In June 1844, weavers in the Silesian villages of Peterswaldau and Langenbielau rose up after the merchants who bought their cloth had cut their pay again and again. The main target was the firm of Zwanziger & Söhne. Prussian troops fired into the crowd. Ten men and one woman were killed. In July 1844, Heinrich Heine published a poem about the weavers in Karl Marx’s paper Vorwärts!. In it, the weavers weave a threefold curse. In 1892, Gerhart Hauptmann published Die Weber, The Weavers, a play in five acts. In the play, the manufacturer Dreißiger cuts the piece rates by a fifth. The Berlin police banned performances. In 1894, after the play had opened at the Deutsches Theater, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up his box at the theater in protest. Hauptmann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912.