SOURCE: Grawe, Christian. Review of Das Napoleon-Spiel, by Christoph Hein. World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 555–56.

In the following review, Grawe offers a negative assessment of Das Napoleon-Spiel, faulting the work for having insignificant themes and lacking direction.

Christoph Hein was already recognized as a promising playwright in both East and West Germany when he turned to prose in the early eighties. He has always been highly regarded too as a courageous and honest voice of reasonable protest in the GDR and was, not surprisingly, one of the speakers at the famous Alexanderplatz demonstration on 4 November 1989.

Between 1982 and 1989 Hein published three major narratives: Der fremde Freund (1982; entitled Drachenblut in West Germany in 1983), Horns Ende (1985), and Der Tangospieler (1989; see WLT 64:2, p. 308), which, rightly, gained him the reputation of an artistically astute and psychologically subtle, humane though pessimistic chronicler of “everyday deformations in the GDR,” as Sigrid Loffler, interviewing Hein in...