In Storm-Brother Socrates, Sudermann places his scene in a small East Prussian town, possibly Matizken, where he was born in 1857. The schoolmaster, the grocer, the Jewish rabbi, the tax-collector, and the dentist are the chief characters of this satiric comedy. A lot of old cronies, men who went through the stirring times of '48, form a revolutionary guild, calling themselves "The Brotherhood of the Storm." Harmless enough, they still declaim against Bismarck--the time of action is twenty years ago--and talk of their warlike exploits. As the dramatist is preeminently a painter of manners, many of his portraits are masterly. The dentist, Hartmayer, is a hater of tyranny and an idealist. He has assumed the name of Socrates, his companions selecting such stirring pseudonyms as Catiline, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Poniatowski. This dentist's son' Fritz has adopted the same profession; and being called to attend a reigning prince's dog for toothache, he is denounced by his anti-imperialist of a father. But Fritz is a socialist and has no prejudices on the subject of canine gums. Another brother, an impudent lad, is a conservative. When the archives of the Bund fall into the hands of the local magistrate, the old man is thoroughly miserable. His associates fly and he, expecting arrest, is decorated for the services of his son in saving an aristocratic dog's teeth! He accepts, and the curtain falls on a rather discursive, ill-natured comedy. However, Sudermann's virtuosity has plenty of opportunity for display. The minor characters are well sketched. The waitress, Ida, is an exceedingly vital figure, as is the innkeeper. The dialogue is Sudermann almost at his best,--witty, sarcastic, ironical, tersely vigorous, and true to life. Like Daudet and Flaubert, Sudermann loves to prick the bloated German bourgeois. There is a little Hebrew, named, from sheer cruelty, Siegfried Markuse. His description of his freshman visits to a _Corps-Kneipe_ at the Königsberg University is a fair example of the playwright's powers of unerring observation.