In October of 1962, Peter Hacks’ play Die Sorgen und die Macht – or Anxieties and Power – made its debut at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Convinced he was living in a post-revolutionary East Germany, Hacks depicted a society striving to overcome its remaining contradictions.  In Die Sorgen und die Macht, Hacks uses the economic and emotional entanglements of workers at a briquette factory and a glassware plant to outline a kind of moral economy. It’s first and foremost his love for Hede Stoll, a glass factory employee, which persuades briquette factory worker Max Fidorra to put the interests of the collective ahead of those of the individual.
After months of wrangling with East Germany’s communist party, the original Deutsches Theater production of Anxieties and Power closed prematurely in January of 1963. Peter Hacks was an admirer of Goethe, a staunch supporter of East German leader Walter Ulbricht, an ironist and a communist. Although – or perhaps because – his were among the most performed German plays of the 1960s and 70s, Hacks gradually faded into obscurity after the Berlin Wall fell. Die Sorgen und die Macht is an encounter with one of East (and West) Germany’s leading intellectuals and with “yesterday’s future”, which surprisingly has much to say about the present.