A comparison of the mob in Zola's novel Germinal, 1885, and in Hauptmann's drama, The Weavers, 1892, reveals many points of resemblance. Some of these grow essentially out of the general similarity of theme, others represent more incidental details; yet the outward resemblance is greatly offset by the fact that the miners and weavers as such are fundamentally different. Nevertheless, both authors portray the abject poverty of a class of laborers—poverty due essentially to merciless exploitation on the part of unscrupulous employers who have degraded and virtually enslaved their employes. In both cases these miserable starvelings revolt against a tyranny which would suck the very blood from their veins and the marrow from their bones; under the momentary leadership of virtual outsiders they resort to violence in their protest against starvation wages. In varying degree, as determined by the greater epic breadth of the novel on the one hand and by the narrower scope of the drama on the other hand, details are given of individual and general misery, decrepitude, degeneracy, despair, long-continued suffering and of a subsequent flaring up into violent rebellion against the unendurable.

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German romanticism extends over a relatively long period, since in part it goes back to the ideas of Herder and the Storm and Stress movement in the seventies of the eighteenth century. Within narrower limits, one may assign to it the period from the seventeen-nineties to about 1830, when it was challenged by the Young German Movement. Obviously, however, this does not mark the end of its influence. To give a brief account of so complex and varied a movement, and to attempt to generalize in the face of marked individual differences is an undertaking beset with pitfalls.

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