Peter Hacks / Andre Asriel - Aristophanes "Der Frieden" (Litera, 1965)

Peter Hacks (21 March 1928 – 28 August 2003) was a German playwright, author, and essayist. He was born in Breslau (Wrocław), 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 arise. From 1960 Hacks worked as a dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater (DT) in Berlin.

When the staging of his play "Die Sorgen und die Macht" (1962) 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" (A Discussion in the Stein Home about the Absent Mr. 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.


Aristophanes (born c. 450 BCE—died c. 388 BCE) is the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity.

"Peace" (Greek: Εἰρήνη Eirḗnē) is an Athenian Old Comedy written and produced by Aristophanes. It won second prize at the City Dionysia where it was staged just a few days before the "Peace of Nicias" was validated (421 BC), which promised to end the ten-year-old "Peloponnesian War". The play is notable for its joyous anticipation of peace and for its celebration of a return to an idyllic life in the countryside. However, it also sounds a note of caution, there is bitterness in the memory of lost opportunities and the ending is not happy for everyone. As in all of Aristophanes' plays, the jokes are numerous, the action is wildly absurd and the satire is savage. Cleon, the pro-war populist leader of Athens, is once again a target for the author's wit, even though he had died in battle just a few months earlier.


Here´s Peter Hacks' adaptation of "Peace", with music by Andre Asriel & die Jazz-Optimisten and members of the ensemble of the "Deutsches Theater Berlin" (Fred Düren, Klaus Piontek, Elsa Grube-Deister, Brigitte Soubeyran, Peter Dommisch.), directed by Benno Besson.


Although a committed communist, Benno Besson pushed the circumscribed theatrical freedoms in the German Democratic Republic to their limits. He worked with the GDR's best playwrights - including Peter Hacks and and Heiner Müller - and identified with their refusal to accept the ruling Socialist Unity Party's political boundaries. Although working within the system, they simultaneously questioned it. Many a barb at the bur- eaucracy was buried in a translated line of Aristophanes or Sophocles. Political comments were routinely semi-masked in theatrical productions, but an astute audience did not miss a single one.

Developing Brecht's theories in a new and fresher direction, Besson was instrumental in establishing a new style of acting at the Deutsches Theatre, which had, until then, been much more in the realist tradition. Some have characterised Besson's approach as puppet theatre, because of his reliance on theatrical machinery and, by those used to a more effusive, realistic approach, as "wooden acting". But his productions were characterised by clarity, freshness and liveliness.


Peter Hacks / Andre Asriel - Aristophanes "Der Frieden" (Litera)
(224 kbps, cover art included)