"Multidirectional" Shakespeare: Heiner Müller, Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome, a Shakespeare Commentary, Postcolonialism and the Holocaust

Errata 8/30/21:The Editor regrets that this article was published without final corrections being incorporated. Please click to download the updated version of the article which includes a list of corrections.

Introduction

Over late August and early September 2018, Germany was stunned by racist rioting in the city of Chemnitz, Saxony, when around 8,000 far-right and neo-Nazi activists amassed to protest the imagined threat posed to traditional European civilization, conceived as culturally Christian and ethnically white, by an influx of immigrants and refugees into the country. These protests were sparked by the arrest of Syrian and Iraqi immigrants in relation to the murder of a 35-year-old Cuban-German man, Daniel Hillig. The protest eventually degenerated into riots, where people of "foreign" appearance were violently abused, both verbally and physically, while neo-Nazis delivered the (in Germany, illegal) Nazi salute, in scenes that were described by witnesses as "frighteningly reminiscent" of civil war and Nazi pogroms against Jews. ¹The riots were quickly denounced in Germany, with Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel (herself originally from Saxony) stating that "vigilantism . . . intolerance and racism" had no place in the country—though Merkel herself had opined as recently as 2010 that tolerant multiculturalism in Germany had proven an "utter failure." ²At the time, the events in Chemnitz seemed to represent a new nadir in the resurgence of the radical right in Europe—and indeed the world—as a seemingly transcended Nazi past irrupted into the present and threatened violence against the non-European "others" deemed to represent nothing short of an imminent racial and existential threat to the continued survival of (so-called) white Western civilization. Chemnitz typified the disturbingly recognizable "themes" which, for Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, the newly emergent right organizes itself around: protecting the physical integrity of the homeland and the purity of the race from the incursions of globalization and the presence of "foreigners." ³

The scenes at Chemnitz may not have surprised German playwright Heiner Müller, also from Saxony—though the similarities between him and Chancellor Merkel perhaps end there. Müller, though a Marxist, did not subscribe to the traditional, vulgar or Hegelian Marxist view that history is informed by progress toward a more equitable future, tending to "presume the catastrophes that mankind is working toward." ⁴Müller was also increasingly aware over his playwriting life of the brutal history of European colonialism and the racist fear of and antipathy toward the other that history entailed. ⁵For him, there were obvious continuities between European colonial rationality, hatred of "the foreigner" and the worst calamity of post-Enlightenment European modernity—the Holocaust and the genocide of European Jewry. These phenomena represent a mutually informing historical nexus underpinned by the binary distinctions of same/other, us/them, insider/outsider, citizen/foreigner and civilization/barbarism. Such reasoning had not been overturned by the victory over Nazism, which, far from being defeated at the end of the Second World War, was for Müller still apparent (if more latently) in both the East German socialist system and in the (neo)liberal democratic capitalist system that, by 1991, had reunified Germany—an event that Müller viewed as a new form of colonial "occupation." ⁶Nazism and the Holocaust, as Müller understood these events, had never simply "gone away."

His view of history as an ongoing catastrophe, as opposed to the undeviating development of human progress, meant that for Müller works of art from "the past" were not always and necessarily obsolete or irrelevant to the concerns of the present. On the contrary: past works—or "Sad stories chanced in the times of old," whether in drama, poetry or prose—may reveal the catastrophic state of history and the irrationalities that produce systems of inequality, oppression and even genocide through time. ⁷Shakespeare was a writer for whom Müller had a particularly intense obsession and whose plays had seemingly been "waiting for history," able—and perhaps uniquely...