From Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Müller

From Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Muller Sue-Ellen Case Bertolt Brecht founded his Berliner Ensemble the same year the German Democratic Republic was founded (1949), and built his directorial/dramaturgical stage practice along side the new state and its cultural policies. He was the international star of the first generation of GDR playwrights. The year Brecht died (1956), Heiner MUller wrote his first major play. Though other playwrights followed Brecht chronologically and formally (Peter Hacks and Volker Braun), MUller became what Theo Girshausen has called "the real Brecht pupil." Girshausen: "The real Brecht pupil is not he who uses the forms of epic theatre, or even imitates them ... rather, it is he who accepts and further develops the socio-political and aesthetic principles on which Brecht founded his theatre model."' MUller has developed, revised, and finally abandoned the Brechtian model of political theatre, in the process creating a new form for the contemporary political play. THE ROLE OF THE PLAYWRIGHT Brecht devised a model for the role of the political playwright based on the playwright's relationship to a specific political ideology, and his or her alliance with an organized political movement or state. In his emigration to the GDR, Brecht allied his work with the new state and placed his theatre within the context of state history and ideological development. In his Notes to Katzgraben, he states that a new kind of state produces a new kind of audience, a new class of playwright, a new content, and a new relationship of audience to stage. (Certainly, Brecht's early plays reflect the 94 same bias- The Mother dramatizes the issues of a partisan audience and portrays the Party's program for change.) Ironically, the duration of Brecht's work in the GDR coincided with the first Cold War and the playwright found himself, both in the East and in the West, interpreted and criticized primarily in terms of his national alliances. The problem for the West was his emigration to the GDR; the problem in the GDR was his exile in America. Mother Courage was Brecht's first production in the GDR. The play set off "the first great conflict of opinion over aesthetic principles among Marxists after the war." 2 They perceived the epic style as a form contaminated by Western influences. In 1949, one article referred to the epic style as "essentially of American origin." 3 (American cultural forms were considered vehicles of capitalist decadence.) Thus, the epic style fell on the formalist and Western side of the growing Formalist/Realist debate because it could not be defined as part of "a realistic art according to the great example of the Soviet Union" 4 -the cultural goal of the Party's first Five Year Plan. Further , Brecht's development of a documentary, "scientific" theatre of contradictions violated a cultural policy adopted at the Party Congress in 1950 to ban "any objective presentation of contrary or enemy ideologies." 5 Brecht's production of Days of the Commune was even labelled "objectivistic " and its opening "postponed." Thus, Party policies of the early fifties (a consequence of Soviet dominance) banned two of Brecht's contributions to political theatre-the epic style and the staging of "scientific" values. After an initial publication on Brecht in Sinn und Form in 1949, no other article appeared in the GDR on Brecht for more than five years.8 Yet, Brecht continued to direct, collaborate, and speak at major cultural functions . By now, he had fallen into a situation which Mtller would inherit: while the playwright's work is defined as contradictory to Party cultural policies and is therefore officially ignored in production, publication, and critical debate, the playwright remains a central influence in the development of the GDR theatre tradition and is hailed in the West as both a representative of the new politic and a dissident of the state. Heiner MOller plays the Brechtian role, rejects it, and redefines political alliance and options open to an artist in a state which has a new set of cultural and political policies. Today the GDR is less a beneficiary of the USSR than an intellectual and engineering leader of the Third World. Occupation and isolation...