Heiner Muller: Last Poems: 1992-95

These poems, written between 1992-1995 and printed here for the first time in English, were among those published posthumously in the volume Heiner Müller: Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), which contains all the poetry the author wrote during his life. Frank Hörnigk, the editor of the volume, stated in his preface that Müller "found his own language almost exclusively in poems during the last decade of his life." And Müller dated nearly every poem during those years, a change from his previous habit of rarely if ever dating his texts.

Most of these poems reflect the events that marked the final four years of Müller's life. These were years that brought him a new marriage, a new child, an invitation to stage Wagner's Tristan and Isolde at the Bayreuth Opera Festival, and appointment as Artistic Director of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's former theatre. In many ways, these years could be considered the culmination of his personal and professional life. During two of these years he also had to face the dread of esophageal cancer; though slowly dying he refused to give up his quest for creative achievement. His poetry mirrored the many faces of death that Müller knew he had to confront in the near future. Some of the poems respond to historical events of those years, yet even they reveal faces of death. Others convey a stance of stoicism that viewed death with a distancing perception akin to a kind of amusement. Müller succumbed to his disease on December 30, 1995, two weeks before he planned to begin rehearsal for his last play, Germania 3: Ghosts at Dead Man, a text that unfolds stories of death and dying throughout a millennium of German history.

Another set of Müller's late poetry will appear in the forthcoming volume, A Heiner Müller Reader--Selected Writings: 1949-1995, published in the PAJ Books series by Johns Hopkins University Press.

*An asterisk indicates a word or line written in English in the original. Unless otherwise noted, the poems were not published during the author's lifetime.

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The Historian's Complaint

In the fourth book of the Annals Tacitus complains
About the duration of peacetime, seldom interrupted
By silly border wars with whose description he
Has to make do, filled with envy
Of the historians before him
Who had mammoth wars at their disposal
Conducted by emperors who thought Rome was not grand enough
Subjugated nations, captured kings
Uprisings and state crises: great stuff.
And Tacitus apologizes to his readers.
As for me two thousand years after him
I have no need to apologize and can not
Complain about the lack of great stuff.

[8/16/1992]

Dying Man with Mirror

    Pushkin dying
    Of his duel wound
    Asked for a mirror
    And a bowl of millet porridge
    LIKE A MONKEY he said
    Spooning into the mirror
As far as we know we will
Not see each other again We do not need
To fool ourselves any more Probably
Nothing new will happen but there will be Probably
Nothing Whatever that may be
Even the leap into the mirror would not bring
Us closer to each other Glass clinks
The way women scream

[10/2/1992]

City Traffic

A woman waiting for green at the intersection
Checks her fingernails An image from the ad pages
Ten minutes later she will be dead And appear
Tomorrow in the papers for the first and last time

[1/20/1993]

Tristan 1993

Yesterday my child had a strange gaze
Frightful news for the length of a commercial
In the eyes of my child read I
Who has seen too much the question
Whether the world is still worth the pains of life
One moment long the frightful news
One commercial long I was in doubt
Shall I wish her a long...