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Rewriting, Violence, and Theater: Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken and Heiner Müller's Mauser
- The Comparatist
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 26, May 2002
- pp. 99-119
- 10.1353/com.2002.0022
- Article
- Additional Information
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THE COMPAKATIST REWRITING, VIOLENCE, AND THEATER: BERTOLT BRECHT'S THE MEASURES TAKEN AND HEINER MÜLLER'S MAUSER Benton Jay Komins Much has been written about Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary influence on contemporary theater. This tendency is perhaps best seen in the words ofKenneth Tynan who stated, in 1956: "Once in a generation the world discovers a new way oftelling a story. This generation's pathfinder is Bertolt Brecht, both as a playwright and as a director" (qtd. in RooseEvans 68). Brecht's "newness"—his pathfinding theories of acting and production—has influenced generations in Western Europe, the United States, and the former Eastern Bloc countries. Yet, to use him as a barometer , or as an aesthetic gauge to judge the relevance and contemporaneity ofa dramatic work often falls short ofits mark. Tfone makes Brecht the yardstick for what literature can accomplish today," writes Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde, "Brecht himself can no longer be judged and the question whether the solution he found for certain problems is tied to the period of its creation or not can no longer be asked" (88). Bürger sees that Brecht's works cannot be separated from history. Once they are removed from their ideological and historical contexts, his influential techniques and theories become mere influences or modes of style and imitation within theatrical convention, not avant-garde techniques which aim to undermine traditional experiences of the theater.1 There is another way to assess Brecht's work. For critic Martin EssHn , "What distinguishes Brecht from his contemporaries [. . .] is the fact that he was able to find a way out ofthe dead end of destructiveness for its own sake" (558). In other words, Brecht's plays themselves are serious reflections that are resistant to nihilism. But what does this mean in the realm of contemporary theater? How can contemporary playwrights use Brecht without vitiating his project? Critics like Linda Hutcheon suggest that earlier works can be reinvigorated parodically by contemporary artists who use them as tools to critique present situations (57). In this critical vein, Heiner Müller uses Bertolt Brecht's play Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) (1930) as the basis for his play Mauser (1970).2 Müller's effective re-writing of Brecht's play injects historical consciousness into perceptions of the course of socialist and communist revolution in the Eastern Bloc, which changed dramatically between the utopianism of the late-1920s and the uncertainty of the postwar period. This essay undertakes a comparative reading and analysis of the ways in which Brecht and Müller grapple with questions of violence, particularly when and where it relates to the revolutionary process. In an essay entitled "Producing Revolution: Heiner Müller's Mauser as Learning Vol. 26 (2002): 99 REWRITING, VIOLENCE, THEATRE: BRECHT/MÜLLER Play," that accompanied the play's English translation in a special issue of New German Critique (1976), David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen first discussed the tense relationship between The Measures Taken and Mauser, noting that Müller's play, like its Brechtian predecessor, reflects issues beyond its immediate frame which act to critique the present (110). While Bathrick and Huyssen allude to violence, the topic remains peripheral to their purported concern of locating the revolutionary tradition in Mauser, especially how it engages with Brecht's model in The Measures Taken. Of course, today's critical discourse and political context differ significantly from those of 1976; the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the reassessment currently taking place in German intellectual circles compel us to interrogate the historical and ideological contexts of these works again. Only through Brecht's play, which itself foregrounds revolutionary sacrifice, does Müller open space for reflection, escaping a "dead end of destructiveness for its own sake," or a reification of the socialist revolutionary project. An essay on these plays, though in many ways a case study in twentieth-century German theater, thus raises questions about history, critique, and "realistic" translation that should interest scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, especially at a time when re-writing and critical engagement with past texts have become important modes in postmodern literature and culture. While Brecht in The Measures...