2023-08-27 15:23:48
A black-and-white photograph shows Peter Hacks, the cigarette holder dangling casually from the corner of his mouth as he reaches for a match. His gaze is directed towards the camera, although in the 1980s – when the photo was taken – he had lost the historical-philosophical cheerfulness that had made him emigrate from Munich to the GDR almost 30 years earlier. In the meantime, the poet is at odds with the new zeitgeist in socialism, with Erich Honecker and Heiner Müller, who he regards as signs of decay in state and theater arts. But for him personally, a new chapter begins with his own country estate.
Hacks looks like a lord of a castle in the photo, in the background you can see a brick building, a tower with battlements rises up. It is the legendary Fenne that Hacks acquires in the early 1970s and has it expanded into his country estate. It later became his place of retreat just outside of Berlin, where he resided, like Machiavelli, in San Casciano near Florence. And indeed there is a touch of Italian grandezza over the courtyard, the walls with rose trellis keep the outside world at a distance. And in the summer heat, it actually feels more like Tuscany than Mark Brandenburg.
A touch of Italy: home of Peter Hacks
Quelle: picture-alliance/ ZB
The one with the field stone path that leads to the Fenne is bumpy. Behind Groß Machnow it goes off the country road, at the end you guess the building more than you see it. “I’d like to be a boulder / In a cobbled street,” Hacks once wrote, it might have been inspired by the Fenneweg. The punchline is: “And one of the art eunuchs / from the media and criticism / could visit hacks, for example / and break his neck.” As an art eunuch from the media and criticism, you are now standing in front of the small gate, shaken up, but with your neck intact. The name Hacks is still on the doorbell, the poet himself died 20 years ago.
You will be received by Matthias Oehme, the chairman of the Peter Hacks Society and head of the Eulenspiegel publishing house. In 2003, shortly before his death, Hacks published his work at Eulenspiegel with 15 volumes and over 5000 pages, in the form he wanted. He called it his “authorized, authentic, and immutable canon.” Oehme, in a striped summer shirt and straw hat, has been carefully adding to this canon ever since. The almost 1200-page brochure will be published these days Correspondence between Hacks and his close friend, the writer and dramaturge André Müller senior.long awaited by fans and researchers.
“The Fenne lies enchantedly there, with its high walls, the tower, the garden in front of the moor and the small road that leads to it from the main road,” writes Müller Sr., when he comes from West Germany to visit Hacks on his country estate. A poet’s residence in the country, like Wieland in Oßmannstedt or Hans Fallada in Carwitz, which – in the most beautiful location – tries to anticipate the better life with its own living. Or like Goethe in Weimar, with whom Hacks was particularly fond of comparing himself. In fact, Hacks died on August 28th, Goethe’s birthday.
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How the search for a suitable country seat went in detail can be found in the recently published volume “Peter Hacks on the Fenne in Groß Machnow (1974-2003)” read by Matthias Dell. When the dilapidated brick factory was discovered, the architect Joachim Stoff was there as construction manager. He describes his first impression to Dell: “Lots of ruins, with a dead dog lying in the middle. But that didn’t interest the poet at all.” Or is it, on the contrary, evidence of the poet’s strong fantasy and strong imagination? According to the motto: The socialist private residence rises from the rubble of the old building?
Oehme has a large stack of documents with him, including old photographs of the construction work and the original blueprints. There are workrooms not only for Hacks, but also for his wife Anna Elisabeth Wiede, as well as a salon and living and sleeping rooms, in between a long, curved corridor that connects the individual buildings and delimits the courtyard. The landscape architect Hermann Göritz, who was well known beyond the GDR, was hired to design the outdoor and garden areas. He had a small baroque garden, the courtyard garden and a landscaped garden with a pond created. It is an idyll in miniature.
Hacks had koi in the pond
Hacks didn’t save. The poet is said to have had his Fenne cost around a million marks, he suspects Hacks-Biography Ronald Weber. D-Mark West, mind you. There was silk wallpaper from Paris, noble koi for the pond and even peacocks strutting around in the courtyard. Classicist statues stand next to Biedermeier furniture. Hacks’ passion for collecting was legendary, together with acquaintances such as Manfred Krug he traveled through the GDR province to find the pearls among the junk. As Oehme explains, Hacks had even rented additional premises in Berlin, where the finds were piled up.
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Manfred Krug’s diaries
With the success in the West came the money. Hacks wrote not only for the theater but also for radio. Plays such as “A Conversation in the Stein House About the Absent Herr von Goethe” were performed on numerous stages in the Federal Republic, with the Drei Maske Verlag in Hacks’ study city of Munich taking care of distribution. “Comrade Millionaire” was the title of “Playboy” in 1981, as Dell vividly describes in his book. Hacks himself once wrote that “the words communism and renunciation must not be in the same sentence”. And on his Fenne he obviously didn’t want to have to do without anything.
Hacks had the reputation of being “a socialist dandy, a GDR revenant of Oscar Wilde,” like Weber in his big Biography writes. Art of living and Marxism-Leninism were not mutually exclusive with him. “The abdomen as well as the upper body / Has read his Marx”, is how Hacks sums it up himself. Anyone who wants to get into the large workroom on the Fenne has to go through Marx and Engels – the famous “Blue Volumes” are on the shelf above the door “ of the Marx-Engels-Werke. Here Hacks shouted his plays, a flight of stairs leads to the garden. The view falls on a statue with a towering phallus. Is that the lower to the upper body?
Peter Hacks country house with garden
Quelle: picture-alliance/ ZB
The “bronze garden god”, as Hacks calls him in a poem, is a depiction of the ancient god of fertility, Priapus, by Manfred Salow. Hacks must have seen in him the ideal antithesis to the despised art eunuchs, the embodiment of unbroken creative potency. “But then out of fat testicles / towers over the garden floor / tirelessly his tail. / With this the good man blesses us,” says the poem mentioned. Suspected toxic masculinity? In any case, such verses should not be found on the facade of a university of applied sciences and Salow’s statue in any university foyer.
At first glance, the luxury, the extravagant and the overloaded look like a great antithesis to the GDR, which is commonly associated with the color gray. But Hacks, the GDR’s bird of paradise, was neither a supporter of slum communism nor a romantic. He liked the abundance – also the privileges. He wanted to live in a developed industrial and consumer society as long as production was socialized. Poverty is a great glow from within? Hacks wanted nothing to do with such dim lighting. The Fenne looks like a small ideal GDR that dreamed up hacks and built them – an alternative world in touch with utopia.
Peter Hacks (1928-2003)
Quelle: picture alliance / dpa
Hacks despised capitalism simply because after 1990 he could no longer afford his servants. Hacks, weakened by illness, spent his last days on his beloved Fenne. When he died on August 28, 2003, time was stopped – that of the large grandfather clock in the study. At that moment, according to Hacks publisher Oehme, the last of the peacocks walked out of the gate and was never seen again. And the koi? Oehme says they were stolen from the pond one night. But even without the animals, the fen still gives eloquent testimony to the stubborn imagination of its former owner, somewhere between Goethe and Ulbricht.
Matthias Dell: Peter Hacks on the Fenne in Great Machnow (1974-2003). Frankfurt colored books, no. 72. Verlag Berlin Brandenburg, 10 euros.
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