Peter Hacks

Who was Peter Hacks?

Peter Hacks was a German playwright, author, and essayist.

Hacks was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia. Displaced by World War II, Hacks settled in Munich in 1947, where he made acquaintance with Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Hacks then followed Brecht to East Berlin in 1955. However, a continued cooperation between him and Brecht did not arose. From 1960 Hacks worked as a dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

When the staging of his play "Die Sorgen und die Macht" sparked criticism from officials, he gave up his position as a dramaturge at the DT and lived again as a freelance writer. His success on the world stage—most notably with "Ein Gespräch im Hause Stein über den abwesenden Herrn von Goethe"--led to his literary acceptance within GDR and West-Germany.

Hacks was a communist and supported the East German government's 1976 expatriation of the singer Wolf Biermann. His correspondence with the communist historian Kurt Gossweiler has been published.

He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis.

Hacks died in Groß Machnow.