Heiner Müller

• Born: January 9, 1929
• Birthplace: Eppendorf, East Germany
• Died: December 30, 1995
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Since 1959, Heiner Müller, who began his career as a journalist and editor of a monthly journal on modern art, has devoted himself to the writing of plays, for which he is best known. He has, however, published lyric poetry, prose, and a great number of articles, interviews, and commentaries on the theory of drama. In 1994, Müller published his autobiography under the title Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen (war without battle: life under two dictatorships) in which he examined his life under the Nazi dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 and under the dictatorship of the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany between 1949 and 1989.

Achievements

Although in 1970, in his critical introduction to postwar German literature, Peter Demetz named Peter Hacks as Bertolt Brecht’s most sophisticated disciple, the American critic changed his mind when he assessed the problems of German theater in 1986, rating Heiner Müller’s achievements as among the most important on the German stage. Müller is the only German playwright who has been able to combine his commitment to socialism with an avant-garde, if not postmodernist, consciousness. In the West German press of the early 1980’s, he was named as the most famous East German dramatist since Brecht, who was, although successful abroad, most controversial at home. In terms of the theory and practice of drama, Arlene Akiko Teraoka, in her 1985 study of Müller’s postmodernist poetics, regarded him as “the most significant playwright since Brecht to emerge out of East Germany, if not out of any of the German-speaking countries of postwar Europe.”

By deconstructing both bourgeois and orthodox socialist models of drama, history, and revolution, Müller has gone beyond the conventions of dramatic action of individual characters in conflict with history or fate and has created a new form of dramatic discourse that includes the anonymous voices of the oppressed, the nonrational, the nonmale, and the nonwhite of the Third World. In his ideology and dramatic idiom, Müller has traveled a long distance from Brecht, toward Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud, and has intersected with the postmodernist forms of Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. He has created a theater composed of the anarchic forms of montage, ritual, pantomime, comic-strip scenes, and street-theater demonstrations of terror, cruelty, and obscenity.

In 1979, Müller received the Drama Prize of the Mülheim Theater in West Germany. In 1985, he was awarded the West German Büchner Prize and in 1986 the East German National Prize. In 1990, he received the Kleist Prize.

Biography

Born in Eppendorf, Saxony, in 1929, Heiner Müller was one of two sons of a working-class family. His father was a member of the Social Democratic Party and subject to the persecutions of the Nazi regime. Müller’s childhood trauma began with the arrest of his father, who was put in a concentration camp in 1933, released, and reimprisoned when he refused to accommodate to the Nazi regime. After 1949, Müller’s father was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party because of his “Titoism” (his opposition to the personality cult that had formed around Joseph Stalin) and left the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for West Germany in the early 1950’s in order to avoid the threat of government persecution.

During the last year of World War II, Müller was drafted and experienced the total defeat of the German army in 1945. After the liberation of Germany, he was employed as an administrator for various cultural organizations in the GDR, and then worked as journalist and editor of the journal Junge Kunst (young art), until he was hired by the Maxim Gorky Theater in East Berlin (1958-1960), where he learned his stagecraft. In the late 1950’s, Müller wrote a number of plays in collaboration with his wife, Inge Müller (1925-1966), for which they were awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1959. After 1959, Müller continued to devote himself to the writing of plays. From 1970 to 1976 he served as dramaturge of the former Brecht company, the Berliner Ensemble, and later of the East Berlin Volksbühne.

Like many of his colleagues, Müller has had his share of conflicts with the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party in the GDR, and with government officials responsible for the direction of cultural developments in the GDR. During the early 1960’s, many of his plays were publicly criticized by party functionaries and were canceled after only a few performances or were never produced. At the same time, Müller was expelled from the East German Writers’ Union. Therefore, from the mid-1960’s to the early 1970’s, Müller concentrated on adapting Greek, Shakespearean, and Brechtian plays. This was the period of a socialist classicism, to which both Hacks and Müller contributed important plays.

After 1971, when Erich Honecker came into office as first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, a number of changes in official cultural politics took place that allowed for a greater divergence of literary productions. The premiere of Cement by the Berliner Ensemble in 1973 was the first production of a major play by Müller since 1958. At the same time, many of his plays were made available in print in the GDR, while a West Berlin publishing house began with the publication of Müller’s collected works. The production of Mauser by the Austin Theater Group at the University of Texas in 1975 brought international recognition to Müller.

In the mid-1970’s, Müller had his breakthrough as a postmodernist playwright. Although the East German theater reacted with some reservation to his development as a postmodernist, theaters in the West have welcomed the products of this phase. With the exception of The Task, most of his postmodernist plays were premiered in West Germany or Belgium. Hamletmachine was premiered by the Théâtre Mobile in Brussels in 1978.

Müller, a resident of East Berlin, traveled widely to participate in the production not only of his own plays but also of other playwrights’ works. For example, he collaborated with Robert Wilson on the CIVIL warS (partial pr. 1983 and 1984; includes Knee Plays) in 1984. After German reunification, he became a member of the management team of the Berliner Ensemble, the former Bertolt Brecht theater in East Berlin. In 1993, there were reports about Müller’s collaboration with the Stasi, the East German secret police, dating back to 1978. Subsequent investigation, however, showed that Müller did not betray any of his friends and managed to help several of his colleagues. In 1994, Müller was operated on for cancer of the throat. He went to Los Angeles to recover from his operation. When he returned to Berlin, he was appointed the artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. He died in December, 1995, and was buried next to Brecht in a Berlin cemetery.

Analysis

Heiner Müller’s development as a dramatist must be seen in the context of the international debate concerning a poetics for postmodernist drama. After 1971, Müller presented his work as a contemporary dramatist in terms of the poetic productions of a postmodernist artist in a postcapitalistic world system, as Teraoka has shown. In the works of this phase, beginning in 1971 with the completion of Germania Tod in Berlin, he engaged in the deconstruction of certain models of enlightenment or socialist drama in favor of alternative models of Third World drama. Investigating the issues of cultural colonialism and the exportation of revolution, the role of the intellectual in the revolutionary process, and, especially, the role of the European socialist intellectual in the conflicts of the Third World, Müller was current in terms not only of his topics but also of his dramatic techniques. In his revolutionary postmodernist aesthetics, Müller associated himself with the antiliterary traditions of contemporary literature, which work toward the elimination of the aesthetic autonomy of the work of art and the disappearance of the author behind the text as part of a universal discourse.

In an essay, “Der Schrecken, die erste Erscheinung des Neuen: Zu einer Diskussion über Postmodernismus in New York” (1979; “Reflections on Post-Modernism,” 1979), Müller defined his place and role within modernist and contemporary European literature. For Müller, quoting Franz Kafka, “literature is an affair of the people.” The revolutionary artist must write from the standpoint of the oppressed people within the dominant structures of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. For Müller, the “oppressed people” are the masses of the Third World in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, living in a world that is divided between the two power blocs of capitalism and socialism. The author in the socialist world, who is still privileged by virtue of his talent, has the goal of working toward his self-abolition. This goal is closely connected to the revolution of the Third World, which will establish, according to Müller, Marx’s “realm of freedom,” in which the author as privileged creator and art as private property no longer exist. In this situation, there are only two alternatives for the language of the contemporary author: either the self-abolition of the privileged voice or participation in a collective discourse—in Müller’s words, “the silence of entropy, or the universal discourse which omits nothing and excludes no one.”

Only gradually did Müller come to this perspective. His dramatic œuvre can be divided into three major periods: from the early 1950’s to the early 1960’s, when Müller dealt with contemporary problems in industry and land reform in the GDR; from the mid-1960’s to the early 1970’s, when the playwright followed the trends of a socialist classicism, employing mythology and the models of classical drama; and from the mid-1970’s to 1995, when Müller explored the causes and consequences of failed revolutions in Germany and the demise of the German working-class movement. In this last period he focused on the issues of cultural colonialism, the exportation of revolutions, and, especially, the struggles of the Third World.

In his first phase, Müller explored the contradictions, evolving from the collaboration of communists and former Nazis, within the new collective work system under socialism. Plays such as The Scab, The Correction, Die Umsiedlerin (the homeless one), which was to be revised as Die Bauern (the peasant), and Der Bau (the wall) belong to this period.

The Scab

The play most typical for this period is The Scab, dealing with the need for increased production under poor working and living conditions in the GDR in 1949. Following the Soviet model of rewarding exemplary workers, the GDR had singled out workers surpassing production norms for extra pay and special privileges. The protagonist of the play is such an “activist,” hated and distrusted not only by his coworkers but also by management and the party. Their distrust is not without reason: The protagonist had denounced workers for sabotage during the Nazi regime in order to save his own life. The fulfillment of socialist production plans, however, requires the collective labor of all workers. There is no room for private revenge. The protagonist, who is beaten by his coworkers after work, and his adversaries on different levels have to work together to complete an important project. The dialectics of the play show that collective labor under socialism is a matter not of individual choice but of historical necessity.

The Adaptations

During the second phase of his work, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Müller did adaptations of Greek, Shakespearean, and Brechtian plays: Ödipus Tyrann (based on Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ play), Macbeth (based on Shakespeare’s play), Philoctetes (based on Sophocles’ play), Prometheus (based on Aeschylus’s play), The Horatian (based on Brecht’s play), Mauser (based on Brecht’s play Die Massnahme), and Cement (1972, based on Gladkov’s novel) make up the corpus of his middle period.

Philoctetes

The work most typical of this period is Philoctetes. The original play by Sophocles has a rare happy ending, returning the protagonist and his invincible bow from his isolation on the island of Lemnos to the Greek army before Troy, where his festering wounds are healed. In Müller’s version, the return of Philoctetes is engineered by Ulysses for the sole purpose of rallying the troops for battle. Ulysses uses Achilles’ son to carry out his plan, deceiving Philoctetes into believing that he is rescued to be taken home to Greece. When Achilles’ son finally tells Philoctetes about the lie, a battle ensues, during which Philoctetes is killed. Now Ulysses exploits the death of Philoctetes, concocting a new lie in the service of the war against Troy. The Trojans are said to have invaded Lemnos and killed Philoctetes because he refused to join their side. With this propaganda story, Ulysses hopes to inspire the Greek army to fight the Trojans with increased fury and desire for revenge. On its most obvious level of interpretation, the drama has been understood as an anti-imperialist play, showing the cynical exploitation of human values for the sake of aggressive wars, but the pervasive pessimism of the play that also informs the character of Achilles’ young son has rendered the obvious interpretation questionable. The dialectics of Müller’s Philoctetes are enigmatic, but not without direction.

Mauser

That the dialectics of Müller’s plays are not always in line with party-approved directions shows in Mauser, a “learning play” based on a theme from Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Tikhii Don (1928-1940; And Quiet Flows the Don, 1934). In this play, an old comrade who has administered revolutionary justice in the city of Vitebsk, to defend the Soviet system during the civil war, is put to death by his own comrades because he continued killing people without party mandate. The revolution no longer needs him; it needs his death. As in Brecht’s Die Massnahme of 1930, the death sentence is not executed before the accused has confirmed his own sentence.

Cement

Although written in 1972 and instrumental in his rehabilitation in the GDR with its production by the Berliner Ensemble in 1973, Müller’s Cement, based on Gladkov’s novel of 1925, portraying the national effort of reconstruction in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war, points in the same direction as Mauser and perhaps even Müller’s earlier The Scab. As during the socialist reconstruction in the GDR, counter-revolutionaries were also needed for the reindustrialization in the Soviet Union after 1917. Cement is not, however, a historical drama, but rather a dramatic analysis of revolution in general and a thoroughgoing critique of the Soviet Revolution during the bureaucratic rationalization under the New Economic Policy after 1921. In this regard, Cement belongs to Müller’s third phase. Of special interest is the concept of the role of women in the revolution, which is far more radical than the traditional Soviet interpretation. The female protagonist sacrifices her child for the revolution. Her daughter starves to death in a children’s home. Her mother wants to construct a new world and is prepared to pay the price: her old love and her child. In reference to mythology, the true revolutionary woman is revealed as a second Medea.

Germania Tod in Berlin

During his third phase, Müller produced the most challenging and most avant-garde work of his career as a playwright. Plays such as Germania Tod in Berlin, The Slaughter, Gundling’s Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream, Hamletmachine, and The Task constitute Müller’s breakthrough of the 1970’s.

Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania dead in Berlin) is a dramatic collage of German history from the first century to 1953. According to Müller, Germany manifests itself through the fraternal strife of two brothers, from the Roman time of Arminius and Flavius to the divided Germany of the twentieth century. While one of the brothers loves freedom and fatherland and wants to liberate his people from servitude, the other brother is concerned only with his individual wealth, glory, and honor and thinks only about his personal freedom. This constellation repeats itself throughout German history, with the defeat and death of the altruistic brother at the hands of the egocentric brother. Still, the unselfish brother never gives up hope, in spite of defeat and death. In this play, Müller appears to be clinging to the last vestiges of hope in German history. In the play’s final scene, the bricklayer Hilse, a counter-figure to Gerhart Hauptmann’s quietist weaver Hilse in his drama Die Weber (pb. 1892; The Weavers, 1899), is almost stoned to death by members of a juvenile gang who ridicule his socialist work ethic. When he finally dies of cancer, Müller’s Hilse sees in his hallucinations Rosa Luxemburg returning from her grave and red flags flying over a united Germany. In contrast to his namesake’s meaningless death in Hauptmann’s day—in which the old weaver is killed by a stray bullet after refusing to take part in the revolt against the ruling class—Müller’s Hilse knows what he fought and died for, even though his final goal remains visionary.

Gundling’s Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream

Gundling’s Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream is a dramatized critique of the German Enlightenment in nine scenes. The synthetic title of the play lists the major figures of the comic-strip plot: Jacob Paul von Gundling (1673-1731), a professor of history and law and president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences; Frederick II, king of Prussia (1712-1786); and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), the major dramatist of the German Enlightenment. The first scene portrays the degradation of Gundling as intellectual at the court of Frederick William I, king of Prussia. Scenes 2-7 present the transformation of Frederick II from poet-king and Enlightenment intellectual into a military tyrant, and scenes 8-9 show the resignation of Lessing and the self-destruction of the younger dramatist Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). In the concluding scene, Lessing meets with the last president of the United States in an American junkyard, while figures from his dramas embrace and kill one another. Enlightenment is exposed as treason of the intellectual, his adaptation to the authoritarian state and service to universal oppression. The reason of language is reduced to absurdity, resulting in the systematic deconstruction of the model of Enlightenment drama.

Hamletmachine

Hamletmachine, of 1977, is Müller’s most enigmatic play, presenting the total deconstruction of European drama by means of a collage of fragments from that tradition. Consisting of five scenes, the play shows the Hamlet figure at the funeral of his father and raping his mother, while the Ophelia figure destroys the home where she has been imprisoned, and takes to the street as a prostitute. While the Hamlet player represents the intellectual betraying the revolution, the Ophelia player embodies the voice of the oppressed. In the end, Hamlet withdraws into a suit of armor, before murdering Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, and Mao Zedong, who appear totally defenseless as naked women. Ophelia is left behind on the stage in a wheelchair among the corpses. Her last words are a call to revolution in the Third World against European colonialism. Form and logic of classical bourgeois drama are abandoned in favor of an anarchic vision.

The Task

The Task is based on the model of the Brechtian learning play, specifically, Brecht’s Die Massnahme (pr. 1930; The Measures Taken, 1960). While Brecht’s play deals with the mission of four agitators sent from Moscow to export the revolution to China, Müller’s play reconstructs the failure of three revolutionaries, sent from France to accomplish a revolution in eighteenth century Jamaica. The three figures of Müller’s play represent the various types of revolution in history: The bourgeois intellectual Debuisson stands for the French Revolution, the peasant Galloudec for the communist revolution, and the former slave Sasportas for revolution in the Third World. At the center of the play is a reenactment of Georg Büchner’s drama Danton’s Tod (pb. 1835; Danton’s Death, 1927) as “theater of the revolution,” with Sasportas playing Robespierre and Galloudec playing Danton. Sasportas declares the “theater of the white revolution” historically finished.

As a black revolutionary, Sasportas adds a new voice to the revolutionary discourse, expressing its superiority over the dominant European models of the French Revolution as well as Marxist communism. While Debuisson betrays the revolution by returning to his former life as a slave owner and Galloudec is not able to provide any leadership, Sasportas introduces an authentic alternative to the European models, continuing the revolutionary movement in Jamaica. As Antoine, the adjudicating voice in The Task, representing the “control chorus” of the Brechtian model, becomes directly involved in the betrayal of the revolution, Müller’s play emerges as a deconstruction of the Brechtian learning play. By abandoning the indispensable control function of reason, The Task shows a shift from Brecht to the theater of Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud.

Germania Three Ghosts at Dead Man

Müller’s last play, Germania Three Ghosts at Dead Man, is a loose sequence of scenes showing his total disillusionment with German socialism and its history during the last seventy years from Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party during the 1930’s, to Walter Ulbricht, the East German Communist Party leader of the 1960’s. The Dead Man’s Ridge is a contested battleground in France during World War I where a great number of German soldiers lost their lives. The “ghosts” of socialism appear at their symbolic Dead Man’s Ridge. At the center of the play is a scene showing Joseph Stalin signing the nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and exploiting Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union for his own power politics. These scenes with historical characters are interspersed with scenes displaying the nameless perpetrators and victims of aggression, rape, and genocide during World War II. Bertolt Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel, and the assistant directors at the East Berlin theater appear in a brief scene rehearsing Brecht’s Coriolan (wr. 1952-1953, pb. 1959, adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus; Coriolanus, 1972) without paying attention to the uprising of the East German workers in 1956. The moral of Müller’s play is that Brecht’s revolutionary legacy is ignored for the sake of artistic production. Müller’s last play ends with the pessimistic conclusion that Brecht’s name is as good as forgotten.

Bibliography

Barnett, David. Literature Versus Theater: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Monograph dealing with the texts of Müller’s later plays with regard to their literary merits and their production on the stage.

Demetz, Peter. After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Survey of German literature after 1970 with chapters on individual authors, including Müller.

Demetz, Peter. Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction. New York: Pegasus, 1970. Survey of German literature between 1945 and 1970 with chapter on Müller.

Huettich, H. G. Theater in a Planned Society: Contemporary Drama in the German Democratic Republic in Its Historical, Political, and Cultural Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1978. Study of theater in the GDR through the 1970’s, including the role of Müller as dramatist.

Kalb, Jonathan. The Theater of Heiner Müller. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Magisterial study of Müller’s plays and their productions, including his plays after 1990.

Silberman, Marc. Heiner Müller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980. Report on the state of research on Müller.

Teraoka, Arlene Akiko. The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Highly acclaimed assessment of Müller’s plays in terms of postmodernist aesthetics.