Positive Heroes and Abject Bodies in Heiner Müller's Production Plays

Abstract

Faced with the commodification of Ostalgie (nostalgia for things and times East) in present-day Germany, in which many in the depressed East find them selves excluded from the affluence promised by Western politicians more than a decade ago on the eve of unification, Germanists and others may find it unfashionable to revisit the embodiment of positive and model workers on the stages of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Especially when portrayals of once pivotal characters such as Communist (or Socialist Unity) Party secretaries appear today mostly in comic mode, it may be hard to recall the critical point of such characters as well as the dramatic and social conflicts about agency and productivity that they once represented. Nonetheless, despite this apparent obsolescence, the Communist motto heroes of still had enough force in 2002 to animate a fortnight of exhibi tions, installations, and performances. The persistence of these leitmotifs, however ironically evoked, suggests that of labor and their comrades may, even in today's unevenly unified Germany, play something more than figures of fun or phantoms from the trash heap of history, washed-up relics