Heiner Müller--A German Proteus

I share with Jonathan Kalb the conviction that Heiner Müller’s plays and his conception of theater are more relevant in the post-Cold War era than ever for the United States—and perhaps for the entire English-speaking world. In this particularly engaging and multifaceted volume, Kalb’s critical investigation of Müller’s work provides a productive and controversial impetus for the future of modern theater similar to that achieved by the critical appropriation of Brecht’s theater work since the sixties. Kalb sees Müller as a protean author who incorporated and transformed the work of Shakespeare, Wagner, Kleist, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, Genet, and Mayakovsky in his own theatrical texts and conceptualizations, and bases his analysis in part on Brecht’s aesthetics of “material” (Kopien), a practice by which an author regards texts “by others as inducements to work rather than as private property.” Thus, Müller “refused to revere any classical text on principle and sought to establish benevolently destructive relationships with canonical works that he thought euphemized or disguised barbaric historical realities.” Classical and indeed modern texts by other authors become material to use critically for one’s own artistic goals. The debate surrounding John Fuegi’s biography of Brecht, in which this aesthetic of material was often confused with plagiarism, is not to the point—a thorough reading of Brecht’s and Müller’s works makes it irrelevant, and Kalb is adept at reading Müller’s works and shedding light on his particular use of material.

Kalb’s decision to concentrate on those crucial Schattenfiguren (shadow figures) who are key figures for Müller and his work allows him to develop the complexity of Müller’s protean ways not in order to “de-mask” him, but rather to take a hard look behind the scenes of those stages, upon which Müller enacts the play of history and theater. I did wish for more in-depth investigations of Müller’s relationship to the dramatists of antiquity, to Büchner and Kafka, to Benn and Jünger, as well as to those English-speaking writers, such as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to whom he referred again and again. A study of Müller’s relationship to artists and filmmakers, such as Goya and Beuys or Eisenstein and Godard, whose work was occasionally more important than literary texts, would be just as revealing. And last but not least, an investigation of Müller’s passion for detective novels—a passion he inherited from Brecht—and his extensive reading of American detective writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Ross Thomas would also shed light on Müller’s conception of theater and aesthetic production. Kalb is driven by a curiosity whose goal is graceful knowledge, such as that described by Kleist in his essay on the Marionettentheater. For many authors of my generation in the GDR, Heiner Müller was not only an inspiring playwright and director, but also an expert on the literature of the outsider, the outlaw, and the underdog, figures mostly absent from or at best peripheral to the official cultural history of the GDR—from Jünger to Brinkmann, from Bierce to Burroughs, from Bruno to Malaparte. Therefore, Kalb’s meticulous and engaging discussion of Brecht and Mayakovsky and their significance for Müller is of extreme importance for English-speaking readers. Both authors continue to be outsiders on the professional Anglo-American stages—most assuredly because of their radical antinaturalist concept of theater and their political stances, still regarded with skepticism and suspicion.

Kalb takes this skepticism and suspicion to task in a highly critical manner. Brecht once said to his assistants at the Berliner Ensemble that “talent is interest,” and Kalb’s talent lies in his ability to awaken and guide the interest of the reader to look beyond Müller’s person and plays toward the historical and political sources and contexts, without which Müller’s work would be unthinkable. Kalb presents the complex and multilayered background of Müller’s work clearly and concisely, and doesn’t neglect Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Derrida, whose works were decisive in Müller’s development. Benjamin was crucial to the development of Müller’s thinking about Marx and the concept of history after the early fifties. Müller’s reading of Benjamin’s “Theses on History” is evident in his interviews and essays, such as “The Luckless Angel.” If Benjamin was a leftist addition to conventional GDR Marxism, Nietzsche (as well as Ernst Jünger) complemented his worldview from a bourgeois-conservative perspective. Derrida’s, Foucault’s, and Baudrillard’s writing led Müller to a critical, postmodern perspective on the development of Marxism after the Twentieth Party Congress. In his last interviews Müller repeatedly refers to the material value of these thinkers’ texts for his own writing. By keeping these thinkers—as well as the multiple shadow figures—in mind throughout his book, Kalb has found the heart of Müller’s thought and theater work; he expertly describes and explains Müller’s attempts to explode the “continuum of history” (Benjamin), to impede the destructive acceleration of time, and to illuminate in the slow motion of theater hidden and forgotten abysses—on both sides of the collapsed iron curtain. Kalb applies Müller’s statement that “using Brecht without criticizing him would be betrayal” to Müller himself.

Yet Kalb struggles with Müller’s refusal to position himself and his works within any clear-cut political or aesthetic paradigm. This stance must seem quite strange to an American audience who expects not only entertainment from theater, but also, however small, an underlying moral message. Müller often admitted the contradictory nature of his thinking and repeatedly remarked that interviews were merely “performances” that allowed him to take on various standpoints and to test them out. That is clearly the stance of a dramatist who does not write opinions about his characters, but who rather describes their behavior in situations that are constantly in flux. This “nomadic thinking” forces readers, actors, and directors to formulate their own standpoints and to venture beyond the “authentic” statements of an author. The interpreters are alone with the text. Their success in working with the texts depends on their ability to draw from their own experience and fantasy in order to get the texts to work and move on stage. Kalb rightly sees the affinity between Müller and Brecht on this point. His excellent discussion of the Lehrstück concept, central to both Brecht and Müller, and his clarification of the misunderstanding brought about by the unfortunate translation of Lehrstück as “didactic play” instead of the more correct “learning play,” will hopefully help to liberate this theater form from the stigma of a dry, German theater pedagogy. In my opinion, the term Verfremdungseffekt is similarly misunderstood in practice and in theory. “Alienation effect” and “didactic play” are pedagogical concepts that characterize the end result, not the process. Both Müller and Brecht were more concerned with the process in theater; as Müller said, “the path doesn’t end when the goal has exploded.”

Equally enlightening is Kalb’s differentiation between Brecht’s Lehrstück concept and that of Müller, who was critical of Brecht for replacing the Lehrstück with the parable, and who preferred for himself an open, fragmentary form. Müller’s goal was the production of difference—not of consent (Einverständnis)—and this difference demonstrates both the political and the aesthetic distinctions between the two authors. Brecht’s utopias were no longer Müller’s utopias, and when the workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953, “alienated the entire existence,” as Brecht wrote in his journal, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the tanks in Prague in 1968, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—not to mention the rapidity of the technological revolution since Brecht’s death—accomplished this alienation more thoroughly than Brecht could have ever imagined.

Müller considered a division in audience opinion to be a signal of the effectiveness of theater and considered success—that is, “consent”—to be a misunderstanding, sometimes even proof of a production’s or a text’s failure. This stance will probably also appear strange to an American audience. In light of the social and political contradictions not only within the United States, however, this stance remains a realistic gauge for a theater that refuses to leave the conflicts of society to television and the movies. This theater also allows for the perspectives of the excluded, the speechless, and the silenced, who no longer have a voice, or who, at the most, serve as alibis on Broadway, in the West End, and at the glitzy international theater festivals of this world.

The differentiated and detailed descriptions of the productions Müller directed, further enriched by the accompanying photos, are essential glimpses into Müller’s work as director. Kalb’s interrogation of Müller’s most important and controversial productions includes Macbeth (1982), The Scab (1988), Quartet (1989 and 1991), Hamlet/Hamletmachine (1990), Mauser (1991), and Tristan and Isolde (1993). It is not quite clear, however, why he pays little attention to one of the most decisive productions for Müller, Duel/Tractor/Fatzer (1993), while giving too much attention to the weak 1989 production of Quartet at the Palace of the Republic.

Heiner Müller always hoped that the strangeness and momentum of his plays would make them interesting for an American audience. This hope has not been fulfilled except perhaps for two productions by Robert Wilson, of Hamletmachine (1986) and Quartet (1988), and a few engaged university and college productions. The resistance to his work seems to have grown stronger. However, this makes the publication of Kalb’s engaging book, which includes an excellent bibliography and a wealth of photos, all the more exciting and necessary in the year in which Müller would have turned seventy. This book will not only inspire theater scholars to take a closer look at Müller, it could also pave the way for a more engaged confrontation with Müller’s work in the English-speaking world—not only among theater directors, actors, translators, and publishers, but for readers who recognize the significance of the most important German playwright since Brecht.