Peter Hacks Research Articles

Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machine by Dietmar Dath

Reviewed by: Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machineby Dietmar Dath Christoph Schmitz Thinking Through the Science Fiction Machine. Dietmar Dath. Niegeschichte: Science Fiction als Kunst- und Denkmaschine. [ Neverstory: Science Fiction as Art- and Thinking-Machine]. Matthes & Seitz, 2019. 942 pp. €38 pbk, €25,99 ebk. With Niegeschichte[Neverstory], German sf author and cultural critic Dietmar Dath presents an erudite, well-written, and stimulating account of sf as cultural history. While the book mainly focuses on literature, it also discusses other narrative forms including films, the visual arts, and even pop music. Niegeschichte, however, wants to be more than sf history. Dath balances an in-depth account of the genre's development with an ambitious interpretive approach. Two strains of theory frame the historical narrative. Readers familiar with Dath's work will not be surprised by the central role of Marxist aesthetics, and in particular the claim that "art is a form of understanding" (22, all translations mine): Dath is one of the most prominent Marxist writers in Germany. Additionally, the text deploys elements from conceptual mathematics, especially category theory, to explain the poetic relations within and among the artworks he discusses. While the theoretical explorations at times expand into the overtly abstract, they are generally well argued and detailed enough to carry Dath's arguments over nearly one thousand pages. Niegeschichteappears to be written for the casual sf reader: the dustcover blurb advertises it as an "introduction to [Dath's] favorite topic." Its chronological organization and the (mostly) canonical text selection underline the book's introductory character, as does Dath's personal investment and his talent as a writer. His honest display of excitement for many of the analyzed stories, novels, and films is often infectious, and the well-structured narrative of the historical part shows that Dath's talents as a novelist transfer seamlessly to the cultural-historical approach. Niegeschichtealso makes frequent allusions to films, literary texts, and philosophical theories from outside the genre. These references allow readers to draw parallels between sf and other areas of cultural history. But the book's analytical aspirations go far beyond introducing new readers to the sf canon. Rather, its main goal is to analyze its history in order to develop a precise understanding of its main characteristics. In this sense, Niegeschichteis a historical-materialist account. Chapter I presents both personal and analytical motivations behind the book and clarifies the grounding of Dath's poetic thinking in Marxist theories, from Marx himself via George Lukács to East German writer Peter Hacks. Dath makes clear that the references to non-sf artworks and general theories not only draw in casual readers, but also support his claim that sf presents a unique narrative mode that "opens up a cultural history of its era" (27). Dath calls sf an "Art- and Thinking-Machine," as the book's subtitle has it. A machine is "everything that replaces, supports, and expands our memory—i.e. writing, image, storage—and everything that allows us to manipulate these [End Page 172]stored data more effectively …: the alphabet, mathematical symbols, all rules to manipulate them, words, sentences, equations" (96). The historical narrative presented in Niegeschichteis also an inspection of this machine, answering the questions "What kind of machine is SF? Who constructed it? Who possesses it? Who uses it? Against what? What for?" (103). A central concept of the book is what Dath calls "Aufhebungsfunktor" ("suspension functor" 72, passim). It combines Coleridge's suspension of disbelief with Dath's ambitious program of a poetics inspired by the mathematics of category theory, of which functor is a central concept. Dath understands sf not as the accumulation of all texts that deal with future civilizations, spaceships, aliens, and/or time travel but rather as the genre's formal and functional characteristics. Category theory does not describe discrete objects or sets of them, but "when, how, where, and in which ways something can be transformed into something else" (71). And these are exactly the questions Dath poses about sf history. The suspension functor describes the suspension of our "expectation of experiencing the world" and substitutes an alternative set of rules—those that are characteristic of...

Scaffolding in second language teaching. The teaching unit “The poem ‘Der Herbst steht auf der Leiter’ by Peter Hacks“

This article presents a lesson plan for German taught as a second language in Middle School. The plan shows the creative integration of a poem by Peter Hacks into the lesson. The artful and partly three-dimensional work improves the understanding of the text and benefits the student’s feeling for the language. The students are guided to the underlying objective through different tasks. In the end, they memorize the poem and present it in front of the class.

GROTESQUE BY PETER HACKS

A grotesque in the work of Peter Hacks is not simply reception, but conceptual connection of funny and tragic, amusing and intimidating. Genre of the works (many of them) an author designated as a «fairy-tale» are addressed to the adult readers and carry in itself the palette of feelings from sad irony to cruel sarcasm. «Dramatist of the two Germanies» creates character on a joint fantastic and knowable. One of the most frequency methods of creation of grotesque character in his works is the pun related to the polysemanticism of the concept «Size» (Größe). It is an important unit of aesthetics of thin parodist and author of whole corps of grotesque plays. The physical sizes of his giants and titans can coincide or not coincide with potential of personality. In the first case personages get in the field of authorial humour, in the second – there is a grotesquely-satiric and even grotesquely-tragic effect. Authorial antitheses from that Hacks extracts a maximum of senses are no less important. An element his heroes operate in that is created on the joint of size and banality, talent and low middle class, spirit and domestic little things, force and weakness, uniqueness and repetition. An author actively uses the collision of scales, reiteration and duplicity, collision of corporality and sex appeal with the questions of politics, connection human and animal the worlds, giving the especially abstract concepts of physical properties, transformation etc. In agregate the train of his grotesques is built in authorial conception of historical progress being based on the idea of objectively nascent equilibrium, contrary often to opposite egoistical aspirations of figures, «creating» history.

Mixing Pop Art and Political Criticism: Heinz Edelmann’s Artwork for Children

Heinz Edelmann (1934-2009), a German illustrator and designer, is probably best known as the art director of the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine (1968). Less well-known are the three picturebooks he illustrated for children, which are influenced by the Pop Art movement. The large-sized picturebooks Maicki Astromaus (1970) and Andromedar SR1 (1970) refer to the science fiction genre and reveal a critical attitude towards the contemporary political and economic situation. Kathrinchen ging spazieren (1973), by contrast, is a picturebook story with nonsensical verses by the East German playwright Peter Hacks and subliminally refers to the causes of consumerism and careless wishes. A comparative analysis of these picturebooks demonstrates that Edelmann’s illustrations in combination with the accompanying texts are significant examples of the political, cultural, and societal upheaval that can be found in German children’s literature of the ‘68’ period.

Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen (review)

Reviewed by: Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen Antje Budde Thomas Keck and Jens Mehrle, eds.Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen [Berlin Dramaturgy: Recorded Conversations of the Academy Working Group Led by Peter Hacks]. Schriftenreihe der Peter-Hacks-Gesellschaft. Berlin: Aurora-Verlag, 2010. 5 volumes. Pp. 2000. €126.00 (Pb). This publication project, based on recorded discussions of a dramatic working group initiated and led by the playwright and poet Peter Hacks between 1972 and 1990 at the East German Academy of the Arts – an assembly of accomplished artists working across disciplines – consists of five volumes of well-annotated and contextualized archival material. The fifth volume provides the reader with a very helpful contextualizing afterword by Jens Mehrle (7–18), as well as the retrospections and critical reflections of some of the participants (19–40, 69–97). Most prominent are hilarious descriptions of the set-ups for the meetings, which provided participants with food and alcoholic drinks. Furthermore, the volume contains a useful index of the names, works, and terminology that appear in volumes one through four, as well as photographic documentation that captures the more atmospheric aspects of the meetings and their theatrical contexts (41–68). Volumes one through four are in chronological order and are thematically organized. All volumes include an extensive apparatus (up to a hundred pages) that provides background information and clarifies historical constellations that affected the strategies for group discussion. The participants were invited by Peter Hacks, and the topics of conversation followed his suggestions and covered a wide range of topics, including Hegel’s dramatic theory, Gustav Freytag’s five-act plays, classical and romantic drama, dramaturgy, the aesthetics and history of socialist realism, and techniques for playwriting. My favourite discussion topic is entitled “Die Entstehung der Fabel aus dem Fassungsvermoegen des Zuschauergehirns” (4: 135–82), which means, “Plot creation evolving from the capacity of spectators’ brains,” and which starts with the well-meant advice to dramatists not to write anything important during the first three minutes of a play because [End Page 584] the spectators are still too busy with themselves, coughing, chatting, and finding comfortable positions in their seats. The archival compendium reads – since women are mainly absent – like an androcentric and patriarchal anatomy of a failing political system that was quite literally imploding between 1972 and 1990, its predictable death ending with the unpredictable unification of the two German Cold-War states and an embrace of neo-liberal capitalism. Also imploding were rigid, classical structures of drama, and that transformation becomes progressively clearer as younger playwrights enter the discussions. This publication project is, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, entitled Berlinische Dramaturgie [Berliner Dramaturgy], which, no doubt, plays with references to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie [Hamburg Dramaturgy]. That association is reinforced by Thomas Mehrle’s afterword, “Arbeit der Poesie” [Labour of Poetry] (5: 7–18), the title playing with a suggestion by Hacks that participants think more about the labour involved in creating skilful poetry than about the inverse –“The Poetry of Labour”– which was the title of another working group at the academy (5: 9). Hacks’s concern with informed skill, historical knowledge, and artistic professionalism is echoed by Mehrle’s choice of an introductory quotation from Dramaturgie, in which Lessing – a highly influential innovator and experimentalist in bourgeois drama and theatre philosophy – complains about playwrights who want to invent the dramatic wheel over and over while ignoring the achievements of their forefathers (5: 7). Hacks was extremely unsatisfied with the state of dramaturgical education in East Germany, which, in his assessment of the situation, had led to a serious deterioration in the professional skills of young playwrights and had contributed to the proliferation of inferior work in the arts sector (5: 15–16). Hence, Hacks insisted on the value of the five-act dramaturgy of classical plays as well as on the value of Gustav Freytag’s dramatic theory and practice, based on this ideal and idealized dramatic form. Hacks was convinced that classical dramaturgy should be studied, particularly by younger playwrights, who seemed to him to be in the unpleasant habit of “reinventing” already discovered and ideal solutions to...

Reviews

ROBIN BERNSTEIN, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, reviewed by Kathryn Bond Stockton LAURENS DE VOS, Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Sung Hee Choi PETRA DIERKES-THRUN, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression, reviewed by John Paul Riquelme IRIS SMITH FISCHER, Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s, reviewed by Amy S. Green MARGARET HAMILTON, Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia, reviewed by Aoise Stratford TYLER HOFFMAN, American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop, reviewed by Christopher Grobe JONATHAN KALB, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, reviewed by John H. Muse THOMAS KECK and JENS MEHRLE, eds. Berlinische Dramaturgie: Gespraechsprotokolle der von Peter Hacks geleiteten Akademiearbeitsgruppen [Berlin Dramaturgy: Recorded Conversations of the Academy Working Group Led by Peter Hacks], reviewed by Antje Budde

GDR Theatre Censorship: A System in Denial

This article outlines the historical, ideological and political reasons why the SED denied that censorship existed in the GDR, and investigates how this denial affected the language, practice, and effectiveness of East German theatre censorship. The supporting evidence is drawn from case-studies ranging across the GDR's history. The euphemistic language of GDR censorship presented officials as cultural facilitators and pedagogues, not as censors. By thus denying that pre-performance censorship was routinely practised, the regime was able to hold theatre practitioners fully accountable for their productions, even though they had been filtered through unofficial controls. Like the lack of clear, reliable guidelines, this apparent devolution of responsibility exposed the practitioners to considerable risks: even licensed scripts could encounter fierce criticism when premiered, so that essentially loyal practitioners like Wolfgang Langhoff unexpectedly found themselves treated as dissidents. Whilst directors and dramatists found ways of turning the regime's denial of censorship to their advantage, Helmut Baierl, Peter Hacks, and Heiner Müller argued that they would fare better if decisions were made openly and could be challenged. As a first step towards the abolition of de facto theatre censorship, they therefore called for its legalisation.

East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (review)

Reviewed by: East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature John E. Davidson Arlene A. Teraoka. East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 250 pp. Arlene A. Teraoka’s East, West, and Others examines the attempts of leftist or left-liberal writers “to envision a non-hegemonic mode of encounter with non-German others” in their literature after 1945. Teraoka contends that the issue is not whether these authors tend toward Eurocentrism, for they must necessarily do so given the social, political, and cultural position from which they write; rather, the interesting and instructive concern is with “how and why they speak” in the manner they do. The project of East, West, and Others, then, seeks to move beyond the images and content of these works to examine the strategic use (deliberate and/or symptomatic) of “the Third World” to meet cultural and political demands. Teraoka approaches this project through close, skillful readings of texts by (primarily) canonical authors, paying particular attention to the way that progress and enlightenment are aligned with European [End Page 467] traditions to which the “other” must aspire. She argues convincingly (if a bit predictably) that Anna Seghers shows no awareness of the problems in representing European tradition as the key to emancipation for inhabitants of Latin America. Concentrating primarily on The Light on the Gallows (1961), the last work of Seghers’s first “Caribbean Trilogy,” this study uncovers a mind-body opposition in which “natives” only become fully human and revolutionary as they take on enlightened ideals and shed the chains of a body-centered existence. Importantly, it is not the orthodoxy of Seghers’s communism that traps her in the strategies of domination she hopes to contest, but rather an adherence to Enlightenment traditions as the corrective to the Nazi’s murderous reign of bureaucratized irrationalism that sent her into exile. A similar snare entraps Peter Weiss, who attempts to come to grips with National-Socialist rule, the war, and, most especially, the Holocaust by turning to the Third World. Teraoka reserves particularly harsh criticism for Weiss’s project, which she claims both universalizes the Holocaust (robbing it of the specificity needed for real critical engagement) and fails to interrogate the radicality of “choosing” marginality as a political strategy in the wake of the Holocaust. The use of documentary drama in Weiss’s “global theater,” (specifically The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey [1967] and Vietnam Discourse [1968]) develops a parallel between (European) Enlightenment and (Third-World) revolution that in essence allows Western intellectuals to have their rebellious cake and eat it, too, quite comfortably. In the work of GDR dramatists set in Latin America, Teraoka finds the role of such “paradigmatic intellectuals” tied directly to their role in advancing European hegemony. One of the more surprising (and well-supported) claims in Teraoka’s book is that, regardless of being written by “career intellectuals” (Claus Hammel and Peter Hacks) or authors more openly critical of the East-German state (Volker Braun and Heiner Müller), these Latin American texts maintain that Europe cannot provide an (intellectual) avant garde for the Third-World revolution, not even from the Socialist tradition. Ultimately these “Solidarity Plays” have much more to do with a commentary about Europe (Western and Eastern) than with Latin America, a commentary softening the critic’s stance on the firmly Eurocentric instrumentalization of the “other” in these works. [End Page 468] Teraoka’s sympathies clearly reside with those authors who eschew a firm position on either side of the Us/Them divide: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. While using the Third World as means of criticizing contemporary Europe, neither of these authors hold that they can get outside of their own European identity by doing so. Thanks to his “sovereign irony,” Enzensberger wields a double-edged sword: for example, his critique of the Western (neo-) colonial and imperial project goes hand in hand with his critique of Cuba, and he never forgets the difference between himself as a “European and the rice farmers of the Third World.” In Enzensberger’s work, poets become deceivers in the European tradition, but...

East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature

East, West, and Others is the first work to examine the Third World in German literature from World War II to the present. Arlene A Teraoka investigates how prominent post-World War II East and West German authors have portrayed the Third World. She discusses the persistent stereotypes of race, culture, and sexuality in texts by authors whose careers were shaped by concerns with Third World politics. Those writers include Anna Seghers, Peter Weiss, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heiner Muller; East Germans Claus Hammel and Peter Hacks; and the documentary West German writers Max von der Grun, Gunter Wallraff, and Paul Geiersbach. Teraoka demonstrates the continuing German need to construct a postwar identity freed from the fascist past and the conflicts and cliches that inevitably mar this dream of the self. Whether authors project a champion of humanity who upholds Enlightenment ideals or a fragmented European protagonist paralyzed by guilt, all negotiate between the forces of rationality and prejudice, universality and difference, solidarity and helplessness. Arlene A Teraoka is an associate professor of German at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is the author of Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Muller.

Brechtian Sexual Politics in the Plays of Howard Barker

Bertolt Brecht's impact on the contemporary vision of theatre is widespread. This includes American feminist theatre, which has identified its development with Brechtian methodology — "Individual playwrights, feminist theatre groups, and other women who have assumed leadership roles in the contemporary theatre have linked their work with Brecht's in a variety of ways” — and contemporary German playwrights such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose "place in the line of haters of traditional theatre can be seen in his affinity with early Brecht," and Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, and Helmut Baierl, who Rolf Rohmer says could be considered as "Brecht's disciples" whose "style and method of playwriting were — however individual and different — unmistakably Brechtian." Brecht has shown himself to be most influential, however, with regard to British playwriting. Many British playwrights working today show at least some sign of having been swayed by the waves and ripples of Brecht's theatrical armada. Whether it be in structural design, political ideology, or social philosophy, and whether it be conscious or subconscious, the effect Brecht has had is clear.

“Only limited utopias are realizable”: On a motif in the plays of Peter Hacks

GDR playwright Peter Hacks has spent his entire career working out the implications of political idealism in a world of limited freedom for action. In his adaptations of classical authors and his plays about the GDR, he demonstrates that “future‐oriented action” is possible, but that it must not be confused with either pure idealism or pure opportunism. This search for a middle ground where actions are based on possibilities beyond existing reality, while pragmatically acknowledging that reality, continues in Hacks’ post‐1989 plays. Hacks’ continuing faith in the possibility of progress has prevented him from despairing during the current period of disillusionment in Eastern Germany.

Thomas Di Napoli: The Children's Literature of Peter Hacks

Thomas Di Napoli: The Children's Literature of Peter Hacks

The Third World in the Work of Volker Braun and Heiner Müller

In looking back at the Seventies from the vantage point of 1980, Frank Hornigk noted ubergreifende gemeinsame Tendenz, eine Art gemeinsames Zentrum innerhalb der DDR Dramatik (Hornigk 148). During that decade, such otherwise disparate authors as Volker Braun, Heiner Muller, Peter Hacks, and Claus Hammel all wrote or published plays which dealt with questions of history and revolution. While these topics were treated in a world-wide context, it was obvious to Hornigk that they also reflected directly on the situation of the GDR at the beginning of the Eighties, especially on the growing recognition that there was a significant and widening gap between the theoretical expectations of revolutionary transformation in society and behaviour and the quotidian reality of socialism (Hornigk 167, 180). Hornigk focussed on the development of these authors, especially on Heiner Muller, and on the relevance of their plays for the GDR. This article will focus instead on two aspects with which he did not deal: the fact that all the plays he mentioned are set in Latin America, the Third World, and how that fact is reflected in the assumptions and interpretations provided in the plays Guevara oder Der Sonnenstaat (finished 1975, first performed at Mannheim in 1979) by Volker Braun and Der Auftrag (published in 1979, first performed under the author's direction at the Volksbuhne Berlin 1980) by Heiner Muller.1 There is little doubt that an exotic setting furnishes a ce rtain degree of freedom for the critical discussion of revolutionary experiences that happened in the past, not unlike the uses of classical mythology in earlier phases of GDR drama (Arnold 58-64). More interesting, however, is the question of

Would the Real Peter Hacks Please Stand Up?

Would the Real Peter Hacks Please Stand Up?

The Children's Literature of Peter Hacks

Contents: Part One: Peter Hacks' development as a children's author, from the 1950s through the decade of the 80s - Part Two: Characterization and such central themes as education, human progress, and man's quest for peace are treated.

Peter Hacks and Children's Literature of the GDR

Peter Hacks and Children's Literature of the GDR

Zu Peter Hacks’ dramatischem Werk : Die Weitsicht des Dichters im Spiegel der Form

This essay uses the criteria defined by Volker Rlotz concerning Peter Hacks’ drama, stresses their formal evolution and significantly concludes on his conception of the world. The «open form» of his first plays for which he is indebted to Brecht’s epic drama is used to fight the social order of the West, which he sets out to stigmatize, refusing to find any harmony in it. The blending of styles which follows Hacks’ settling in East Berlin in 1955 is to be viewed in relation to his belief that die GDR was at the time going through a period of transition, marked by contradictions, towards socialism. The plays written after the middle of the sixties tend to have a «closed form» and show that the notion of harmony ranks first in. the artist’s vision of the world. Finally, this analysis stresses the ambivalence of the socialist «classicism» wanted by Hacks.

Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum in the New World: John Gay and Peter Hacks

No AccessCaptain Macheath and Polly Peachum in the New World: John Gay and Peter HacksAlbert WertheimAlbert WertheimSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Jan 2019https://doi.org/10.7767/muk.1981.27.23.176SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 27Issue 2-3September 1981 ISSN: 0025-4606eISSN: 2305-0667HistoryPublished online:January 2019 PDF download

"Enfant terrible" of Contemporary East German Drama. Peter Hacks in his Role as Adaptor and Innovator.

"Enfant terrible" of Contemporary East German Drama. Peter Hacks in his Role as Adaptor and Innovator.

"Reject it, in order to possess it": On Heiner Muller and Bertolt Brecht

None of those writers who began writing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; the Federal Republic of Germany is here similarly abbreviated to FRG), or who found a literary home there, was more clearly regarded as a pupil of Brecht than the playwright Heiner Milller - not even Peter Hacks, whose first plays return unabashedly to forms of the "epic theatre," and about whom the story long circulated that he had immigrated to the GDR in the early 1950'S at Brecht's personal invitation. Hacks began to speak of the "new classicism" of the theatre in the "developed socialism" of his society, and in his plays of the 1960'S based on classical models he replaced the critical parable about the misunderstandings in this world with large-scale and above all aesthetically "rounded" designs for the future human society. It was at this pOint that people realised that Hacks was going his own way - a way that led away from Brecht. The interaction was quite different with Milller. His first plays about the establishment of socialism in the developing GDR, about the hard, difficult, contradictory work involved, have little in common with the "typical" techniques of "epic theatre." There is no trace of parabolic forms, "Verfremdungseffekte," techniques of authorial comment as Brecht developed them (and as they are characteristic of Hacks's early works) in Milller's The Wage Slaver (Der Lohndrucker; 1957), Correction (Korrektur; 1956/58), Report from Klettwitz (Klettwitzer Bericht; 1958), or The Bui/ding Site (Der Bau; 1964). Nonetheless, until the 1970'S, there was no question that this writer was a successor to Brecht. This categorization -in contrast to that of Hacks - outlasted Milller's adaptations of the classics (like Philoctetes [Philoktet; 1964], Prometheus [1968) , or Oedipus the Tyrant [Odipus Tyrann; 1966)), and even his version of Macbeth (1971) , which treated the old text much more drastically and radically than Brecht had ever done in his adaptations of the classics.