A Puzzle

Ed. note: What follows is Jonathan Kalb's response to the material published on the Castillo Theatre in T179 (47:3, 2003), specifically referring to Castillo's production of Heiner Müller's Germania 3, discussed in the article by Dan Friedman, "A Performance Community Onstage and on the Street: Castillo Theatre and Heiner Müller's Germania 3."

Aesthetic judgments aside-way aside-the most puzzling question for me in the Castillo Theatre's production of Heiner Müller's last play, Germania 3, was why a theatre purportedly devoted to this author, doing one of his American premieres, would perform an expurgated version of his text-and not just any expurgation but precisely the bowdlerization that Müller's advocates had vigorously objected to for years in Germany.

Between 1996 and 2000, the posthumously published Germania 3 was the subject of a heated and very public dispute in Germany. It began in 1996 with a legal attempt by the heirs of Bertolt Brecht to ban the play's sale and distribution, because it contained passages from two Brecht plays (Galileo [1938/39] and Coriolanus [1952/53]) and a paraphrase from a Brecht poem ("I need no gravestone") for which publication permission hadn't been granted. Müller was an inveterate borrower and quoter of other writers' works; his art is essentially about the dialogic interplay of voices in his intertextual pastiches. Furthermore, his principal role model in this sort of carelessness about literary property was Brecht himself.

Beyond all that, it's important to understand the literary purpose that the Brecht quotes serve. As Brecht's daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall admitted at one point, a prime motivation for the lawsuit was that she felt insulted by one scene in Germania 3 that lampoons her mother, Helene Weigel. Müller presents Weigel as one of three "Brecht widows" who eavesdrop on a 1956 Berliner Ensemble rehearsal, which is used as a figurative debate about despotic control. In 1996, with the play already printed, Brecht-Schall's representatives told Müller's publisher that: (1) the Coriolanus passage in this scene had to be replaced by another Shakespeare adaptation, not by Brecht; (2) the Galileo passage could be used, provided the proper names of the Brecht widows were cut from the text; and (3) Brecht's famous original gravestone poem ("He made suggestions. We carried them out.") had to be used instead of Müller's variation ("He made suggestions We didn't carry them out Why should we"). The publisher, together with Müller's widow, refused these demands and fought the injunction, and the case eventually ended up before Germany's highest court. In a strongly worded and important decision in July 2000, that court decided in Müller's favor and ordered the Brecht heirs to pay all legal costs.¹

The Castillo Theatre production of Germania 3, performed in the fall of 2001, mentioned the Brecht widows by name but contained no material from Galileo or Coriolanus. It also used only Brecht's version of the gravestone poem, without explanatory comment. Apart from the addition of other explanatory narration and some music, these were the only changes or cuts that I noticed in the entire, densely allusive work. With the theatre (indeed all of Manhattan) filled at that time with the acrid smell of real death and devastation, I was reminded of the German critic Franz Wille's obituary for the recently deceased Jan Kott. Wille remarked that Kott had "outlived all his worst enemies. Now only friends are left to threaten him."