Mourning and the Body: Heiner Müller's Fathers and The Foundling Son

Mourning and the Body: Heiner Milller's Fathers and The Foundling Son JEANETTE R. MALKIN Heiner MUlier, who died at the end of December 1995, was Germany's most acclaimed and controversial contemporary playwright. Before the political unification of [989, he held the anomalous position of a writer, thinker,'and practitioner of theatre who was at home, and extolled, in both East and West. Pre-[989 MUlier ,occupied, as he put it, that chasm between the "two German capitals Berlin," whose "shared and not shared history" he saw - and portrayed ~ as "piled up by the latest earthquake as a borderline between two continents .'" As in much of MUlier's writing (and directing), Walter Benjamin's "piled up" ruins of history became the image that connected the memories of a catastrophic past to the failures and repressions of the present.' And as in much of his writing (and directing), MUlier used a postmodem theatre aes- , thetic to recover the repressions and betrayals of Western (and especially German ) history. In his quasi-autobiographical play The Foundling, that ruinous past returns as highly concentrated layers of memory - as an act of mourning by a "foundling" son self-exiled from East to West Berlin. Centered on the broken body of the stepfather figure, and on the historical ideologies that tortured and disciplined it, The Foundling is a bitter elegy to the terrors of German history as translated into the flesh of its victims/perpetrators. MUller's two major political and personal traumas were Gennan Fascism and East German Comrnunism.3 Born in 1929 10 a working-class family in Sax.ony, MUller saw his own father, a minor Social Democratic functionary in Ihe Weimar Republic, bealen and taken away by SA agents (Storm Troopers) in [933. He was himself drafled at sixteen into the German Labor Force and sent to the front in [945, where he witnessed the ending of the war. With the division of Germany he became an East German, a Socialist soon critical of the Socialist state. His father served briefly as an official in the new Socialist Modern Drama, 39 ([996) 490 Mourning and the Body 491 regime, but then crossed over to the West. MUller's career was a dialogue with, and against, the political and ideological forces that defined and constricted him - and with their historical antecedents. In The Foundling, the narrator-son pities and despises the historically inscribed (fictive) father who was broken first by the Nazis in the camps (genitals crushed) and then by the Party in East Berlin (back broken). The fractured voices and fragmented fonn of the play, its repetitions, regressions, and refusal of narrative cohesion or closure, replicate the interlaced memories of these traumatic pasts - often written onto the same bodies. The Foundling (Del' Findling [1987]) is the last part of a cycle of five perfonnance texts written between 1984 and 1987, each a self-standing piece originally published and perfonned separately, and each recalling a part of Gennan history. The complete cycle, entitled Volokolamsk Highway (Wolokolamsker Chausee) consists of poetic texts written in open-verse lines that, to quote Carl Weber, "read like inner monologues, or better: a 'streamof -memory' in which a person reca11s, or dreams of, moments of extreme crisis .'" The themes of these texts - history, betrayal, fragmented identity - are familiar from MUller's earlier plays, but their fonn - dense voice texts lacking assigned speakers or any stage instructions - points to a more introverted type of dramaturgy. MUller's plays of the eighties have been called "BewuBtseinslandschaften '" - landscapes of consciousness - and indeed, unlike his earlier more spectacular style, they move inward, presenting a less gestural and more expressly memorial dramatic fonn. Using complex lyrical tactics and temporal overlap, MUller recalls in these plays a no longer grounded past: a past that floats within the collective unconscious - as a place of (fragmented) collective identity. The Foundling enacts both a political and a personal "excavation," uncovering the layered wounds cut into the bodies of a father and his son by their own betrayals, and by the last fifty years of Gennan history. The five sections of Volokolamsk Highway, although quite different from each other, all share a lyrical memory-form and each...