A spark is enough: when a starving boy collapses, the exploited weavers protest in front of the manufacturer's villa in Thirties. The situation escalates. Hauptmann's drama about the Silesian weavers' uprising of 1844 was a political issue - the first public performance in Berlin in 1894 was preceded by a lengthy censorship process, Kaiser Wilhelm II resigned from his box in the »Deutsches Theater«, and the Social Democrats cheered. But it also broke new aesthetic ground: the »hero« of the drama was no longer an individual, but a group of uniform miserable figures - the weavers.