Would the Real Peter Hacks Please Stand Up?

Peter Hacks has long been recognized as a leading dramatist of East Germany. A passionate advocate of orthodox Marxism, he has unleashed vehement polemics against heretics like Wolf Biermann and social democrats like Gunther Grass. At the same time, his ardent ideological commitment has sometimes placed him at odds with a relatively pragmatic ruling party, and Hacks himself has been attacked by cultural authorities. He is notorious for the acerbic wit, cynicism, coarse sensuality and arrogant tone of his work.

When I first heard that Hacks wrote extensively for young people, I shuddered a bit at the thought of impressionable young minds entrusted to such a man. But, as Di Napoli demonstrates, the tales for young people illuminate a side of the playwright that is not widely recognized. Rather than the enfant terrible of East German letters, the author of these stories comes across as a sort of amiable grandfather. The books for young people are mostly charmingly contrived fables and parables designed to entertain and instruct. Unlike Hacks's work for adults, the tales for young people almost always end happily.

What, for me at least, is most notable about these tales is the playful imagination they reveal. Members of a rhinoceros family play music with their horns. A rat eats a young girl's school books but then to make up for it he instructs her. A vast range of animals, people and mythological creatures parade through the stories. Virtually none of the plots is predictable.

I am sometimes a bit troubled by the complete lack of stylistic elegance in Di Napoli's analysis, but it may be unfair to criticize him for this. His prose, at any rate, is clear. Di Napoli's style is pragmatic. It reflects a conception of scholarship that requires the nearly complete subordination of the commentator's personality to the material studied. Academic work is not viewed as an act of individual creativity but as part of a collective endeavor. One aspires only to add a few stones to the vast edifice of learning. Apart from his introduction and conclusion, Di Napoli never uses the first person.

Although there is something noble in the asceticism of such endeavor, this is not the only approach to scholarship. A limitation of this self-effacement is that it does not allow for an intense personal engagement with literary works. They are, therefore, easily reduced to blandness. Di Napoli never seems to be challenged by the literature under discussion except in a purely intellectual way, nor does he ever presume to offer more than the most restrained criticism of Hacks. Regard for his subject borders on reverence, a somewhat traditional attitude in German academies.

When Di Napoli cannot evade potentially emotional political and social topics, such restraint is particularly inappropriate. By not mentioning his own opinions and reactions, Di Napoli artificially depoliticizes discussion of a controversial public figure.

The child psychology of Bruno Bettelheim provides the major foundation of this study. But Bettelheim's work is always removed from its basis in Freudian theory. As a result, the pedagogical approaches of the Freudian analyst and the Marxist author, both detached from their respective philosophies, seem to be in complete harmony. I suspect that differences are being overlooked rather than resolved.

Di Napoli convincingly refutes East German critics who accuse Hacks of being overly individualistic and insufficiently partisan (parteilich) in his political views. But would Di Napoli have regarded these qualities as defects? Does Di Napoli share Hacks's support for the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961? After reading well over 250 pages, I do not have the vaguest idea of Di Napoli's own social, political or philosophical opinions. No doubt his omission is made in the interest of objectivity, but I think it more forthright for a scholar openly to state his views.

The lessons that Di Napoli finds in the stories by Hacks border -for adults and, I think, many children —on triteness: the need to accept maturity, the importance of education, the...