Gespenster

Osvald, Mrs. Alving's son, returns from Paris where he started a career as a painter. About 20 years ago, his mother gave him out of the house to protect him from his late father. The former captain led a 'nefarious life,' as the family's family doctor called it. He fathered another child with the maid of the time and later probably succumbed to a venereal disease. If one considers the real events that Henrik Ibsen describes in "Ghosts" in the home of the Alving family, one can understand why the play did not pass the censors in 1882 and was first performed in Chicago. The family as a social structure proves to be a place of arbitrariness that does not even shy away from abuse in a concrete and extended form. Life in the provincial town is unable to escape the past, which haunts time as a ghost and transmits the father's illness to the son.