germany's most successful writer of prose fiction, was born in 1875 and died in 1955. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. These two stories, from Mann's middle period, concern major problems facing Germany between the wars: the first deals with the chaos of economic, social and moral values in the early twenties, and the second with the enslavement of a society by a fanatical and hypnotic dictator. In both pieces Mann's moral values are delicately pointed by his omnipresent irony.