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

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 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...