The Theater of Heiner Muller (review)

The Theater of Heiner Müller. By Jonathan Kalb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; pp. xix + 255. $59.95 cloth.

Jonathan Kalb's study begins with a mystery. On December 30, 1995, Heiner Müller, the East German playwright/poet/director, long considered one of the most important figures of the political-literary avant garde in Europe, died. What followed was a spectacle of grieving by thousands of people that lasted several days and seemed "absurdly excessive" (3) to the American professor. To Kalb, Müller was "the very opposite of a darling, beloved countryman in the eyes of either Ossies (Easterners) or Wessies (Westerners)" (174). Rather, he was a sinister man—belligerent, vindictive, hateful, and without integrity—in short, not fit for inspiring trust, at least not in Kalb when he began his research. Why he would want to write about a man whom he judges his moral inferior is the mystery Kalb sets out to solve. He begins with the "elementary question of identity—who is he?" (1) and ends with the proposition that Müller's "indifference to reproaches of disingenuousness, evasion, charlatanism, and cynicism" is exemplary for the tepidity of our "ice age" (208). In other words, every era gets the "culture it deserves, and ours deserved Heiner Müller" (21).

There are already a number of substantial works in this area, including Arlene Teraoka's The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (1985) and Gerhard Fischer's edited collection ConTEXTS AND HISTORY (1994), both in English, and Genia Schulz's Heiner Müller (1980) and Nobert Otto Eke's Heiner Müller: Apokalypse and Utopie (1989) in German. Kalb shares with these authors the belief in a correspondence between theatre and history (or biography), aesthetics and politics. He differs from them in how he systematizes key terms. Consider Kalb's description of Müller's typical theatrical practices: "(1) to adopt the manner of the source author entirely, style, tone and all, occupying the corpus like a vampire or virus in order to explode it from within, or (2) to set up a source author or composite of several authors as a broad paradigm, a nexus of ideas drawn from fable and fact, and then embarrass it with a similar occupation—these exploding or embarrassing processes coming to full fruition only in the public arena of production" (15-16). Pathology ("virus") is employed as a way of characterizing the relation between convention and innovation, original and copy, with the playwright appearing as the rotten anti-hero ("vampire") of his own works, and these in turn as examples of the rottenness of our state of affairs ("embarrassing processes"). Anticipating his critics, Kalb remarks that the aim is not to "unmask" Müller but "rather to illuminate his work and thought by way of his carefully constructed alter egos" (14).

The Theater of Heiner Müller combines cultural criticism, textual investigation, and psychology. It is divided into ten chapters, each of which treats either a single play or a group of plays. The material is arranged thematically and includes topics such as Müller's critique of the Brechtian Lehrstück in The Horatian (chapter 2) and his variation on socialist realism in The Scab, The Correction, and The Resettler (chapter 4), as well as the interrogation of the poststructuralist "Death-of-the-Author myth" in Hamletmachine (chapter 6) and The Mission (chapter 7). Within each chapter, a constant doubling takes place with Müller and his so-called alter egos—Brecht, Kleist, and Mayakovski, as well as Artaud and Genet. Kalb's chief topic, whatever his ostensible subject at a given moment, is the problem of authorship and authenticity in an age of "mechanical media" and "information inflation" (20, 208).

The last two chapters are the book's strongest. "Müller as Beckett" (chapter nine) takes as its object one of the artist's most enigmatic texts, Description of a Picture, to pursue the question...