Optimistic Tragedies: The Plays of Heiner Muller

Abstract

The GDR playwright Heiner MUller has given the following account of his life and work: Born January 9, 1929, in Eppendorf in Saxony. Received the Abitur (due to suspension of school during and after the war, not until 1949); began work in various sectors: agriculture, industry, the press. Work for the since 1956. Everything else is of general interest only in the form it has taken and continues to take in these (56 Autoren, Photos, Karikaturen, Faksimiles [Berlin und Weimar, 1970], p. 106). Miiller's numerous works range from sketches, librettos, plays, translations and adaptations, produced in various theaters in the GDR as well as in the Federal Republic, to those still in manuscript form, in the process of being reworked, or simply in process. Like Bertolt Brecht, who preferred to view his dramatic production as working attempts (Versuche), MUiller is also a writer of pieces (Stiickeschreiber) whose works cannot, either individually or as a whole, be circumscribed in terms of literary completion or theatrical success. Rather, they might be termed poetic materials for and within the building of socialism. As a character in one of his plays says: My desk is the construction site. The subject matter of Muiller's work is the dialectical nature of social and individual processes within the GDR in their relation to historical socialism. Hence the unfinished character of his work, which in its development reflects the historical development of the GDR in a transitional phase, and which in its individual efforts forms a series of metaphoric projections of points of dialectical transformation. Unlike Brecht, whose epic was rooted in situational conflicts, Miiller focuses on individual character--the socialist individual and his integration into the collective-and the turning points in socialist consciousness. The development from Brecht's dramaturgy to Miiller's represents a historical transition from the individual as the object of history to its subject; thus, all of Miiller's plays have the quality of the play (Lehrstiick), which Brecht was only able to experiment with in the early 1930s and which he understood to be the theater of the future. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's analysis of Muller's plays as optimistic tragedies explicates the nature of the dialectical process underlying the learning quality inherent in this writer's work. His comparison of Miiller's Mauser with Brecht's Measures Taken-the classic and up to