The theme is happiness, and the title already indicates that it is about a highly concrete experience that can be fixed in time.

Hacks uses an allegory going back to Greek antiquity, according to which Fortuna in her cornucopia holds natural products, the fruits of a bountiful harvest - ideal and hope of those working in agriculture.

With hacks, it's luck itself that seemingly indiscriminately "empties out" its cornucopia, which doesn't just contain natural fruits.

The fact that the cornucopia is not held upright, but points downwards, contradicts the usual allegorical representations.

So the painters are “wrong”.

In the case of hacks, the (changeable, moody) luck has all sorts of things ready, including those of an unpleasant nature, and pours them out haphazardly, even violently.

One thinks of the baroque painter Salvator Rosa, whose beautiful goddess of fortune holds a twisted horn from which all sorts of objects – including jewelry and a crown – tumble down onto the animals lying at her feet.

The picture was intended to be satirical, directed among other things against the Pope, who is depicted as a donkey, and almost cost the painter his life.

The Dark Happiness of Love

According to the poet, it is precisely the raining down of various, ultimately useless objects that has to be endured, because “in the mother-of-pearl darkness of a tighter coil” the goddess of luck has the greatest luck ready.

It's not an object, but it's definitely of this world.

It is the "dark bliss of love", the epitome of a worldly enjoyment of life.

Absolutely no joke, no mere boasting, as the "blonde sweetheart" can testify.

The poet celebrates the eros of the two, which should not be imagined as product-like peak performance, with paradoxical images of nature - as a storm that stands still, as a never-ending tide, as endless calm.

This is how he captures the enraptured but extremely earthly intensity of mutual happiness.

Here, Hacks very concretely stages an ideal that people cling to even in dark times.

In the bitter, clairvoyant comedy "Der Geldgott", which Hacks wrote in the early 1990s, the previously battered couple, who have been robbed of their love by the new economic developments, crawl into a large cornucopia set up on the stage.

After all sorts of civilizational rubbish has been cleared away, the heroine glimpses an auspicious image at the very end that she cannot put into words.

Her partner squeezes into the narrow cornucopia behind her to get this picture as well.

That's the end of a piece.

What the two see there and what leaves them speechless is not said.

But one thing is clear: the search for happiness is ineradicable, even in the face of adverse circumstances.

In his love poetry, which makes up a third of his volume of poetry and spans half a century, Hacks never loses himself in romantic languor or world-breaking illusion.

If occasionally elegiac tones are struck, this serves as a trick, not as a world view.

The gaze of the materialist is always present, who knows that there is only this one world and nothing else.

The “Father of Pleasures” is none other than the “old skeleton man”, as it says in a text at the end of the block of love poems.

It is important to hold on to happiness and enjoyment, because "Had happiness helps die.

/ Death should inherit nothing / But shards licked clean / And skins squeezed out”.