Peter Hacks

• Born: March 21, 1928
• Birthplace: Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland)
• Died: August 28, 2003
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Peter Hacks abandoned a career as a scholar and critic of German literature to devote himself to the writing of plays, for which he is best known; he has also written a large number of articles on the theory of drama. In addition to his works for and about the theater, Hacks has published a number of well-received children’s books and has translated works from English, including plays by William Shakespeare and John Millington Synge. In 1994, Hacks published a volume of short stories, and in 2000, an expanded version of his collected poems appeared.

Achievements

In his critical introduction to postwar German literature of 1970, Peter Demetz claimed for Peter Hacks the distinction of being Bertolt Brecht’s most sophisticated disciple. Whether this title should go to Heiner Müller rather than to Hacks is still an open question. Müller and Hacks have been the leading dramatists of the East German theater, and both have been known as representatives of dialectic theater in the Brechtian tradition. Brecht provided the ideological and aesthetic basis for their development as dramatists. Both have continued this tradition in a most creative and even challenging manner. Müller can be called the better dialectician, while Hacks has had a greater talent for comedy. During the 1960’s and early 1970’s, Hacks’s plays were among those most often performed on the stage in East and West Germany. Although Hacks also had his share of problems with the official cultural policies in East Germany during the 1960’s, Müller has perhaps been more controversial during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Müller, however, exerted significant influence on the theater in East Germany and abroad, whereas Hacks’s influence had begun to diminish after the late 1970’s, both because of a lack of publications and productions and, in West Germany, because of his support of government policies in the expulsion of poet and singer Wolf Biermann from East Germany in 1976. Furthermore, the West German stage of the 1960’s and 1970’s saw the debuts of younger playwrights such as Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and Botho Strauss.

Inspired by Brecht’s ideas of an epic, or non-Aristotelian, theater, Hacks developed his concepts of a dialectic theater for a socialist society in an important essay on realist drama, “Das realistische Theaterstück,” published in 1957. With the advent of socialism, Hacks argued, class antagonisms, based on conflicting class interests, had disappeared. There remained, however, nonantagonistic contradictions that were to be employed for the benefit of socialist society. In Hacks’s view, the dialectic dynamism of contradictions should provide the motivating force of socialist drama, supplanting the individual conflicts and clashes of personal interest that animate traditional bourgeois drama. Thus, “realism” is redefined: Reality is not a given, but rather is dialectically changeable—and therefore beautiful. In this new aesthetic, Hacks saw the promise of drama in a socialist society.

In addition to Brecht, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and his utopian philosophy of hope greatly influenced Hacks. In his book on the nature of imaginative literature, Das Poetische: Ansätze zu einer postrevolutionären Dramaturgie (1972), Hacks declares that the image of history, as conceived by the aesthetic consciousness, is a “humane utopia” that does not exist in historical reality. It is to be understood as a “counter-design” to the world, existing in the past and in the future “perhaps only in remembrance and hope.” Hacks suggests that the principal subject of modern literature is the relationship between utopia and reality; the only mode of perfection open to reality, he concludes, is to be found in perpetual striving, in utopian hope. Even in a socialist society, the individual is never so completely integrated as to be beyond improvement. It is the function of the theater, Hacks argues, to show this potential for growth.

In spite of these philosophical concerns, Hacks managed to write entertaining plays and attract large audiences in East and especially West Germany during the 1960’s and early 1970’s. His talent for comedy, combined with his highly developed skill in handling blank verse and his demand for a socialist classicism, account for his success as a dramatist during those decades. His later plays, based on dramas by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, have been neglected by most theaters, except for Goethe anniversaries and memorials.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Hacks appeared to have diminished in popularity. Although he published a two-volume edition of his late plays in 1999, none of them was performed by a major stage, except for an adaptation of an operetta by Jacques Offenbach (Orpheus in der Unterwelt). His major dramatic achievements remain his early plays.

Biography

Peter Hacks was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), in 1928, into an upper-middle-class family, the son of a lawyer who was a member of the Social Democratic Party. He studied philosophy, sociology, German literature, and theater arts in Munich, receiving a Ph.D. in German literature in 1951 with a dissertation on nineteenth century German drama. He began writing radio drama and cabaret sketches, and in 1954, he won a prize for his first major drama, Eröffnung des indischen Zeitalters, which premiered in Munich in 1955. During the same year, Hacks decided to move to the German Democratic Republic (GDR). There, he served as a dramaturgical assistant to Wolfgang Langhoff, director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, until 1963, when both Hacks and Langhoff were dismissed because of conflicts with the cultural policies of the government.

At the Bitterfeld Conference of 1959, which was arranged by the ruling state party to plan in detail the future of socialist literature, dialectic drama had been proscribed, and dramatists had been admonished to write more about the workers and their lives. Literature was to treat topics of national significance. Hacks had tried his hand at realist drama, as prescribed by the Bitterfeld Conference, by writing Die Sorgen und die Macht, a play about brown coal production. Its dialectics, however, proved to be in conflict with official cultural policies. The play’s second production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin was canceled in 1962, and both Hacks and Langhoff were criticized by the writers’ union for misrepresenting conditions in the GDR.

With Moritz Tassow, Hacks continued to write drama in dialectical fashion, yet managed to avoid any major clashes with official cultural policies. A general trend of East German drama toward a new socialist classicism around 1968 proved to be favorable to Hacks, who could now apply his dialectics to classical myth, as in Amphitryon and Omphale, thereby avoiding conflicts with party doctrines. Similarly, his monodrama on Charlotte von Stein, Goethe’s great love of the 1770’s and 1780’s, Charlotte, was a great stage success. During the early 1970’s, Hacks experienced his greatest popularity in West Germany, after which, as noted above, his reputation there declined rapidly.

Hacks was a member of the East German branch of PEN, the international writers’ organization, and after 1972, he was a member of East Germany’s Academy of Arts.

Hacks isolated himself from his colleagues in the GDR when he supported the government in its action against Wolf Biermann, the dissident poet and singer who was denied re-entry into the GDR and lost his East German citizenship after a concert tour to West Germany in 1976. Even after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Hacks did not change his allegiance to GDR socialism.

Analysis

Peter Hacks began with historical drama from a Marxist perspective. His early plays demonstrate the force of history through the characters of so-called great men, such as Christopher Columbus, modeled after Brecht’s Life of Galileo, in Eröffnung des indischen Zeitalters, Duke Ernst of Swabia in Das Volksbuch vom Herzog Ernst, and Frederick II of Prussia in Der Müller von Sanssouci.

Eröffnung des indischen Zeitalters

In Eröffnung des indischen Zeitalters, the discovery of America is seen as the historical event that energized the merchant middle class to evolve as the most powerful class of the future. Its ascent to power is achieved at the expense of the nobility and clergy, who prove to be unable to adapt to historic changes. Columbus is far from being a great man. Like Brecht’s Galileo, he betrays his science. At the Spanish court, he is manipulated not by scientific discovery but by the imperialist and capitalist interests of the Spanish crown. Once a scientific discoverer and scholar, Columbus becomes a representative of the new bourgeois class. He does not feel compromised by his opportunism, until he sees the future of America: the rape of a continent and the enslavement of its natives in the name of historical progress.

Die Schlacht bei Lobositz

In Die Schlacht bei Lobositz, Hacks presents the perspective of the little man—in this case, an eighteenth century Swiss citizen, kidnapped for service as a mercenary in the Prussian army. This unheroic hero deserts when he realizes that officers belong to a different class, a class that is not interested in the welfare of its charges. Even if an officer shows a humane attitude, this attitude is but a trick to keep the common soldier from deserting.

Die Sorgen und die Macht

Die Sorgen und die Macht—inspired, as noted previously, by the Bitterfeld Conference of 1959—deals with the initial difficulties of brown coal production in the GDR. Criticizing the workers’ petty bourgeois self-interest and the bureaucratic socialism of the party, the play projects a path toward the communism of the future. In spite of its socialist happy ending and its vision of “true communism,” the play was severely criticized by the ruling party, and its production at a major theater in Berlin was canceled.

Moritz Tassow

In Moritz Tassow, a blank-verse comedy and parody of Goethe’s classical drama Torquato Tasso (pb. 1790; English translation, 1827), Hacks continues to deal in dialectic fashion with the problems of building a socialist society in the GDR, in this particular case with the problems of land reform and the collectivization of farms. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Moritz Tassow, a former swineherd, takes over the estate of the local Junker and establishes a farming commune. Current party policies, however, prescribe the division of the old estates into small, individual farms, although large communes may be more productive. While the members of the party insist on compliance with the party directives, Moritz Tassow holds on to his utopia. In the end, the representatives of the party prevail, and the land is subsequently divided among the farmhands. Yet Tassow has the satisfaction of knowing that he is ahead of his time. The land reform of 1945 was finally replaced in East Germany by the drive for collectivization of 1960. In 1945, however, Tassow must withdraw, like his Goethean model, from his clash with party functionaries, the men of action, and, like Goethe’s protagonist, he retires to writing fiction, yet he continues to fight for his utopia against the courtiers of his age—that is, the party functionaries.

Amphitryon

In the two comedies, Amphitryon and Omphale, Hacks resorts to mythology to dramatize his concern for a humane utopia in socialist society. The Amphitryon plot, well-known to theater audiences through the treatment of Plautus, Molière, Heinrich von Kleist, and Jean Giraudoux, is changed insofar as Alkmene prefers the god to the human being, because Jupiter represents the utopian dimension of humankind. He is what people are supposed to be, and something beyond that, incorporating the humane utopia, whose essence consists of love and the striving toward perfection. The comedy lacks the tragic elements of the Kleistian version, affirming the potential of human growth and development toward perfection. Because Amphitryon fails to develop this potential, his wife, Alkmene, knowingly chooses the god over her husband; Jupiter achieves what her husband was meant to be. When Amphitryon argues that there are limits to human achievement—paradoxically, only a god is able to be a human being—Jupiter answers with the metaphor of border crossing (Grenzüberschreitung) that is so central to Bloch’s philosophy of hope, saying that recognizing one’s limits means transcending them. Amphitryon proves to be not totally uneducable; he and Alkmene experience through divine intervention their growth toward their humane utopia in spite of all their shortcomings.

Omphale

In Hacks’s other blank-verse comedy Omphale, the exchange of male and female dress and attributes between Hercules and Omphale is presented as a positive event symbolizing their emancipation from the traditional stereotypes of male and female roles. Hercules becomes Omphale, and Omphale becomes Hercules, forming a new union on a higher level of human growth. This new synthesis, however, would merely be a short-lived private utopia if the two partners failed to establish contact with society: Individual love and growth become meaningless without social interaction. Hercules and Omphale must return to their former roles, he as a dragon slayer, and she as a mother of heroes, in order to restore their social standing. Their return is not a defeat; rather, it constitutes an enrichment of their former personalities. Hacks appears to be saying that although this Herculean feat of becoming a new human being is impossible to achieve, society is thereby set into motion in a direction that will lead to the humane utopia in the not too distant future.

Charlotte

Hacks’s outlook on human life and love is not as optimistic in Charlotte. With Charlotte von Stein, Goethe’s great love of the 1770’s and 1780’s, as sole dramatis persona, this monodrama deals with the price of human suffering paid for great artistic achievements. While stirring Goethe’s passion, Charlotte had challenged his intellect and inspired his creativity. In 1786, however, Goethe left her to seek new inspiration in Italy. The play opens after Goethe’s hasty and secretive departure for Italy, with Charlotte explaining to her husband, playing a mute role in this drama, what it was that happened between her and the young poet and statesman. She tries to deny any transgressions on her part, calling Goethe a self-centered lout who adored her, but whose attention she discouraged all those years. She protests too much, however, betraying not only an erotic passion for Goethe but also resentment and bitterness for the price she had to pay for the self-centered development of a great poet. Not much, if anything, is left of the humane utopia of this great love relationship. Like so many of Hacks’s dramas, it is a dialectic thesis play that presents, however, in contrast to the plays of his middle period from 1960 to 1970, a negative assessment not only of human relationships but also of art, including his own, and its inherent utopian function. This pessimism may be an explanation for the subsequent decline of Hacks’s dramatic productivity.

Bibliography

Demetz, Peter. Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction. New York: Pegasus, 1970. Survey of German literature between 1945 and 1970 with chapters on individual authors.

Huettich, H. G. Theater in the Planned Society: Contemporary Drama in the German Democratic Republic in Its Historical, Political, and Cultural Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1978. Monograph on theater and drama in the GDR until 1976.

Mitchell, Michael. Peter Hacks: Theatre for a Socialist Society. Glasgow: Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies, 1990. An examination of Hacks’s plays and his political positions.

Scheid, Judith R. “Enfant terrible” of Contemporary East German Drama: Peter Hacks in His Role as Adaptor and Innovator. Bonn: Bouvier, 1977. Study of text adaptation and innovation in Hacks’s plays through the 1970’s.

Waidson, H. M. “Peter Hacks.” In Twentieth Century German Dramatists, 1919-1992, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin. Vol. 124 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1992. Survey article of Peter Hacks’s plays through the 1980’s.