SOURCE: McKnight, Phillip. “Homesickness for the Cell: Der Tangospieler.” In Understanding Christoph Hein, edited by James Hardin, pp. 88–112. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, McKnight examines the inability of Der Tangospieler's protagonist, Dallow, to function outside of prison after his release.]

The spring 1989 publication of Der Tangospieler (The Tango Player), translated into English in 1992, completes what could be designated as a trilogy of historical prose writings by Hein, each of which focuses on a time during a key historical turning point in East Germany: The Distant Lover on the revolt in East Germany of 17 June 1953, Horns Ende on the impact of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, and The Tango Player on the “Prague Spring” of 1968 that led to the fall of the Czech party chief and head of state Alexander Dubcek and the elimination of democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia.

Reading The Distant Lover in 1982 shocked people; reading The Tango Player in 1989, whose main character reminds some critics of Claudia (neither is interested in a close relationship or in politics),¹ provided ironic amusement. Hein captures the mood of the changing times: the situation had become so absurdly pathetic in the minds of many people that it deserved ridicule. A few weeks after the appearance of The Tango Player, the mass exodus by GDR “vacationers” through Czechoslovakia and Hungary began the final stage before the fall of the Wall. But in 1968, the main character's behavior was not amusing. The political situation was deeply serious.

None of Hein's books actually present an intense direct interaction with these historical events on the part of any of the characters. Such happenings are kept in the narrative background, but they are undeniably important in the lives of the characters, even though the characters often tend to discount their significance. For Hein, as we saw in Horns Ende, an individual's attitude toward history is the crucial point, and these varying attitudes comprise the level of reality he explores and intensifies in his fiction.

The three books were written throughout the decade of the 1980s, and each traces not only steps in the gradual easing of censorship in the GDR during this time—measured in terms of reduced need for Sklavensprache—but also those specific earlier historical events which most caused disillusionment and loss of faith in the system, and apathetic withdrawal into private life by ordinary citizens.

The Tango Player opens with the release of Hans-Peter Dallow from prison in February of 1968 after a twenty-one-month internment. Now thirty-six years old, Dallow had been a junior faculty member in the history department of the Karl-Marx-University in Leipzig, specializing in nineteenth-century proletarian history. He had been nearing promotion to Dozent (equivalent to associate professor with tenure) when a group of students talked him into providing the piano accompaniment for their cabaret show. Their regular pianist was sick, and they had only two days before the first show. Dallow agreed and played an old tango number from the 1920s, “Adios Muchachos,” to which the students, having altered the text, performed a witty persiflage of Walter Ulbricht.

Dallow claimed to be innocent. He had not paid any attention to the text; he was only the tango player, and a fill-in at that. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison with the others for “defamation of character of leading personalities of the state” ([The Tango Player, hereafter cited as Ta] 71). The story concludes seven months later with Dallow's return to the university with the promotion just a few days after the repression of the Czechoslovakian reform movement by Soviet tanks and Warsaw Pact troops. Dallow replaces his rival at the institute, Dr. Roessler, who is demoted for having accidently misread the situation in Prague. During the seven months, Dallow tries to put his life back in order by establishing his old routines.

He picks up women at different bars each night until this becomes boring; he visits old colleagues and acquaintances, pays a belated visit to his family, starts an affair with a single mother, and spends most of his time in disgruntled thought about the unfairness of his imprisonment. There are some encounters with his lawyer and the judge. The tango number is played again in the cabaret bar (without Dallow this time) by the same students as an ironic joke, and Dallow is followed by two Stasi agents whose purpose is to “rehabilitate” him and to entice him to return to the university and re-enter socialist society. Dallow has enough savings to avoid work during the seven months, but the judge finally orders him to obtain work. After Dallow's failed attempts to get a job as a truck driver, a bartender friend finds him a job on a resort island as a waiter. There, he occupies himself by sleeping with vacationing young girls, avoiding political involvement, and continuing his withdrawal, until the events of the Prague Spring provide him with the opportunity to return to Leipzig.

As usual, Hein does not pretend to be more clever than his readers and does not directly attempt to establish Dallow as a representative of society around 1968. His writing thus causes “reader insecurity” which leads to a “heightened tension.”² Unlike in The Distant Lover, Hein does not employ a first-person narrative and hence creates more distance between the reader and the main character. Familiar short sentences like those seen in the The Distant Lover create a neutral zone, and then the narrative switches to long, introspective sentences when Dallow's reflections about his innocence and his future are related—a thought process which reveals his guilt for not assuming responsibility for his actions or for his life. Consistent with Hein's objective use of language, interpretive adjectives are seldom used; there is seldom a change of perspective and a “minimum of ironic fracture.”³ His dramatist touch with language and dialogue readily lent the text to a screen adaptation by Roland Gräf later in 1989, the first DEFA film produced after the opening of the Wall and one of the last major films produced in the GDR before unification.⁴

When Sara Bershtel moved over to Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990, she took the rights to Hein's works other than The Distant Lover along with her. Plans were in the works to translate Horns Ende, but little progress was made, possibly due to less-than-expected sales of The Distant Lover. When The Tango Player appeared, a decision was made to proceed with it first. The translation by Philip Boehm is a marked improvement, but it still fails to replicate much of the essence of Hein's precise descriptions of humdrum every day existence, or his use of dialogue to define his characters' mentality in a nutshell. The translation doesn't provide the reader with the intermittent sardonic chuckle that Hein's blend of ironic humor with banal reality produces. The severity of this short-coming may, however, depend on the reader's lack of common cultural reference points regarding life in East Germany and an unfamiliarity with the kind of creative, ironic-bitter wit which ordinary East German people added to their everyday language to buffer themselves against the world around them. Few in the United States have ever lived behind the iron curtain, and any translator is faced with difficult barriers when attempting to find common parallels in linguistic expression—especially one who has not spent time in the GDR as more than a hostile tourist. To his credit, Boehm at least tries to avoid finding common American cultural equivalents as reference points: they seldom exist.

A LITTLE PROGRESS

When Dallow gets out of prison, he finds that things have changed: “Wir sind ein Stück weiter gekommen” (we have made a little progress) is a phrase used as a leitmotiv throughout the novel. Dallow hears these words several times in conjunction with the news that he would not be sent to jail for playing the tango nowadays. Under the new constitution, enacted in 1968, it would be a simple misdemeanor.

This change adds insult to injury for Dallow, causing him to act defiantly towards the system which ostensibly attempts to rehabilitate and reintegrate him. By the time of the publication of the novel in 1989, a large segment of GDR society had resigned itself to the situation, looking upon the aging members of the government with disgust and ridicule. East German readers would have reacted positively if Dallow had at least had the fortitude to stand with the other members of the student cabaret group, if he had at least bothered to pay attention to the text and therefore had been “unjustly” imprisoned for having knowingly participated in the caricature of Ulbricht. The fact that he continues to maintain his innocence (by reason of ignorance) makes his situation ludicrous and demonstrates that he has no backbone. His persistent resistance to being reintegrated does offer some hope, however.

When Dallow gets out of prison he returns to his apartment in Leipzig, cleans it up, gets resituated as quickly as possible, and establishes a routine. His previous girlfriend has left the apartment quite some time ago, and she never appears in the story. He checks out his car, fills up the battery, and hooks it up to a charger. He speaks to his car, “I missed you, you and the ladies” (Ta 12).

After cleaning up, he goes into town for a walk to see what had changed, to check out his old haunts. Even by GDR standards, Leipzig itself was not a very typical large city even though it boasted over 600,000 inhabitants. A source of constant irritation for the Leipzig inhabitants was the preferential treatment given to Berlin for scarce building and renovation funds. The fact that Leipzig was left in a state of dilapidation throughout the existence of the GDR fueled old antagonism between the Saxons (Leipzig) and the Prussians in Berlin, a city which was rebuilt as a “showcase” to the West. Leipzig's town center was shut off to traffic, a situation that generated an atmosphere more of a small town than of a big city. It was not unusual to bump into friends and acquaintances in the city center in spite of the size of the population.

In a café bar, he discovers his former defense lawyer sitting at a table with the judge who had sentenced him, Dr. Berger. That the judge, the ex-prisoner, and his lawyer all patronize the same bar underscores the provinciality of the city—a resistance to change and a small-town sense of boredom. Dallow shakes hands with the attorney and reminds the judge that he had sentenced him to twenty-one months in prison. The judge tells him that he is welcome to make an appointment if he has any questions or complaints, but Dallow says he was just saying hello to his lawyer, Kiewer.

Observing Dallow still taking his first gingerly steps after his release from prison, the reader is expecting substantive encounters and significant actions by the character. Dallow goes up to the bar and asks for his friend Harry, the head waiter, who is not scheduled to work until later that evening. Dallow has a conversation with the barmaid, who doesn't find him very pleasant. Some men next to him are discussing Dubcek and the situation in Prague. This annoys Dallow—they are speaking so loudly that it disturbs his concentration on the breasts of the barmaid. This minor glimpse into the workings of Dallow's mind defines the characteristics of his non-political personality and exposes his sense of priorities, personal self-gratification being at or near the top. Hein juxtaposes Dallow's particular chauvinistic and degrading attitude towards sex and his political disinterest from the outset of the narrative.

When Harry shows up, the conversation of the two men centers around small talk and women. They joke about the barmaid. Maybe she's the type for Dallow. Nothing of substance comes up, in spite of their not having seen each other for almost two years—not even any description of life in prison. Dallow hangs around the bar until midnight, drinking and looking over the women. He can't help but think to himself how harmless looking and suburban the judge, who is having a bit too much to drink, appears. He now makes a different impression on Dallow than he had wearing his formidable robes at the hearings. The reader begins to sense banality but, is, at the same time, willing to allow Dallow some time to get his bearings.

The next day, Dallow tries to sort things out during a walk outside of town. He finds that the only conclusion which presents itself is for him to cease thinking about what happened—a narrative construction of anti-identity, on Hein's part. He realizes that he has no desire to speak about it with anyone: “He wanted to wipe the time out of his memory in order to free himself of it” (Ta 21). It was incomprehensible to him that the imprisonment could have been a punishment; for him, it was an unjust theft of his time and a personal insult. He is happy that his car motor still runs without missing a beat, and he (ominously) resolves that the machine can be an example to him for how to continue with his life.

That night, he goes to a different bar and picks up a young woman. She has to move her small child into the hallway—she doesn't want it sleeping in the kitchen because of the gas stove—so they can use the bedroom. Although there is no description, the GDR reader would know that her apartment would have been crowded and small; she would have been assigned space which included a hallway, a narrow bathroom, a small kitchenette, and a bedroom/living room.

Dallow is noncommittal about whether he will return. She tells him there is a key on the kitchen table. If he plans to come back, he can take the key along; otherwise, he should toss it through the mail slot after locking up on his way out. From a telegram delivered to her that morning, he learns that her name is Elke Schütte. He is amused that the telegram is from a male friend. He changes his mind and leaves her a note with his name and phone number, writing that he will drop by in a few days. He keeps the key and, since he doesn't come back for a long time, for Dallow Elke is not much more than a woman in reserve, a potential piece of the routine he has begun to re-construct for himself—an “object” to fall back on in the event someone else doesn't pan out. Since Elke stands apart in the novel from the one-night-stand ladies (mentioned with no description or names), she represents both a failed opportunity for love—and meaning—and a yardstick by which Dallow's human worth can be measured.

In some respects, Dallow has emerged from an incubation period—a Rip Van Winkle theme commonly used in European literature. Poor Rip, of course, is estranged and disoriented by the changes he perceives. In Max Frisch's novel Stiller (1954),⁵ the main character retells the legend of Rip Van Winkle as part of his struggle to create a new identity for himself. His denial of the old identity ultimately is overpowered by the forces of society. Dallow is exactly the converse of Stiller: although presented with the opportunity to establish a new identity, he struggles to get back inside the skin of his old identity.

He decides to try out his phone and unconsciously calls up his old work number in the history institute, where his former rival, Jürgen Roessler, answers. They agree to meet, an idea which amuses Dallow, since he thinks it will make Roessler, whose career moved forward when Dallow was arrested, uncomfortable. The phone rings, and a man who identifies himself as Schulze asks him to come to the district court for a meeting at 2:00 p.m. It could be a full day for Dallow.

He encounters Sylvia at the institute, a former student who has become an assistant professor. Instead of congratulating her, he reminds her of a pajama party he was supposed to attend at her house the night of his arrest and alludes to sexual activity with her. She discounts any importance in what he says and claims, prophetically, that he just seems to want to return to the way things were. Hein leaves the impression that the content of Dallow's identity was and is to be a womanizer (he missed his car and the ladies) and that his profession as a historian has been more or less inconsequential to him. Dallow then listens for a few moments through the door to Sylvia's lecture and to the student discussion and recalls how tiresome it was to teach, underscoring his alienation from his profession, from the importance of history and passing it on to the next generation. Dallow is much different from any of the historians of Horns Ende; even Kruschkatz has at least wrestled with the importance of social historicism. For Dallow, a scant decade later, history has no intrinsic or social significance; it simply provides the means for his career. The “little progress” takes on an ironic characteristic.

Outside Sylvia's lecture hall, he recalls having suffered through listening to nonsense from the students, “nodding approvingly or rolling his eyes” (Ta 32). He remembers the “contempt he felt when he gave praise, acknowledged an achievement with goodwill or respectfully accepted a week-long effort by a student to finish a paper. And the same repeated student questions every year about all the possible riddles of the world, naive, cute little questions, each sentence a testimonial, statements of belief and hope not yet damaged, awaiting fundamental, all-encompassing explanations” (Ta 32).

He found that his answers had to be devoid of sarcastic comments, and “the corners of his mouth hurt from forming smiles which glossed over everything” (Ta 32). It was nothing more than a question of discipline for Dallow to maintain his posture over the years, to meet the necessity of such “stupidity” by pretending that their questions and his answers were meaningful. The cynical attitude expressed by Dallow's not-too-subtle choice of words regarding his pseudo-professional life as a teacher is highly reminiscent of Claudia's non-committal and routine job performance as a doctor and healer. Both occupations suggest the need for dedication due to the important role in society which they represent. If teachers (historians) and healers perform their tasks with only mechanical routine, serious problems exist within the structures of the society which they impact and from which they originate.

Dallow could not have taught at the university without having joined the party—which he clearly would have done as an act of pretension, without conviction. He would have been required to reiterate the party line. History is not important to him, but he is a professor of history. History, too, is nothing but a formality for Dallow. If we recall Horn's thoughts, humanity ceases to exist when history is wiped out. Hein's choice of profession for Dallow is integral to the “social autobiography” he constructs in The Tango Player to reflect society's widespread degeneration into apathy. “The legitimate child of dictatorship,” as Barbara Sichtermann wrote in her review of The Tango Player, “is apathy.”⁶

Roessler is now head of the history section, aware that this is a job to which Dallow would have been promoted before his transgression in the student cabaret. At stake is Dallow's future, now that it has been altered by the fact of his imprisonment. Roessler advises him to forget what happened: times have changed, “we have progressed a little” (Ta 36–37) since then. Nowadays he would receive a mild reprimand, nothing more. The best thing for him to do is to start over and to orient himself towards the future.

“The word future frightened him” (Ta 37). Dallow cannot conceptualize what it means for him. For him, the “future was a large, white, frightening piece of paper” (Ta 37). It would help him to think clearly if he were only capable of drawing just a couple of lines on this paper. He doesn't understand why this word future renders his brain lame. The future seems to Dallow to be a linear continuation of the past and the present. Just as Roessler sat on the chair in his office, Dallow can go on doing that day after day, and his future will be secure. Dallow's past was the prison cell, not so comfortable as the office, but nevertheless he discovers that his release from prison was actually an interruption of the linear quality of his future and his security. Dallow is trapped between future anxiety and a return to “normalcy.”

The meeting comes to an awkward and unresolved end. Dallow leaves, flirting with the secretary a bit, and then heads to the district court building to see what Schulze wants. As he approaches the building, two men appear behind him and introduce themselves as Schulze and Müller. These names have a comical ring. On stage, they would probably be shown not to be threatening evildoers from the all-powerful secret police but slightly inept, albeit dutiful, bureaucrats doggedly pursuing their quarry. Evidently they have been following him, although Dallow isn't sure from which direction they came. The word Stasi is never used in the book, but it is clear from the beginning that Schulze and Müller hail from the secret police. They have come to help with his rehabilitation, as the new constitutional laws had provided. Thematically for Dallow's important day, they will attempt to find solutions for his dilemma as Roessler has done.

Schulze and Müller also engage in “soft terror” to counterbalance the rehabilitation effort by playing mind games with Dallow. One asks the other if he locked the door to the office, and the other answers, “Of course not. What gives you such an idea?” (Ta 45). Dallow recalls that one of the men had stood at the door for a while after they entered the room, and he wonders whether the door is locked or not. He asks if he can leave, and the reply is yes, of course, any time—they just would like to chat with him.

The chat eventually gets around to Dallow's plans for the future, and he answers the same as he had with Roessler. He didn't have time to think about it in prison. They wonder how he had spent his time in prison. He invents a story, telling them he wrote a novel there. He says on the last day before his release, the authorities took his manuscript and tore it up. Schulze and Müller know that none of this is true. They wonder if Dallow isn't interested in going back to work, and they tell him they can help him. Dallow asks them why they want to help him. They reply, “Because we are convinced that your sentence was a silly mistake. Today that wouldn't happen. We have made a little progress” (Ta 50). Dallow wonders if they can give him the two years of his life back, and then he gets up and leaves. …

LIVING OUTSIDE THE CELL

Eventually, Dallow receives a letter from his mother wondering, as he then does himself, why he hasn't called or visited since his release from prison. He sends her a telegram saying he would come for a visit. It appears that Dallow has been avoiding visiting his parents as part of his overall reluctance to put himself in a situation where he would have to explain his recent past: why he was put in prison and what it was like to have been there. Dallow begins to think about his situation some more and realizes how much he dislikes coping with problems, especially when these problems include the painstaking need to find appropriate words to express excuses or reasons for his actions or behavior.

In prison he never had appointments, duties, or meetings. He now realizes “that he must learn how to live outside the cell” (Ta 58). For him, this task means that he has to reshape his attitude, but it also seems to mean only that he has to find new forms for the expression of the inconsequentialities of life which make up its routine. “The cell, he concluded, had been a familiar environment, a home in which he was safe and secure, and freedom, so desired and longed for as it had been, had become alien and eery” (Ta 58). Dallow realizes that he has now been busily constructing a new cell for himself, shut off from the outside, a place where he need not receive guests, need not answer any questions about his time in prison, need not tell anybody about it. Prison will always carry a social taint, no matter how sympathetic some of his friends and acquaintances may feel about it. An interpretation which suggests itself is that his reluctance to speak about prison is not associated with the social taint, but with the feeling of child-like security he has about it, a feeling he might understandably be unwilling to disclose.

At the same time, it is easy for the reader to think that the cell is a microcosmic description of the condition of life in the GDR—which left its citizens feeling locked in. Symptomatic of this feeling could be the emergence of a need to organize one's own life in accordance with the kind of consciousness which develops in individuals who are locked up. Long-term helplessness and dependency experienced within the confines of the cell could be metamorphosed internally into the supine comfort and security found in a life of subordination. Dallow leaves the reader with the impression that he is a typical case of such psychological self-manipulation and, for the East German reader in the late 1980s, having lived since 1961 in a “cell” defined by the country's borders, this impression was unsettlingly familiar.⁷

During the visit to his parents, Dallow experiences an evening of depression and confusion. He can't seem to get a sense of direction. He had thought that he would resume a life very similar to that before his imprisonment, that he could return to familiar relationships and structures, to old habits, to the security of an everyday routine. On the other hand, he keeps telling himself that this is a chance for a completely new beginning, a rare quirk of luck enabling him to start over altogether, a new direction which he only needed to recognize.

From this mid-point in the narrative, Hein seems to dangle the chance of a new beginning like a carrot on a stick in front of the reader, who hopes that Dallow can overcome his lethargy and do something sensible with his life. In prison he never had to think or act for himself; his daily routine was prescribed for him by others. His essential struggle now is to assume the responsibility for his own life and future. Any renunciation of this responsibility leaves him no alternative but to live in a cell, “not the cell in prison, from which he cannot extricate himself, but the one of his old, comfortable life story.”⁸

ONE FOOT IN PRISON

At home in the small village where his parents live, Dallow is obliged to recount to his father the events which caused him to be arrested, at last providing the reader with the details. He says that the students had assured him that the texts were approved by the authorities. During the interview with Kiewer, his lawyer, he had been shown the texts, which he claimed all along to have ignored, and had commented that the texts were miserable. His lawyer advised him to say that to the judge, but then Dallow, naive about the charges being leveled against him, explained that the problem with the texts was that they “were without wit, they were missing esprit and bite” (Ta 72). Because of this remark, Dallow's lawyer changed his mind and advised him to reply with only “yes” and “no” answers.

Nevertheless, Dallow had elaborated to the judge about how he had concentrated on trying to get the students to comprehend the least notion of musicality and rhythm, of which they seemed not to have much understanding. He still seems blithely unaware that his narrow, pedantic focus on the aesthetic quality of the music and lack of attention to the satirical content was self-incriminating. His father does not respond much to Dallow's description of the events and his continued claim of innocence. But for his father, it is too late for Dallow's innocence or guilt to make any difference: the family has been disgraced. Hein seems to imply here, as in other works, that both the older generation of the GDR founders and the younger generation born into socialism felt betrayed by each other.

At the local train station, Dallow places a long-distance call (there would not have been many private telephones in a small village) to his sister, and the railroad official (doubling as telephone operator) utters a statement which can be understood as paradigmatic for life in the GDR: “In my profession you always have one foot in prison. Forget to give the right signal and you're out of here” (Ta 79).

During an evening with his sister and her husband, who seem to be the only people in the story with whom Dallow has a genuinely relaxed relationship, they drink and joke into the night about the tango. He should have used a bandoneon to play it, not a piano. That's probably what the judge objected to, the brother-in-law jokes. According to his brother-in-law, “You can read in the statistics that each one of these old, sad tangos has more suicides on its conscience than all the virgins made into whores in the entire country” (Ta 84). He goes on to tell about when he drove an ambulance, a precarious job: they would be fined if they drove too fast, and the patient would die if they drove too slowly. This left them with “one foot in prison.” Dallow says he has heard this before: “it appears that the entire country has one foot in prison. Except of course the prisoners and the guards” (Ta 84).

The ambulance (rescue) team hated the tangos. The brother-in-law figured they should just drive up and down the streets on Sunday afternoons and break down the doors wherever they heard one of these old, sad tangos being played. Maybe they could still rescue someone from a noose before the person expired. But their boss insisted they would just be interfering with some couple in the act of conceiving a new human being. Discrediting oneself (as Dallow had done) could result in depression and, as we have seen, loss of employment, imprisonment. A silly mistake and the choice was suicide or one of the above. The best choice would be the conception of a new human being. Make love, not rebellion, they conclude.

The word-plays on “tangos” can be understood as political satire on all the old, sad figures in the political leadership from mid-level on up, not just Ulbricht, whose era was nearing the end. It was a popular way of joking that was widespread in private parties with friends, but certainly not much appreciated by those who were the butt of the jokes, as Dallow well knew. More directly, “tangos” constitute a dissident activity, from which one needed to be “rescued.” Of course, if everyone “has one foot in prison,” then everyone lives with an Orwellian fear of being caught with a dissident attitude. Even if one is not a dissident (like Dallow!), the danger is not diminished. There's some hope evident in these passages that Dallow can shake himself loose from his brooding about the imprisonment, but on his way back to Leipzig the next day, he gradually feels relieved to get away from his parents, the village, and his family, happy to return to the city.

Dallow decides at last to drop in on Elke again. This time, the two get to know each other a little better. Dallow's primary interest is still to sleep with her without feeling committed. She begins to realize that he probably wishes to live his entire life with no commitments or obligations, and he confirms her suspicions by telling her about his profession. Dallow tells her that his job consists mainly of an anecdotal form of historization describing how illegal social-democratical newspapers of a hundred years ago were printed and distributed, how workers and craftsmen bravely attempted to defend and define class conflict. Dallow's failure to take history seriously in his conversation with Elke continues to call his character into question and, at the same time, exposes the shallowness of force-fed, dogmatic versions of history, to which he passively and cynically allows himself to ascribe.

Elke had gotten a divorce two years earlier, having grown tired of supporting her husband. She is uneasy about Dallow's obvious lack of interest in going back to work. Elke is perhaps typical of thousands of female single parents in the former GDR, struggling to make ends meet, living in a tiny apartment, working and taking care of a small child. The right to work for everyone, coupled with the tacit demand on the part of the state that everyone work, including women, created an economic independence for women unmatched in other modern industrial societies. In addition, the state paid for day-care centers to make it possible for women to work, provided an extra monthly subsidy for each child, and supported a liberal abortion law. Many couples actually married early in their lives order to gain access to a decent apartment. All this led to the tiny GDR's having the world's highest divorce rate for a period of time—a situation exacerbated by the resistance of the men to adapt to the principles of equality inherent in these new socio-economic structures. The man generally left most of the housework, cooking, and child care to the woman anyway, even though she worked the same hours on a job as he did. Since Elke had divorced her husband to establish her independence, the reader tends to wonder exactly why she puts up with the likes of Dallow, who never helps her with the chores; perhaps she is drawn to him only because of the extreme physical passion with which they make love. However, Hein makes no effort to explore the character of Elke in depth; the focus is more on the fact that Dallow is content to regard her merely as an object of his sexual desires.

When he gets up the next day, he reads disinterestedly in the paper that the country has passed the new constitution—the draft of which, he recalls, had led to sarcastic comments by his fellow prisoners when they first saw it. The early draft was circulated throughout the country, apparently even to prisoners. He also notices two short articles about Prague and Warsaw (Poland was also experiencing considerable unrest), but is unable to discern what it is all about. The editors seem to manifest a deep concern about the monumental events taking place in those cities. The key word is “disinterestedly.” History is poised to intrude in Dallow's life in the form of the Prague Spring, and it has already done so subtly in the form of the new constitution, but he fails to acknowledge or realize its significance. When pressed to do so, he will simply say that he is just a piano player, not an historian. He accompanies whatever song is being sung; the content is unimportant.

Dallow has gained a freedom that he is incapable of exploiting and which he can hardly bear, an experience that surprises and depresses him, for he now knows “that all the tracks for his life had been laid, by himself or by someone else, and that he could now only proceed along the prescribed path to the end, unable to change anything” (Ta 110). Prison had only been an accidental interruption of his journey along this path; it has not changed anything, it was just a trivial error by both the judge and himself. He had “taken a few punches,” according to Friedrich Dieckmann, and would now just “crawl wordlessly back into himself … into the emptiness of lost identity.”⁹

Present circumstances might offer Dallow the one chance to break free of the tracks, but “he now suspected that he would not understand how to take advantage of the opportunity” (Ta 110). It had all been in vain: “Like a little toy electric train he had been lifted off the uniform, monotonous tracks and now he would be capable of nothing other than making the effort required to place the wheels of this little toy train back onto the old tracks without further bumps and disturbances, fitting as best as possible, so the toy train could resume chugging imperturbably along the infinite loop” (Ta 110).

Dallow thinks about looking for work the next day, and then he thinks about sleeping with Elke. He would go back to see her and then, sometime soon, the decision about this relationship would be made for him as well. He would simply keep on seeing her because he saw her the day before, or two days before. Dallow goes to bed and pulls the covers over his shoulders and thinks to himself: “The toy train locomotive, the little model train with the name Hans-Peter Dallow, would run interminably straight ahead and yet always in a circle” (Ta 111). With a sneering, self-mocking smile, Dallow falls asleep.

The next evening is not much better for Dallow as he proceeds more rapidly into his impending crisis. He begins to be tortured by a feeling of homesickness. He is homesick for his cell. He misses the special sheltered security, the totality of provisions, the completely regulated life. He never had to make decisions in the cell. Not having to make decisions was a deliverance. “And now he missed the pre-ordained daily routine and the directions, he missed the thoughtless and decisionless mundane existence” (Ta 115). He admits to himself that he never really left the cell: “I, too, obviously still have one foot in it” (Ta 115).

THE JOB SEARCH

Dallow really does begin a job search. He has made up his mind to work as a truck driver. But as soon as prospective employers learn that he is an intellectual, they tell him the advertized position has been filled. They don't need historians from the university working in the transport of goods. They show little concern about his prison record, but they are unwilling to facilitate the integration of intellectuals and workers—a symbolic rejection of fundamental communist principles by the proletariat itself, and a realistic reflection of unchanged and unchanging attitudes, especially the working class's traditional mistrust of intellectuals. After a month-long, fairly intensive search, Dallow becomes discouraged and gives it up. He wonders if Schulze and Müller have had anything to do with the situation, especially towards the end when the rejections come much more quickly.

Dallow pays another visit to the bar where his friend Harry works and again bumps into the judge and the lawyer. This time, the judge approaches him and mentions what an amusing evening they have just enjoyed. Dallow, who is drunk, fails to understand what the judge is talking about. The judge proceeds to point out that Dallow not only was in the wrong at the time of the original incident, but that he is still wrong to maintain his innocence. The law is a dynamic entity, according to Dr. Berger, and just because it has changed doesn't mean that a previous injustice can be rectified. Everything is in a state of flux, and the amusing evening has merely demonstrated that it's a different year now; the river keeps flowing.

It turns out that the old student group has reconvened and performed their old tango number again. To be audacious, they invited the judge and the lawyer to the performance, and both claim jovially that they enjoyed the show immensely: “It showed us that we have made a little progress” (Ta 134), says Dallow's former lawyer—who, by the way, never appears in the story except in the company of the trial judge. When Dallow protests that he didn't know anything about it, Kiewer shows him the letter of invitation. It turns out that Dallow's name is missing among the signatures, which include those of his former fellow inmates. Dallow blows up and insists that this proves his innocence: he was only the tango player. And now he had not even been invited to the show. The lawyer explains that it would be senseless at this point in time to dredge up the old trial records in order to conduct a new hearing to clear his name. Dallow is enraged and the lawyer leaves, disgusted at Dallow's drunkenness.

Dallow proceeds to look up the leader of the student group, Ulrich Klufmann, now living in one of the many old, condemned buildings in the city of Leipzig. Klufmann is in good spirits, living with a young woman and earning his living as a writer of cabaret texts. Klufmann, of course, had simply forgotten to send Dallow any tickets; since he had just been a fill-in that evening, the ticket had probably gone to the regular piano player. The two characters present a contrast, especially in Dallow's mind, as he realizes that Klufmann has adjusted to his life and will not be brooding and wrestling with the problem at all. This is a bitter pill for Dallow to swallow, inasmuch as he views this circumstance as ironic and unfair: the guilty party living free and easy, enjoying the fulfillment of his sexual fantasies (an important value in Dallow's warped sense of priorities) and unconcerned about the past, while Dallow, innocent and unjustly imprisoned, continues to suffer and cannot get his life back into order. Events quickly begin to overtake Dallow, and the course of his life is accelerated by external circumstances. Schulze and Müller wake him up again and begin to insist that he find work. They explain his difficulty at finding a job as a truck driver quite logically by reasoning that those companies didn't want any trouble. Hiring an overqualified Ph.D. in history would reek with trouble for them. The factories had experience with such types: either they dump the job after a short period of time, or they want to lead discussions instead of working. And who needs this kind of trouble, they argue.

Schulze and Müller bring considerable pressure to bear on Dallow for his unwillingness to work in a “Worker's Country.” Not only does everyone have the right to work, but each citizen has a duty to work as well. It's not really a private matter, they inform him. They have names for people like Dallow, people who violate moral codes and social standards. As Dallow himself answers, the names are arbeitsscheu (“Shirkers”) and asozial (“asocials”). The word asozial was often shorten to asi (pronounced “ah zee”) and would have included a fairly substantial number of counter-culture types, such as Klufmann, as well as people who didn't want to work or to participate in society, be they social or political dropouts.

Schulze and Müller insist that historians are needed and that Dallow could be particularly useful because of his knowledge of Czech and Slovakian history. This he denies, claiming that he is only knowledgeable in the nineteenth century. “The present has never interested me” (Ta 151), he asserts—an additional, rather incriminating bit of unwitting self-irony in this case. At the same time, his self defense as “only the tango player” and his lack of interest in participating in discussions about Prague reveal the truth of his statement. It can also be understood as a commentary on the contradiction of the life led by someone who professes to be a historian but who has no perception of relevant historical or associative connections between the past and the present. The kind of historian Schulze and Müller say the country needs.

A few days later, Dallow again encounters the judge at the café bar. This time, he follows him home late at night and accosts him in a park. Dallow seems to be out of control; he insists on knowing why the judge condemned him “in the name of the people” (Ta 154) instead of in his own name, or in the name of the law, or in the name of the state. He finds his fingers squeezing tightly around Dr. Berger's throat. Confused by the judge's rising panic and fear, he lets Berger go. Surprisingly, he is not arrested for this incident (a little progress?), but it will have a significant impact on his future.

The next few weeks find him more or less mentally paralyzed. He finds it difficult to get out of bed. He rarely gets up before noon. He can't sleep or read, and he is unable to concentrate on any subject. He thinks he should let himself fall in love with Elke; perhaps that would be a way out, a sensible way out. The excess of free time is crippling him: “He was afraid that he would just one day dissolve. Finally he was driven out of his bed by a sudden fear of death which caused him to break into a cold sweat” (Ta 157).

Soon afterwards, he goes to a party with Elke, a party buzzing with animated discussions about Prague. It was the end of May, and Soviet military leaders had met with Dubcek, an event which led to intensified speculation about military intervention although such was denied heatedly in the Soviet press. One of the men asks Dallow his opinion about Dubcek's chances for political survival. “I haven't the least idea,” responds Dallow, “and it doesn't interest me at all” (Ta 158). The people listening are dumbfounded by his answer. “If that is true, then you are the only human being in the entire country who is not pre-occupied by the events in Prague” (Ta 158–59). A girl says that he at least has to be interested as a historian. Dallow corrects her politely, stating that he is a pianist by profession, a tango player. But he has given this job up as well. Referring back to the sarcastic lie he had told earlier, he says that now he is writing a novel: “The hero is an idiot. And he gets what he deserves in the end. That's about it” (Ta 161). The self-fulfilling prophecy of these words, lost on Dallow, will become evident to the reader at the end of the story. Dallow seems to be attempting to fictionalize his life, to avoid reality, to withdraw from any accountability, to become a character in a book dependent only upon the whims of the author instead of taking some action to determine his own fate. However, Elke is not amused with Dallow's way of impetuously trivializing serious or important issues and asks him to not come by again until he has gotten over his personal problems.

The next day, Dallow meets with Roessler in the history department, and Roessler informs him that they were thinking about reinstating him. Dallow retorts that he is unwilling to forgive and forget and therefore has no interest in returning. Roessler admonishes him to forget the past “idiocies” which led to his arrest and to accept an advanced assistant professor position, one which could lead to a promotion in four or five years. Dallow isn't interested, but Roessler gives him until 15 June to answer anyway.

“Life has given me another chance and I want to take advantage of it” (Ta 165). With this statement Dallow again appears to be ready to take some concrete action, to intervene himself in his own fate, to determine his own future after all. Roessler mentions that the offer wasn't actually his idea, and Dallow surmises that the idea came from Müller and Schulze. However, Roessler says that Dr. Berger had called him with the suggestion.

Dallow discovers a letter from Dr. Berger in his mailbox, in which Berger requests his presence for a meeting in his office. Juxtaposed between the letter and the meeting is a reference to Dallow's reading the newspaper, which is dominated by reports on Prague. The newspaper reports accuse the Western press of inciting war fever by claiming that the Warsaw Pact countries were planning an invasion of Czechoslovakia. This contention was an evil invention equated with “gangster methods and the propaganda of a Josef Goebbels” (Ta 171). Dallow has a cup of coffee and listens to a program on a Western radio station which also included commentary about the crisis in Czechoslovakia and the threat of invasion. Dallow is bored with it all and changes channels until he can find some music.

The judge delivers Dallow an ultimatum: he is to call in within three days to report his place of work. He is left to believe that failure to do so will result in serious consequences. In a key moment in the novel, Dallow does not stand up to the judge. He says the incident in the park was a misunderstanding. His tone is apologetic, self-degrading, helpless. Somewhat desperate, Dallow stumbles around from place to place. His neighbor advises him to return to the university, but Dallow believes, prophetically, that this would “be tantamount to underwriting his condemnation” (Ta 177). Elke is not home, but Harry promises to see what he can do. The next day, he calls to tell Dallow he has arranged a job for him as a seasonal waiter on the resort island of Hiddensee, a popular summer vacation spot for East Germans in the Baltic Sea. Dallow is so pleased that he opens the piano cover and is barely able to suppress the urge to play. Elke, always the voice of social morality, regards this choice as a cop-out, another refuge to hide in, and repeats that she doesn't want to see him again until he clears up his problems.

THE FUTURE

Hiddensee is a narrow strip of an island, covered with bluish-hued heather, sandy beaches and a handful of houses and bungalows. Automobiles are not permitted, and the only way to get around is by bicycle or on foot. The atmosphere can have a liberating effect; time seems to stand still and, consequently, there is time for someone like Dallow to be introspective and to figure out what to do. However, Dallow's first actions consist of his taking the steps necessary to establish a comfortable and innocuous routine for himself. With the scarce housing and difficulty in obtaining quarters on the island, many day visitors try to find overnight accommodations before the last ferry returns to the mainland, about 8:00 p.m. Dallow exploits this situation to his advantage after allowing a young female student to stay in his room. Soon, he has a female in his room almost every night and, on one occasion, even two of them. Sometimes girls visiting the island look him up, having been told they could sleep there. Once again, he retreats into a cycle of daily banality and sexual gratification without love.

Dallow is still working on the resort island Hiddensee toward the end of August, when the Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, triggering impassioned discussions even on the island. He is together with a young, somewhat plump female student when the reports came in over the radio in the morning. She listens to the reports, stunned. A reporter reads a release from TASS, and Dallow turns off the radio. The girl asks him to turn it back on, and again she listens in horror. Dallow tries to caress her and is surprised to notice that her eyes are filled with tears. At first, Dallow is amused at the girl's crying about the radio reports, which are GDR reports, not Western radio reports. Dallow becomes aroused by observing the girl's emotional reaction to the news and picks her up and takes her to the bed. She makes no effort to resist and just lies there. On the bed, “he made love to her while the radio announcer read a second, heroic-sounding communiqué” (Ta 199). This episode creates an association between the girl and Czechoslovakia as victims of statutory rape, a familiar topos in Hein's works.

The girl asks him to say something about the reports, but he just shrugs his shoulders and asks her what she wants for breakfast. She is incredulous that such an event could leave him so cold. But Dallow says he is just a waiter. She objects: “You are a living human being, you are …” (Ta 199), but he interrupts to joke that he also used to be a tango player but that was a long time ago. Dallow accompanies her to the ferry. She is anxious to get back to friends in Berlin, and he, for his part, wistfully rues not having another opportunity to sleep with her, just when she was becoming interesting to him.

By 1968, the socialist movement in the Soviet Bloc countries had gone through a building period of over twenty years. Indeed, it had “made a little progress” over that period of time. That little progress came crashing down abruptly in August in Prague, and Dallow's stolid insensitivity to those monumental events left East German readers, good socialists and dissidents alike, recoiling incredulously at his behavior. No passage in The Tango Player could have been more disturbing to East Germans who still remembered the Prague Spring than this one about Dallow's insensitive and perverse sexual arousal during the major historical event which signaled the last hope for a socialist alternative form of society. To put this notion in perspective, imagine a story relating an American behaving as Dallow did on Hiddensee during the reports of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

The “unheard of event” in this story, however, takes place about ten days later, on 3 September, when the department secretary calls to hint about some changes and Sylvia takes the phone to ask him to find her quarters for the next day, a bed where she can sleep, not in Dallow's room. Sylvia arrives and asks him if he would be prepared to return to the department with a promotion to Dozent. It would be best if he could begin the very next day in Leipzig.

It seems that Roessler had experienced a bit of misfortune. He had a class at 7:00 a.m. on the day of the invasion of Prague. The students were stirred up and deluged him with questions about the events of the night. Unsuspecting, Roessler asked them what the source of their reports was. Since they all said that their information came from Western radio reports, Roessler stated that “the reports about an invasion of Prague were nothing more than a renewed provocation from the West, categorically rejected the notion of military intervention in allied Czechoslovakia and referred to earlier newspaper reports and commentary by government and party officials” (Ta 202). These were the reports which had accused the West of Goebbels-style propaganda. Moreover, Roessler adamantly rejected reports that GDR troops could have been involved as well—a particularly distasteful and outrageous thought, since German soldiers could never take part in an invasion of Prague for reasons of historical and political culpability. After class, a student brought him a daily newspaper which contained a TASS report verifying the opposite. Six hours later, Roessler was suspended from his duties.

Dallow learns that Roessler has been demoted to assistant (the job he had offered to Dallow) and will not be allowed to teach classes (he is not imprisoned; a little progress has been made). He tells Sylvia he wants to think it over, but he already knows what his decision will be. The next morning he quits his job and drives back to Leipzig. Home, Dallow takes a bath, turns on the TV, leaving the sound off, and sits down at the piano with a bottle of vodka. As he plays the Chopin pieces he knows, he watches the silent pictures in his TV, a GDR program showing soldiers being hailed by the people. Women with small children throw flowers to the soldiers sitting on their tanks. Other shots show Prague citizens in friendly conversation with soldiers. Dallow drinks the whole bottle and, before going to bed, sets the alarm so he will arrive punctually at the institute the next morning.

Thus ends the story of Dallow. He never was capable of any degree of self-realization. In the end, he accepts the offer, the same offer made by the Stasi and by the judge, sealing his fate forever. The ironical implication of Hein's story consists in the tacit exposure of the subtle and sophisticated educational system designed to keep citizens in a state of tutelage (unmündig) in the GDR, a system so advanced that GDR citizens like Dallow would choose this type of subjugation freely. Dallow was and is extremely uncomfortable when left to his own devises. Indeed, the tracks of his life have been pre-ordained, just as if he were a little toy train. His last chance to declare himself independent never gets off the ground. Briefly awakened from the darkness of the anesthesia which supplemented his tutelage, Dallow fights it off, and the only independent action he ever takes is to regain the security of his condition of tutelage. With that, he makes the transition from the compulsory tutelage of a model pupil to the self-imposed tutelage of an adult living in the “real-existing” socialism of the GDR. He is safe and sound back in a cell.

Notes

1. See Karin Hirdina, “Das Normale der Provinz—Der Tangospieler,” Chronist ohne Botschaft. Christoph Hein. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Materialien, Auskünfte, Bibliographie, ed. Klaus Hammer (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992) 147.

2. Neva Slibar and Rosanda Volk, “‘Das Spiegelkabinett unseres Kopfes.’ Schreibverfahren und Bilderwelt bei Christoph Hein,” Text + Kritik 111, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1991) 59.

3. Hirdina 150.

4. The film was reviewed in Der Spiegel 9 (1991): 264. It was praised for its accurate insight into GDR society and criticized for generating nostalgia.

5. Hein was familiar with Max Frisch's works. Hein's “Achtung, Abgründe!”—presented 13 December 1989 in Düsseldorf in honor of Frisch as the recipient of the Heinrich Heine literary prize—was published in Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen.

6. Barbara Sichtermann, “Weder Auβenseiter noch Pechvogel,” Christoph Hein. Texte, Daten, Bilder, ed. Lothar Baier (Frankfurt a.M.: Luchterhand, 1990) 165.

7. Perhaps the inability to cope with freedom was even more disquieting after unification, inasmuch as many GDR citizens felt helpless in the face of the pressures and stress of a capitalist system in which no kindly dictator looked after them in exchange for loyalty or, at least, neutrality. Although The Tango Player was published before the Wall was opened, the impact of the “Dallow personality” is still widely felt in the eastern parts of Germany today.

8. Friedrich Dieckmann, “Christoph Hein, Thomas Mann und der Tangospieler,” Chronist ohne Botschaft 155.

9. Dieckmann 157.