Despoiled Shores: Heiner Müller’s Natural History Lessons

DESPOILED SHORES Heiner Mller's Natural History Lessons Bonnie Marranca Like seaweed that shifts restlessly from shore to shore, green hope of the future, his words stretch out in the vast ocean of texts that is the world, sweeping its depths. For the Europe of 1992, Heiner MUller has already prepared a drama of no borders. He has dramatically realigned the political order. He has rewritten the stories of the East and the West, the Old World and the New, and the Third one. In the common marketplace of ideas posthistoire is a hapless consumer item, for MUller has not yet finished writing the history of the world. Backwards. In his LehrstJcke that are unlearning plays, MUller outlines brutal new history lessons. His narrative is set at the end of Western civilization, his book a Baedeker for the nuclear age, unmoved by proud architecture, priceless collections of art, scenic excursions to romantic capitals. If he pauses at Berlin's Landwehrkanal, it is only to remark that Rosa Luxemburg 's body was dumped there by her murderers. If he points to a street in Jamaica, it is only to show the slave exhibited in a cage. MUller describes places drama has rarely been, his words captions for snap shots that quote the history of violence. He is the last traveler in Europe, our Odysseus, his guidebook to be read upon ruins. 17 The monuments are already crumbling, whole cities cry out in putrefaction, people disappear into landscapes at the moment of catastrophe. Heroic figures of myth and history walk alongside the living in cities around the world. But their stories are different from the golden tales of ancient epics, of Shakespeare and Schiller's royal tragedies, nor do they resemble the revisionist histories of student textbooks. From a lake near Straussberg Jason and his Argonauts begin their walk through the city of East Berlin. Gandhi sits in a Nazi prison. Prospero turns into a desk in the brave new world of socialism. The time between history and literature melts in the unbearable heat of MUller's poetry, skewering fact to imagination in a new kind of horror story. In bloody, cruel ink MUller retraces the classics in contemporary scenes, framing the violence and dislocation that is commonly celebrated as their poetry and passion. His texts are satyr plays attaching themselves like bindweed to great works of the Western tradition, trailing over the fourth wall of Berlin, prolific morning glory. A homeless man who lives at whim either East or West of the wailing wall, Muller a man split in half, is the disembodied emblem of his divided country. At home here or there, he lives best in literature. Miller uses the texts of the past like found objects from an archeological dig, dreaming in them, reshaping, recasting them: burnt offerings from the altar of war. Everything is material. His writing a history of imagery. He scratches behind the pentimenti of historical portraits in the museum of Europe. Somewhere, in an homage to Stalin, Caesar and Napoleon are chewing on the dead corpses of soldiers. Lessing meets the last American president, a robot, in an automobile junkyard. MUller tells of the life of cities in mourning plays (Trauerspiele), his sorrow that of architecture. Already vines reach to the ceilings of ruins whose inhabitants act out their agonies, great allegories of decay. Science fictions spin out of time machines, the audience extinct races. When the sun is at its zenith Alcestis comes back from the dead, in a long-forgotten dramatic structure that gathers in a single sentence a random drawing, The Odyssey, a Noh play, and an Alfred Hitchcock film. Intercultural, its form is its content, this explosion of memory lives its own life in the world. Between time and space and culture, the continental drift. Now one can speak of an anthropology of drama, the dream life of nations. The world is not one because human beings have the same body parts, and live and laugh and love and give birth astride a grave, rather it is that in the world of global trade, of common markets, everyone consumes the same imagery. Multinationals have colonized Olympus and turned Fate into economic...