Mourning and the Body: Heiner Milller's Fathers and The Foundling Son

Abstract

Heiner Müllier, who died at the end of December 1995, was Germany's most acclaimed and controversial contemporary playwright. Before the political unification of 1989, he held the anomalous position of a writer, thinker, and practitioner of theatre who was at home, and extolled, in both East and West. Pre-1989 Müllier, occupied, as he put it, that chasm between the "two German capitals Berlin," whose "shared and not shared history" he saw — and portrayed as — "piled up by the latest earthquake as a borderline between two continents.” As in much of Müllier's writing (and directing), Walter Benjamin's "piled up" ruins of history became the image that connected the memories of a catastrophic past to the failures and repressions of the present. And as in much of his writing (and directing), Müllier used a postmodem theatre aesthetic to recover the repressions and betrayals of Western (and especially German) history. In his quasi-autobiographical play The Foundling, that ruinous past returns as highly concentrated layers of memory — as an act of mourning by a "foundling" son self-exiled from East to West Berlin. Centered on the broken body of the stepfather figure, and on the historical ideologies that tortured and disciplined it, The Foundling is a bitter elegy to the terrors of German history as translated into the flesh of its victims/perpetrators.