Location
Gerhart-Haupmann-Haus, Kirchweg 13, D-18565 Kloster/Hiddensee,
by boat from Stralsund or Schaprode on the island of Rügen
Content
»Haus Seedorn«, the summer estate Gerhart Hauptmann purchased in 1930, has been a museum since 1956 with all the interior in its original shape, containing a permanent exhibition on Hauptmann's works and the island of Hiddensee. Nearby the grave of Hauptmann is situated at the church yard of Kloster.
Gerhart Hauptmann (1862 - 1946), Nobel prize winner of the year 1912, found his inspiration on Hiddensee, the small island off Rügen, called the “Capri of the North” in the Twenties. He had discovered this treasure back in the summer of 1885 and was buried in the monastery on Hiddensee when he died in 1946 at the age of 83. It was true that he regularly visited the Elbe heights near Dresden, the Sudetan Mountains and Upper Italy, but the author of the Weavers , Rose Bernd and Bahnwärter Thiel returned again and again to the Baltic Sea coast. »The first impression that the visitor had on Hiddensee was one of worldly seclusion and desertedness. This gave it the grandiose and terrible gravity of untouched nature and gave those persons that looked into its face that mystical emotion associated with a realisation of the limits of being and human civilisation generally«, wrote the naturalist author describing his love to Hiddensee.
Today »Seedorn House« is the only place in the writer's life and creative career that has been preserved in its original condition. The Gerhart Hauptmann House also gives visitors the opportunity to enter into dialogue with contemporary literature and current theatre productions of Hauptmann's works as well as concerts.
According to Hauptmann, Hiddensee could offer several other pleasures. He said of his utopian South Sea novel Die Insel der großen Mutter : »I would probably never have written it, if I had not often observed there the many beautiful and often stark naked bodies of women and their activities.«