Monodramat jako metadramat: Rozmowa w domu państwa Stein o nieobecnym panu von Goethe Petera Hacksa

The monodrama Ein Gespräch im Hause Stein über den abwesenden Herrn von Goethe is a multidimensional literary experiment in the post-war German playwriting history. Written in 1974, the play was first published by the East German publishing house Aufbau (1976), and to this day, it remains the most recognizable literary work of Peter Hacks, who was born in Breslau (1928-2003). The drama belongs to the middle phase of the work of an author, who, along with Heiner Müller, is considered one of GDR’s greatest playwright. Hacks confronted the figure and work of Goethe many times in both his literary texts and essays on the poetics of drama. Ein Gespräch in Hause Stein… had its theater premiere in 1976 in Staatsschauspiel Dresden and since then has been played on over 200 stages of the German-speaking region and in more than twenty other countries. The Polish premiere of the play, translated by Zbigniew Krawczykowski, took place in 1978 at the Ateneum Theater in Warsaw, where it was directed by Aleksandra Śląska. A year later, the Czechoslovak premiere took place on the Prague stage Divadlo on Vinohradech with Iva Janžurova starring as Charlotte. The play’s plot takes place in October 1786 at the home of Charlotte von Stein and her husband, Josias. Divided into five acts, the drama maintains the Aristotelian principle of three unities. Alongside these classical tragedy similarities. Hacks uses Brecht's technique of distancing (V-Effekt), which modifies the theatre's basic aesthetic assumptions. The paper aims to analyze the modifications in the structure of Hacks’s dramatic text, taking into account the postulate of socialist classics and the literary typology of metadrama (Vieweg-Marks 1989). The analysis is intended to answer the question suggested in the title: namely, how Peter Hacks’s play presents and dramatizes the love of Charlotte von Stein and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe almost 200 years later. As such, this paper is a continuation of the latest research on Ein Gespräch im Hause Stein... conducted in the tradition of German and Czech German Studies.