Germania 3: Gespenster am toten Mann: Heiner Müller and the Art of Posthumous Provocation

Abstract

Germania 3: Gespenster am Toten Mann, or Germania 3: Ghosts at the Dead Man, is Heiner M?ller's posthumously published and produced last play. Com posed and compiled between 1990 and 1995, partly from material decades old, it is a collage work about German history and myth that belongs to the class of writings M?ller generally called fragments. Previously, the main synthetic fragments had been Die Schlacht (1951/1974), Ger mania Tod in Berlin (1956/1971), and Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preus sen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (1977). All of these plays are self-consciously disjunctive, densely allusive, and stylistically promiscuous, but Germania 3 is extravagantly so. In its first German edition, the eighty-one-page text was published along with a thirty-four-page appendix of encyclopedia articles prepared by Stephan Suschke, about the places, people, institutions, and con cepts cited in the action (arranged in double East and West columns for contrasting views).1 Germania 3 has never been popular. It tends to flummox theatergoers with its massive palimpsest of obscure references, and even