ABSTRACT
After schooling in West Berlin and various jobs in the GDR, where he grew up, Hein studied philosophy in Leipzig, then worked until 1979 as literary adviser and playwright for the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. His plays bear a formal and thematic resemblance to those of Volker Braun, especially Schlötel (première 1974, published 1981), in which a graduate of Leipzig University forced on to the shop-floor finds the workers apathetic when he attempts to make them socially motivated, and Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q (1983), set in China, which shows intellectuals unable to find a productive role in a revolution. The temptations, hesitations, self-deceptions and failures of revolutionary leaders are the subject of Cromwell (1978), in which Hein points to the plot’s relevance to the course of twentieth-century revolutions, and of Lassalle fragt Herrn Herbert nach Sonja (1981), in which the nineteenth-century workers’ leader is shown as the victim of his own tendency to self-pity and quixotic romanticism as well as of others’ intrigues. Passage (1987) is set in a French café close to the Spanish frontier during the Second World War, where six refugees wait for permission to cross.
