[In the following review of Schlötel, oder Was solls: Stücke und Essays, Blomster focuses on Hein's desire to improve society as the central theme of the collection.]

“The human being,” Christoph Hein declares, “is the animal with the thickest skin.” The two plays and four essays collected in Schlötel, oder Was solls speak urgently of the forty-three-year-old East German author's strong desire to penetrate this armor of insensitivity and move both individual and society toward that “island of blissful humanity” of which Johannes R. Becher dreamed in the heyday of expressionism.

In “Hamlet and the Party Secretary” Hein offers a brilliantly brief assessment of contemporary theatre, lamenting that drama and theatre stand today in no meaningful relationship to each other. At the same time, he insists that only progress within society—upon which valid theatrical life depends—can remedy this situation. As vastly different as the two dramas contained here are, they both reflect this same concern.

The title play, premiered at East Berlin's Volksbühne in 1974, confronts the problems of socialist society in its decade in much the same way that Heiner Müller's play Der Lohndrücker did in 1956. Here an idealistic student is driven to suicide by his inability to show factory workers the error of their selfishly opportunistic ways. Despite the hero's fate, Hein calls the play a Komödie.

In Cromwell Hein studies a revolution that ended in failure despite its initial success. The author's commentary on the play, written for the Cottbus premiere in 1980, stresses its relevance to the “revolution” that the Democratic Republic was designed to perfect.

The volume concludes with Hein's critique of Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983). This is a major work of modern criticism, marked by a quickness of wit for which Sloterdijk himself is at best a weak match. Schlötel, oder Was solls complements the earlier collection of plays and essays Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q, published in 1984.