ABSTRACT
After writing his first play Senftenberger Erzählungen (first performed 1967), a conventional piece of socialist realism with an industrial setting, Lange worked in the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin from 1961. His next play Marski, completed in 1963 and performed in 1966, is a variation on the theme of the master-servant relationship treated by Brecht in Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti. The historical analogy of Stalin’s dispossession of the big farmers, hinted at here, was made more specific in the following plays Hundsprozeβ and Stalin als Herakles, published together with an interlude under the title Herakles in 1968, which approach the Stalin system from different points of view. Lange had meanwhile moved to the West in 1965, but he remained for a time a Marxist in his approach to his principal theme (the position of the artist-intellectual in society), while at the same time taking the opportunity to write on subjects taboo in the East. After a successfully realized free adaptation in dramatic form of Kleist’s Die Marquise von O., Die Gräfin von Rathenow (1969), Lange composed two plays on Trotsky, the first Die Ermordung des Aias oder Ein Diskurs über das Holzhacken (1971), an elaborate allegory in which the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky for the heritage of Lenin is presented in the form of the rivalry between Ajax and Odysseus for the arms of Achilles before the gates of Troy, the second Trotzki in Coyoacan (1972), an account of Trotsky’s last days devised to challenge comparison with the work of another partially disillusioned Marxist, Peter Weiss’s Trotzki im Exil (1970).
