SOURCE: Blomster, Wes. Review of Schlötel, oder Was solls: Stücke und Essays, by Christoph Hein. World Literature Today 61, no. 3 (summer 1987): 441.

In the following review of Schlötel, oder Was solls: Stücke und Essays, Blomster focuses on Hein's desire to improve society as the central theme of the collection.

“The human being,” Christoph Hein declares, “is the animal with the thickest skin.” The two plays and four essays collected in Schlötel, oder Was solls speak urgently of the forty-three-year-old East German author's strong desire to penetrate this armor of insensitivity and move both individual and society toward that “island of blissful humanity” of which Johannes R. Becher dreamed in the heyday of expressionism.

In “Hamlet and the Party Secretary” Hein offers a brilliantly brief assessment of contemporary theatre, lamenting that drama and theatre stand today in no meaningful relationship to each other. At the same...