JULIE KÜHNE, LAURA MARHOLM, AND CLARA VIEBIG were dramatists who concerned themselves overtly with sexual politics. For Viebig in particular, the politics of gender overlapped with the politics of class. This brings Viebig closest to the writers this chapter will consider: Marie Eugenie delle Grazie (1864–1931), Lu Märten (1879–1970), and Berta Lask (1878–1967). Even more than Viebig, these three make class injustice their theme; Lask and Märten even move right out of bourgeois theater to write specifically for workers and the Marxist revolutionary cause.

Interesting in this study is, first, how far these three dramatists are prepared to sideline ideas about women's subjectivity and emancipation to portray the emancipation of the (primarily male) worker; second, their reception as dramatists writing within (delle Grazie) and outside of (Märten, Lask) the bourgeois literary economy. We shall consider the possibility that women might be perceived as more interesting writers if their concerns are party political rather than gender political.

So far this study has assessed how far playwrights who are also women can assert their subject status in the context of a discourse that tends to deny women both subjectivity-in-the-world (the position of being the subject who sees, interprets, and names) and creative intellectual ability (particularly the capacity to write drama). Here we shall take the opportunity to observe what happens when the focus is not on womanhood or on personal creative endeavor, but on class injustice and revolution, in the turn-of-the-century Socialist cause. The plays for discussion are delle Grazie's Schlagende Wetter (1898) and Lu Märten's Bergarbeiter (written in 1908), both of which deal with the sufferings and political self-organization of the mineworkers; and Berta Lask's Leuna 1921 (1927), a play focusing on the historical factory workers’ strike at Leuna and its brutal consequences.

Delle Grazie and Lask were both prolific dramatists, although their development as writers took them in different directions. Where delle Grazie stayed within the bounds and explored the scope of bourgeois theater, Lask (who was writing around a quarter-century later) quickly invested her energies in creating theater for the working-class revolutionary cause. Delle Grazie followed her first drama, Saul (1885), with two overtly political pieces: the one-act satire Moralische Walpurgisnacht of 1896, and, two years later, Schlagende Wetter.