Heiner Müller’s Democratic Theater: The Politics of Making the Audience Work by Michael Wood (review)

In a 1982 interview, Heiner Müller, the most influential German dramatist since Brecht, declared: “Ich glaube an Konflikt. Sonst glaube ich an nichts” (157). In other words, “I believe in conflict. Or nothing at all,” a creed that captures a paradox in the playwright’s stubborn intent: promoting dissensus within a political system that admitted no faults and brooked no arguments. Müller’s quest for a democratic socialist theatre of dissent unfolds in Michael Wood’s thorough and thrilling examination of three major plays in four productions through the lens of key historical events in the German Democratic Republic.

An introductory essay grounds the author’s research in reception theory, explaining Müller’s focus on his “implied audience” and how spectators’ political views and material reality influence their ability to think critically and imagine possible alternatives in the insular world of East German theatre—a realm that Müller sought to turn from psychological realism and predigested didacticism into “a laboratory of social fantasy” (10). Wood tempers Müller’s exaggerated notion that “interpretation must not take place on the stage” by affirming that directors, of course, must make interpretive choices but that, according to Müller, the “work” of interpretation “must not be taken away from the audience member. It is consumerism to take this work away from the audience, spoon-feeding. This is capitalist theater. But it is what we have and what is usual” (4). Significantly, Wood notes that “Müller does not consign consumerist theater solely to the West: what stands in opposition to consumerism is not necessarily socialism but democracy” (5).

In applying the term “work” to audience reception, Müller, Wood says, opposes a “democratic conception of the theatre” to a capitalist—or “culinary” one—to borrow Brecht’s term (4). Wood’s principal argument, then, is that “making the audience work” is what distinguishes Müller from his predecessors. Using Marx’s definition of labor—“a process between man and nature, a process by which man, though his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (4), the author claims that, “when mapped onto the case of theater spectatorship, this implies that the audience is involved in a creative process, in which it handles and shapes raw material in the form of the various theatrical phenomena on stage, and produces meaning” (4). Wood often characterizes this “handling and shaping,” this “work,” as “audience participation,” a phrase that generally suggests vocal or physical interaction with the play and players. Consequently, it seems like overreaching to label silences, passive observation, and private discussion during scene changes as “audience participation” but entirely reasonable to term the creative thought process as “work,” for it requires the mental labor of reflection and discernment.

To explain Müller’s passion for demanding such effort, Wood employs exhaustive archival research and new interviews to trace the playwright’s role over four decades as an avant-garde artist and provocateur. In chapter 1, he offers vivid description of Der Lohndrücker (The Scab), written in reaction to the GDR’s adoption of the Soviet-style form of socialism, as well as its crackdown on the workers’ uprising on June 17. Yet the Konflikt Müller sought to ignite was defused by a director that portrayed the eponymous Balke as a proletarian hero and downplayed the GDR’s erasure of German history, particularly the Third Reich. Chapter 2 treats Der Horatier (The Horatian), influenced by the Prague Spring and Müller’s hopes for it, crushed not just by Soviet tanks but by soldiers from the GDR. Under the repressive leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), Der Horatier, an adaptation from Ovid, didn’t see a production in East Germany for years after its publication. Wood covers its premier in West Berlin, where an autocratic director repurposed the play as a struggle of the individual...