The Tango Player - Hardcover

Hein, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374272522 ISBN 13: 9780374272524

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1991

Synopsis

In Leipzig, East Germany, in 1968, Dallow, a young history professor, is released from prison after spending twenty-one months there for playing a tango with subversive lyrics and sets out to rebuild his life in a corrupt system that has lost face

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Reviews

One of East Germany's leading writers, Hein ( The Distant Lover ) critiques the political corruption and patronage system that marked his country's brand of communism during the 1960s. The tersely described life of Dallow, a luckless history professor in Leipzig, receives its dramatic tension from historical events, particularly the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a gross miscarriage of justice, Dallow is jailed for performing in a politically subversive cabaret revue--the judge, aware that this professor only accompanied a bunch of rowdy students on the piano, nevertheless decides tomake an example of him. Disoriented and bitter after his 21 months in prison, without even the comfort of thinking himself a dissident, Dallow petitions to get his job back but is rejected. Any sympathy for the unfortunate Dallow diminishes as he lapses into a routine of heavy drinking and one-night stands, while a half-hearted attempt at an affair falters. Pressured to return to the university as an informer, he retreats to a distant resort town where he leads an amiable, rootless existence. But a political purge at his former institute paves the way for his reinstatement there as a professor. The reader is left with the impression that Dallow is--or has become--as morally bankrupt as the system that produced him.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A chilling depiction of the Kafkaesque dimensions of life in Eastern Europe from prominent German playwright and novelist Hein, echoing the harsh social analysis of his earlier novel, The Distant Lover (1989). In the Prague Spring of 1968, Dallow is a young professor of 19th-century history just released from prison, having served a term of almost two years for playing a tango with lyrics deemed harmful to the state. Although he was recruited only as a temporary pianist for the student theater group responsible, Dallow shared their sentence, and now emerges into life only to find it distasteful and himself unable to function. His Institute in Leipzig no longer has a position for him, and his efforts to find work as a truckdriver are unrewarded. Dogged by government agents who promise to help if he'll play their game, and forced by the woman he's taken up with to come to terms with his hostility--which occasionally manifests itself in a loss of control over his hands and caused him to almost strangle the judge who presided over his trial--he seeks refuge as a waiter at a distant resort. Completely uninterested in developments in Prague, Dallow uses the fact that beds are scarce to accommodate a succession of young women, dallying until word arrives that his nemesis at the Institute has been politically incorrect in rejecting news reports of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that Dallow has been tapped to replace him. At once a historical curiosity in its resurrection of a totalitarian regime recently put to rest and a damning assessment of the mind-set of those waiting to assume power. A timely, disturbing vision of social and moral collapse. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this tightly written novel of East Germany in 1968, Hans-Peter Dallow is a Leipzig professor unjustly sentenced for political crimes to 21 months in the "pen." His arrest and the ensuing period of his reentry into East German society might be seen as a Kafkaesque charade were it not so realistic and so well portrayed. While the original German ( Der Tangospieler , 1989) was published before the wall came down, Hein's novel of an unlikely hero unable to deal with his future while the injustice of the past haunts him strangely foreshadows the struggle facing East Germans moving into a free world. A good translation of a very readable novel by a major modern German writer. Recommended for both general audiences and academic collections.
- Ingrid Schierling, Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374272522
• ISBN 13: 9780374272524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 219