[In the following review of The Tango Player, Frank discusses the work as a commentary on the transitional state of politics and emotions surrounding the decline of the German Democratic Republic.]

Hans-Peter Dallow, the protagonist of this witty, subversive novel [The Tango Player], is introduced just as he's released from the East German prison where's he's spent 21 months. His “crime” was a pathetic offense—having played the piano in a politically incorrect cabaret show. Now he's very much on guard, and uneasy: “The fear has crept into the bones of my fingers,” Dallow tells an official as he leaves his jail.

In the world described by playwright and novelist Christoph Hein (author of The Distant Lover), most of those in Dallow's circle are sympathetic, but also cautious—starting with former colleagues at the Institute, where he'd taught history. Even Dallow's mother and father are suspicious of their ex-convict son. Dallow's protestations that he was merely an innocent accompanist in a student cabaret—(“I was only the tango player”)—are often repeated.

The time is 1968, and the repulsive face of the old regime hovers in the background. The face takes its most visible form in Prague, where Soviet tanks are moving in. In Leipzig, those who feign loyalty to the regime still look over their shoulders. The currents of the time flow hesitantly; Dallow reads “two short articles about Warsaw and Prague, from which he could only gather that the newspaper's editors were following certain events in these cities with great interest and deep concern, though what these events were remained unclear.”

After 21 months locked up, Dallow makes interesting discoveries. With some amazement, he learns “how inept and ill-prepared he was for freedom.” And suddenly he cannot come to terms with the word “future”—his own seeming “like an enormous sheet of paper, white and terrifying.”

Life after prison has a certain inevitability. As Dallow encounters family, or neighbors, or ex-colleagues or even the judge who sent him away, he becomes frantic and confused—his musings are like notes from underground. The woman he'd lived with has left him, moving out days before he reclaims his apartment. He begins to frequent bars, where he meets, among others, the sensible, attractive Elke. Inevitably, she gets fed up with Dallow. In particular, she becomes fed up with his unwillingness to return to his career as a historian. Why does he profess disinterest in the events in Prague? Why does he pretend that he'll find happiness as a truck driver, or a waiter? And so on.

The Tango Player never dwells directly upon the failed systems of Eastern Europe; Hein's sense of irony is too keen for that. Yet the regime that was (and that Hein knew all too well in the former East Germany) is always there. It is present in every shop, in every pub, and—quite literally—comes through the front door, in the forms of the mysteriously banal Herr Schulze and Herr Muller, who easily use words like “parasite” and “asocial element” to describe the Dallows of their world.

Dallow may run to assume his role as outsider, but he cannot hide. He even gets stopped in the middle of the night by two policemen who examine his papers and chastise him for a deficient mud flap on his car. (Why is it that Germans in positions of authority always seem unusually sinister?)

What makes all this less-than-promising material work is, above all, Hein's terrific eye and his sense of the power of the state—even if the state is on its last, decrepit legs. He understands (as Orwell did) that one of the system's most sinister talents is its ability to leach independent thought from the individual, a phenomenon Dallow experienced in prison: “None of his musings had any practical consequence, and so they inevitably became confused, and he soon lost the ability to express them in words. His thinking was incomplete; it filled his head with a strange, impenetrable, and disconcerting jumble of fractured ideas.”

Hein (who apparently wrote The Tango Player as the East German state was crumbling) also understands the curious appeal of life under totalitarianism. When Dallow actually becomes homesick for his cell—“the strange security, the comprehensive care … the total regulation of his life,” Hein, not very subtly, is suggesting that his countrymen are coming to grips with similar emotions.

The suspicious looks, the dark streets, the empty train stations, the prying state—it was a cast of characters for much of the world for much of this century. In The Tango Player, in Philip Boehm's graceful translation, it seems no less wicked in the moment of its disappearance.