None of those writers who began writing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; the Federal Republic of Germany is here similarly abbreviated to FRG), or who found a literary home there, was more clearly regarded as a pupil of Brecht than the playwright Heiner Milller - not even Peter Hacks, whose first plays return unabashedly to forms of the "epic theatre," and about whom the story long circulated that he had immigrated to the GDR in the early 1950'S at Brecht's personal invitation. Hacks began to speak of the "new classicism" of the theatre in the "developed socialism" of his society, and in his plays of the 1960'S based on classical models he replaced the critical parable about the misunderstandings in this world with large-scale and above all aesthetically "rounded" designs for the future human society. It was at this pOint that people realised that Hacks was going his own way - a way that led away from Brecht. The interaction was quite different with Milller. His first plays about the establishment of socialism in the developing GDR, about the hard, difficult, contradictory work involved, have little in common with the "typical" techniques of "epic theatre." There is no trace of parabolic forms, "Verfremdungseffekte," techniques of authorial comment as Brecht developed them (and as they are characteristic of Hacks's early works) in Milller's The Wage Slaver (Der Lohndrucker; 1957), Correction (Korrektur; 1956/58), Report from Klettwitz (Klettwitzer Bericht; 1958), or The Bui/ding Site (Der Bau; 1964). Nonetheless, until the 1970'S, there was no question that this writer was a successor to Brecht. This categorization -in contrast to that of Hacks - outlasted Milller's adaptations of the classics (like Philoctetes [Philoktet; 1964], Prometheus [1968) , or Oedipus the Tyrant [Odipus Tyrann; 1966)), and even his version of Macbeth (1971) , which treated the old text much more drastically and radically than Brecht had ever done in his adaptations of the classics.
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