Hein
[This page by Astrid Köhler]
Christoph Hein
Christoph Hein, born 1944, shot to fame in the early 1980s, and is now known as one of the most eminent authors of German drama, prose fiction and essays. Asked about his moral and artistic stance as a writer, he once replied:
‘I understand myself to be a chronicler, one who describes with great accuracy what he has seen. Thus I stand in an honourable tradition running from Johann Peter Hebel to Kafka. But the writer is not a preacher, someone adding his own commentary to the facts of the case. I avoid preaching, but my own position is sufficiently clear. You can’t write and remain concealed at the same time. Without backbone, writing is impossible.’
(Christoph Hein, ‘Die alten Themen habe ich noch, jetzt kommen neue dazu’: Interview, March 1990. Translated by David W. Robinson, in Robinson, Deconstructing East Germany, p. xiv, see reading list below)
Hein was born in 1944 in the Silesian town of Heinzendorf (now Witoszyce in Poland). After the war, the family moved to Bad Düben near Leipzig. As the son of a protestant pastor, he was barred from attending a grammar school in the young GDR. His attempt to gain the necessary qualifications from a boarding school in West Berlin was stymied by the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He later completed his diploma at evening classes whilst working in a number of different jobs. After taking a university degree in philosophy and logic, he worked as a ‘dramaturg’ at the Berlin Volksbühne theatre, where he was made house author in 1974. Since 1979 he has worked as a freelance writer in Berlin where he still lives today. Both before and after German reunification in 1990, Hein made a name for himself as an outspoken intellectual, condemning censorship in the GDR, contributing to the famous demonstration of East German artists and intellectuals on 4 November 1989 in East Berlin, but also as criticising the political process of unification in which all of the GDR’s social, cultural and political achievements were to be erased. Hein holds many literary awards such as the Lessing Prize (1989), the Erich Fried Prize (1990), and the Schiller Gedächtnis Prize (2004). His works have been translated into 35 languages.
One of Hein’s first big successes on both sides of the Iron Curtain was the novella Der fremde Freund; The Distant Lover which appeared in 1982; the West German edition of the book was called Drachenblut; Dragon’s Blood. It was preceded by a collection of short stories and followed by the novel Horns Ende; Horn’s Fate in 1985. With these three books, Hein set the tone, established the topics and demonstrated the specific qualities that have characterized his prose works ever since. Among his themes are: a critique of the destructive forces of civilization, people’s attitudes towards history and the pervasiveness of ideological constructs in every society. In his texts, he revisits particular historical periods or events in order to attain a deeper understanding of their influence on the present. His stories lay bare the emotional poverty and the workings of self-deception underneath seemingly successful biographies; and in their sober descriptions, they dissect various social behaviours as if with a scalpel. All of Hein’s stories are spare narratives; they are strikingly restrained in tone and suggest a strong detachment between the narrator and what is narrated. Indeed, the author himself claims that his work is guided by the principle of sine ira et studio (without passion or prejudice). Nevertheless, these stories often have a rather disquieting effect on the reader. And although each of them is firmly rooted in concrete historical and local settings, their essence is easily transferable to other settings (i.e. that of the respective reader). Precisely because they never put forward a particular point of view, they require the reader to engage in a dialogue with them, and to supply the missing conclusions for themselves.
Dialogue with the audience is also the main principle underlying Hein’s dramas. In his 1983 play Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q; The True Story of Ah Q (an adaptation of a short story by the Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun) the protagonist famously says: ‘Ich habe keine Botschaft’ (I have no message) followed by ‘Sie sollen sich selber was denken’ (They should think of something themselves). The ‘They’ refers to the audience and by association the reader, and many critics transferred Ah Q’s statement from the character to his author. Hein is therefore widely regarded as a ‘chronicler without a moral message’ (Chronist ohne Botschaft), an attribution he himself accepts (see also the quotation above).
Hein’s works include:
Schlötel oder Was solls; Schlötel or What is the Use?, play (1974)
Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois; Invitation to the Lever Bourgeois (1980)
Der fremde Freund; The Distant Lover; published in West Germany as Drachenblut; Dragon’s Blood (1982)
Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q; The True Story of Ah Q, play (1983)
Horns Ende; Horn’s Fate (1985)
Öffentlich arbeiten. Essais und Gespräche; Working publicly. Essays and Interviews (1987)
Die Ritter der Tafelrunde; The Knights of the Round Table, play (1989)
Der Tangospieler; The Tango Player (1989)
Das Napoleonspiel; The Napoleon Game (1993)
Von allem Anfang an; From the very Beginning (1997)
Willenbrock (2000)
Landnahme; Settlement (2004)
Aber der Narr will nicht. Essais; But the Jester Refuses. Essays (2004)
In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten; In his Early Childhood, a Garden (2005)
Frau Paula Trousseau; Mrs Paula Trousseau (2007)
Weiskerns Nachlass; Weiskern’s Estate (2011)
Glückskind mit Vater; Portrait of a Son with Father (2016)
Trutz (2017)
Further Reading in English
David Clarke, ‘Diese merkwürdige Kleinigkeit einer Vision’. Christoph Hein’s Social Critique in Transition (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002)
David Clarke and William Niven (eds.), Christoph Hein (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2000)
William Niven, ‘“Das Geld ist nicht der Graal”: Christoph Hein and the Wende’, Modern Language Review 90:3 (1995), 688-706
William Niven, ‘A Play about Socialism? The Reception of Christoph Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde’, in ‘Whose Story?’ – Continuities in Contemporary German-language Literature, ed. by Arthur Williams (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 197-218
Graham Jackman (ed.), Christoph Hein in Perspective, German Monitor 51 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000)
Phillip McKnight, Understanding Christoph Hein (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)
David W. Robinson, Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein’s Literature of Dissent (New York: Camden House, 1999)
Further Reading in German
Lothar Baier (ed.), Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990)
Klaus Hammer (ed.), Chronist ohne Botschaft. Christoph Hein. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Materialien, Auskünfte, Bibliographie (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992)
Astrid Köhler, ‘Christoph Hein: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen.”’, in Astrid Köhler, Brückenschläge. DDR-Autoren vor und nach der Wiedervereinigung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 131-56
Web Links
www.themodernnovel.com/german/hein/author.htm
www.oneeyedman.net/school-archive/heinpage.html
