The society hearkened back to historical examples from the Sturm und Drang movement, especially the circle centered on the Hart Brothers up until the Vormärz period before the revolutions of 1848. At their meetings, aesthetic questions about idealism, Realism and the naturalist movement were discussed. Hauptmann gave a lecture about the theretofore largely forgotten poet and dramatist Georg Büchner. With that, he also established his naturalistic orientation. At the end of the 1880s, he was confronted with the incipient anti-socialist movement. The first of the Anti-Socialist Laws was passed in 1878 and strengthened in 1887. Hauptmann was in 1887 as called before the court in Breslau, because he had been a follower of the "Icharians," whose ideas hearkened back to the ideas of French communist Etienne Cabet. He sought refuge in his brother's house in Zurich in order to avoid prosecution. While there he encountered psychiatrist August Forel and the preacher Johannes Guttzeit, whose ideas influenced "Before Sunrise". Hauptmann's early dream of a utopian-socialist community were further fed by his encounter with the poet Gusto Gräser, whose communal colony Hauptmann would visit several times in 1919. The story "The Heretic of Soana", the novel "The Fool in Christ Emmanuel Quint", and the final chapter of "Till Eulenspiegel" deal with his experience of a Dionysian-Jesuanic itinerant prophet. Hauptmann began producing naturalistic works in Zurich. From there, he sent the manuscript of "Bahnwärter Thiel," his first naturalistic work, to Munich to be read by the critic Michael Georg Conrad. Hauptmann's 1889 play "Before Sunrise" caused one of the largest scandals in German theater history. The bourgeois audience was shocked by the frank depictions of alcoholism and sexuality. According to Franz-Josef Payrhuber, "Before Sunrise" was an epoch-making work, but it is not the representative example of naturalistic drama, that label would go to Die Familie Selicke by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. Hauptmann however did have an important role, with the support of Otto Brahm, in establishing naturalistic drama on the German stage. Theaters under Brahm's leadership premiered 17 of Hauptmann's plays. Those plays, and the numerous performances across Germany, gave Naturalism its first broad exposure and social impact.