The Horatian

40 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW HEINER MÜLLER THE HORATIAN TRANSLATED BY MARC D. SILBERMAN, HELEN FEHERVARY, GUNTRAM WEBER INTRODUCTION Heiner Müller—age 47, communist, citizen of the German Democratic Republic, author of numerous works for the theater, and resident dramaturge at the Berliner Ensemble-is the most compelling voice in German drama today , both East and West. In the GDR, where theater bent on forging a more humane society often evokes more prescriptive rigor and self-affirmation than real political effect, Müller's plays center on the dialectical tensions underlying the buUding of a socialist society and demand critical response which at once challenges the cultural, phüosophical, and psychological, as well as the political sectors of human consciousness. In the Federal Republic, where for the last decade political theater has desperately explored the paths of moral indignation, agitation-propaganda, intellectual self-flagellation, and alternative forms of popular theater, Müller's plays provide one of the few models whereby a Marxist analysis of contemporary questions has found a unique esthetic form of expression, neither solely reliant on nor independent of other critical modes. But what does this mean for us in America today? Certainly Müller's import for Marxist esthetics and theater in both Germanies, and potentially in the United States, stands immediately in the Brechtian tradition. The political reception of Brecht in this country—superseding his former image as the folksy sage of all things human—coincided with the height of the New Left movement and contributed in a large part to a more incisive theoretical and practical understanding of the role of art and culture within political change. However, Brecht's "Americanization" also led to the recognition that historical models cannot be transplanted indiscriminately, and if Brecht was to become a viable model, he himself would have to be reutUized, just as he had reutUized models before him. With the insistence on so-called secondary contradictions spurred by the women's movement, the insights gained from theoreticians ranging from Marcuse to Mao, the cooptation of popular cultural forms by increasing mass media sophistica- MÜLLER 41 tion, and the political re-formation of radical movements, Brecht's dialectics of antagonism demand to be differentiated. New forms of mediation need to be found for explaining the conditions of the St. Petersburg workers in The Mother, the theory of surplus value in St. Joan, the pragmatism in The Measures Taken, and not lastly, for GalUei's and his author's faith in knowledge and reason. Its potential, indeed, its demand for reutUization is, of course, the singularity of Brechtian dialectical theater. Here Heiner Müller is at once Bertolt Brecht's systematic student and critic, and his effort to locate new points of relation and conflict, to further complicate reality in order to explicate it, is what both links him to and separates him from Brecht. Müller's first play, The Wage Shark (Der Lohndrücker, 1956), was based on a fragment by Brecht (Garbe/Büsching) and treated problems of industrial production in the GDR reconstruction period. As an attempt to redefine the classic Brechtian dialectic of conflict which had reflected the nature of class struggle within capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, Müller's play sought to construct dramaturgically new constellations of conflict specific to socialism in the GDR. With the emergence of the GDR since the 1960s as a fully industrialized socialist state, Müller's plays have turned to the larger historical context of revolutionary movements. Mauser (1970) is an effort to revise historically the question of discipline versus spontaneity posed by Brecht in The Measures Taken. Cement (1972), based on Gladkov's novel of the same name, treats the relationship between revolutionary activism and economic/bureaucratic reconstruction in the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the CivU War. The Horatian (1968), Müller's first play to appear in the United States, is one of his many adaptations of literary and mythological themes. Like its most immediate literary model, Brecht's The Horatians and the Curiations (1934; translated by H.R. Hays in Accent 8/1 , 1947), it is a learning play. Brecht's play, written the year...